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Bacon and Enlightenment

Bacon (in the Shakespearian Sonnets) has treated the cosmic sense so emphati­cally as a distinct person that the world for three hundred years has taken him at his word and has agreed that the “person in question (whatever his name may have been) was a young friend of the poet’s! It has already been incidentally mentioned that a race entering upon the possession of a new faculty, especially if this be in the line of the direct ascent of the race, as is certainly the case with cosmic consciousness, the new faculty will necessarily be acquired at first not only by the best specimens of the race but also when these are at their best—that is, at full maturity and before the decline incident to age has set in. What, now, are the facts in this regard as to the coming of the cosmic sense.

To illustrate the objectification of this purely subjective phenomenon (though it must be remembered that to the person with cosmic consciousness the terms objective and subjective lose their old meaning—and “objects gross” and the “unseen soul” become ‘‘one”), it will not be amiss to quote a passage [173: 5] from a poet who, though he is a case of cosmic consciousness, is not in­cluded in the present volume for the reason that the present writer has not been able to obtain the details necessary for that purpose.

And in regard to cosmic consciousness, enlightenment, so St. Paul, when he was “caught up into paradise,” heard “un­speakable words.” And Dante was not able to recount the things he saw in heaven. “My vision,” he says, “was greater than our speech, which yields to such a sight.”

That he began writing the “Sonnets” immediately after his illumination. The “Sonnets,” as considered here, are the first one hundred and twenty-six, which distinctly constitute a poem in and by themselves and deal with the subject here considered. That the earlier of these one hundred and twenty-six “Sonnets” are addressed to the Cosmic Sense, and the later to it and its offspring, the plays. e. That in the “Sonnets” the following individualities may be recognized: (a) the Cosmic Sense; (b) the Bacon of the Cosmic Sense, and of the plays and “Sonnets”;. (c) the special offspring of the Cosmic Sense—the plays; (d) the ostensible Bacon of the court, politics, prose writings, business, etc., and possibly others. 

But, as the Self Conscious man (however degraded) is in fact almost infinitely above the animal with merely simple consciousness , so any man permanently endowed with the Cosmic Sense would be almost infinitely higher and nobler than any man who is Self Conscious merely . And not only so, but the man who has had the Cosmic Sense for even a few moments only will probably never again descend to the spiritual level of the merely self conscious man, but twenty, thirty or forty years afterwards he will still feel within him the purifying, strengthening and exalting effect of that divine illumination, and many of those about him will recognize that his spiritual stature is above that of the average man .

 

 

 

Super Heroes and Mythical Creatures

Super Heroes and Mythical Creatures

CHAPTERS

Super Heroes

Angels

Pegasus

The Sphinx

Unicorn

Dragons

Jack and the Beanstalk

Pan the God

Pandora’s Box

Immense and Unseen Beings

Immovable Force Meets an Unstoppable Object

Aliens

Medusa

Sleeping Beauty – or Little Briar Rose

Christmas Myth

The Christian Mythology

The Holy Grail

Vampires

Werewolf _Lycanthrope

Zombies

The Gods

Evil Spirits Devils Demons

 

Super Heroes

No person that I know of can fly without mechanical help, can send bolts of energy to fight people with, has seen a flying dragon, or rode on a Unicorn or Pegasus, or even walked on water. But in dreams all these are possible, because all the stories about them are all created by the inner world of dreams to illustrate in symbols what we are all capable of.

Example: I was suddenly awakened by a feeling I was being attacked. Still dreaming I looked to my right and saw a strange man standing near my bed who I felt was trying to mess with my head. Reaching out I send a bolt of energy at him that exploded in his face. He immediately disappeared, but I sent several other bolts exploding after him. This amazed me because I had never done anything like that before.

Example: ‘During childhood I learned to fly in a long sequence of dreams. Each linked very clearly to the last. I would go to the nearby churchyard and in the beginning I would run along as fast as I could then jump and just manage to extend the jump by a great effort of will. In subsequent practices I managed to gradually extend the jump for many yards; and eventually I could skim along indefinitely. The next stage though was to extend my height, and this took enormous effort of will and body. I made active swimming motions and climbed, but only held altitude with great and constant concentration. With further practice still, this clumsy mode of flying was left behind as I learned to use pure motivation, decision or will to lift me into the air and carry me easily and gracefully wherever I wished. At this stage my flying was swift, mobile and without struggle.’

Example: “One night I dreamt I was on the hill behind my old “home” in Amersham. A strong wind was blowing, but it was warm, sunny, and peaceful. Spreading my arms I caught the wind in my short coat and rose up like a kite. Higher and higher I went, and I experimented with diving and gliding. Sometimes I lost the airlift and tumbled over and over, but at no point did I feel fear. I twisted and found the lift again. At one point I rose to an enormous height and saw the earth distant below me.”

Take walking on water, it says in symbolic  form that our emotions that can be stormy and difficult to deal with can be dealt with and even tamed by the immense power we hold within us, which most of us have lost contact with. I am talking about a huge force that can be contacted or allowed into ones life. Without it we are often powerless to deal with negative feelings, and so many people take the path of suicide. But with it we can meet them easily, walking over the surface of such stormy emotions.

Perhaps the only way I can begin to make this real to you is to have you consider what a seed is. But I want to remind you that all life on our planet began as a single cell. That single celled life form had eternal life, for it never died but created copies of itself, and each new copy carried the experience of all its past – so it evolved. In fact it became all the billions of plants, creatures and humans alive today.

As for the seed, I ask you to realise that any seed did not simply appear, but is the result of millions of years of life experience. So, no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient and huge self.

That huge memory has faced every life situation, has dealt with death over and over, has mated and lived in all animal forms, and is the greatest survivor. In animals we call it instincts and animals do not face uncertainty in life choices, they simply ARE. But humans developed self awareness, and have a sense of themselves as individuals, and that comes with a huge cost attached to it. The cost is that most of us are no longer guided  by our instincts, their long and huge memory, and so often become victims of depression, madness, and feeling lost. See Programmed 

But that isn’t a new problem because it has been seen, recorded, written about for as long as humans had language and the mean to communicate. In doing so their stories are full of super heroes  and amazing creatures. The stories are all about the wonder that we carry within us that we have forgotten, persecuted, even tried to kill out. After all, what is the New Testament, the Labours of Hercules about but super heroes or heroines. Of course we have been told the stories as history, and so been deluded, when really the stories are about what we face in our lives now.

Because they were never a new story, but a new presentation of the old, old story. For example, Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. He was born of a Virgin. He travelled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator of men. His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples (the twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose again; and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings. He was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers. Mithra appearance is dated 1400 BC.

An image of Mithra, showing his aura and glory

But long before that, Osiris was born on the 361’st day of the year, say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great traveller. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and “tamed them by music and gentleness, not by force of arms”; he was the discoverer of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness, and slain and dismembered.  His body was placed in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life. His sufferings, his death and his resurrection were enacted year by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos.

Jan and his wife Tipuy worshipping Osiris

Yes, we are living this ancient story now in our life. Are we denying it, crucifying it, seeking it or even opening ourselves to it? For it is discovered again in every age. See Opening to Life

In the Sixties Donovan sang a song called ‘There is an Ocean’.  To quote some of the words, he says the ocean is, “The abode of Angels, the mystical Promised Land, The one and only Heaven, the God of man, Is but the closing of an eyelid away.”

That ocean is just an eye blink away.  When you close your eyes you are in the ocean.  Of course you are never out of it.  But with open eyes and ears, you may be completely unaware of its enormous depths and dimensions.  Even with eyes closed you may be lost in the choppy ocean surface waves of thought and emotions.  So many impressions claim awareness, apparently of enormous importance.  Urges gusting from hormones, from deeply etched habits, claim attention. Donovan found a way beyond by using  psychedelics. 

 

Angels

Traditionally there were many angels, and some of the greatest were said to be messengers for particular things, like the angel of death, or the angel of love. Such old concepts still hold sway in our unconscious, so it is helpful to consider if the angel you met has some particular quality, or is communicating a particular message. Also consider whether you are in accord or in conflict with the angel. If in accord it suggests that some deeply felt intuition is accepted by you. If in conflict then something that is powerfully influential deep within you is being rejected and is creating an internal conflict.

Angels do not need wings to fly, but the church has added them and also the image of a male god up in the sky. Also most angels are shown as female, but again that is make believe.

When we meet in life things that have no form, like electricity or forces of nature such as gravity, an aspect or level of our mind often produces images or emotions as a way for us to have a sense of them.

As an example, while working in Japan and having no knowledge of their language, I was invited to have lunch in a restaurant with the group of people I was teaching. As we entered the restaurant a Japanese man welcomed us and I heard him speak in French his message. I mentioned this to the others and they assured me that the man had spoken in Japanese. yet I had heard it!

It happened the next day also, and so I believe that because I was surrounded by a language I didn’t understand, my brain that actually interprets, and creates our internal sense impressions, summed up the situation – a foreign language – French – a greetings was happening add so my amazing mental process produced the sound of greeting in French instead of Japanese – a very remarkable thing, We do this because we tend to have an experience of the world based on our body senses, and our mind and awareness are from a very different environment or dimension, so we tend to put such awareness in images and ideas we understand.

Example: Dreamt I was dead and was now an angel, but I was asleep. I seemed to be a separate witness to this, watching my sleeping angel self. The angel self also seemed to be neither male or female.

This story, which was told to me by a doctor who witnessed it from beginning to end in the small Idaho hospital where it happened. A woman had given birth to a baby with severe complications. When the child was delivered, he was found to have a severe brain haemorrhage.

The child spent several months in the intensive care unit of this small town because the mother did not want to transfer him to a large city where she would not be allowed to spend full time with him. Doctors decided not to encourage her to move the child since they felt the injuries were so massive that no treatment would be possible.

The child had severe cerebral palsy secondary to brain damage and a seizure disorder that had shown up on an abnormal EEG. These are afflic­tions from which children simply don’t recover. If they survive infancy, they spend their lives severely retarded.

The doctors told her their prognosis, but still the mother stayed with her child. By all accounts she was with the boy almost twenty-four hours a day for several months. Perhaps it was the strain of the ordeal or sleep deprivation that led to what happened next.

Late one night, she said, a Being of Light came into her hospital room. Later she described it as having the shape of a person, but not the features of either a male or a female. It glowed with a cold, gray light as though light were being beamed through an ice cube.

“Your son will be all right,” the being said.

The woman said that she felt as though love were being poured into her body. “It was marvellous.”

The next day she shared this vision with her medical team. She was especially excited because the being had assured her that her son was going to be normal. Could they please do another EEG to see if anything had happened? They repeated the brain-wave test and came up with the startling results – normal. The child had made a full recovery.”

“That the Divine is the same in things greatest and least, may be shown by means of heaven and by means of an angel there. The Divine in the whole heaven and the Divine in an angel is the same; therefore even the whole heaven may appear as one angel. So is it with the church, and with a man of the church. The greatest form receptive of the Divine is the whole heaven together with the whole church; the least is an angel of heaven and a man of the church. Sometimes an entire society of heaven has appeared to me as one angel-man; and it was told that it may appear like a man as large as a giant, or like a man as small as an infant; and this, because the Divine in things greatest and least is the same. ” Eckhart

In a real way, because images arise from our own potential and are in some way expressions of us, angels are about the conscious use of our own faculties without the waving of magic wands. There is no need to attempt conjuring of spirits or angels. We are an expression of life and as such hold all possibilities within us. So, the question is, how can we work with ourselves here and now, with our own psychological and biological processes? How can we help our being to heal itself and move further? See messengers – Intuition – Using It

Well, even if we take that point of view, it is still helpful to enlist the help of such dream images. After all, dreams link with a very deep part of us, a part not limited by logic, thinking and the past experience. As Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”. So, use your imagination and follow it where it leads. See Travelling Your Dreams and Using Visualisation.

Example: Before I knew I was ill with cancer I dreamt that an angel came to me and explained that before we are born we are all angels and are without limitations. When we are born we take on a life of the limitations of our body in order to learn something important to us. Then when we die at the end of that life we return to being an angel. All the limitations of life then disappear again.’

My own angelic experience. It happened while lying in bed awake and it left such a deep impression it changed my life –

Angels in my Room

Suddenly there were two beings with me in my room.
I could not see them with my eyes,
But they were standing in my awareness,
To my left, suspended above the bed
Where I lay musing.

Surprising, because I had not sought them.
Frightening, because they were the living dead.
Radiant, because they were angels.
Inspiring, because they shone with wonderful life.
Uplifting, because of the gift they brought.

The living dead!
Yes. That I knew of them.
It was everywhere about them,
Communicating itself to me.
Telling me the majesty of death.

Speaking to me without words
They led knowing in me,
As you might lead a friend
Through your new house,
Revealing its secrets.

Thereby I knew,
All that I considered human,
In them had died.
Desire, longing to possess, power, sex, ambition,
All had melted away.

And I understood in their presence,
If I surrendered to the Highest,
This was my path.
My own person would melt away,
My desires fade like shadows in the sun.

Fear – Yes – in the loss of myself.
In the sense of my own futility.
In the knowledge of my littleness.
In the confrontation of majesty.
At the loss of what I thought my wisdom.

In them I saw beyond myself.
Through their emptiness
Of all that I so valued.
I saw shimmering light,
Cosmic in its vastness.

Their death allowed,
Shining through them,
Dimensions of a life
Beyond the very best
Of all my mind, or love, or art.

Radiant they were
With all the mystery of Life itself.
Suns shone through them;
Not just with light,
But with ungrasped joy and love.

Inspiring me
By showing me the possibility
Of my life,
And all the lives
Of those myriads around me.

Uplifting too,
By unveiling to me
The meaning of the story He told,
Where, having lost ones cloak,
You offer your coat also.

Not, as I had thought,
An act of selfless generosity.
They said it was a statement.
“How strange. You want this old coat,
When you could have the life unbounded?”

That was their promise.
If I dared lose my self,
Let that coat be taken from me,
My being too would shine.
As theirs shone on me that day. 

 

Pegasus

Let’s start with Pegasus, the winged horse.

Here is a dream of a young sixteen year old female.

“I have been dreaming about similar dreams as this one but do not remember any except from one single dream and it hit me strongly. I dreamt about a white flying house; a Pegasus. At that time, I felt pure joy and love. I felt free, warm and lighted. But compared to this dream, in the dream about my birds I instead felt afraid and slightly irritated like I didn’t want to lose something that I hold so dearly. I didn’t feel this free and happy. I myself got a direct feeling that this dream could mean that I need to let go of the negative thoughts from the mind and free my inner bird because no bird is meant to be caged even if it is a pet. That is why I have been letting them out once a day to fly around in the room and to be free before putting them back. So, a question I would like to ask is: What could this dream actually mean with me feeling worried, being afraid and trying to caught the birds back instead of being happy and filled with joy? Is there something I may have been missed when analysing my dream?  Ariadna”

Pegasus, the winged horse can take flight from the foot of a hill because it doesn’t need to be at an altitude, it doesn’t even go left or right. It seems that it takes flight from the most blatant sexual love and passion. In fact out of that passion, out of that connection and the pain of it, it takes flight.

I realise at this point that when a man and woman have great flowing love and passion for each other it can lift up their consciousness into a new level of experience. Women seem more ready for this than men. They want to be transported by love and thereby achieve a new level of being or maturity. But usually in our society this love in some way becomes materialized or commercialized, maybe even trivialised or sexualised to the point where any transcendence is killed or broken.  

 

The Sphinx

This depicts riddle of your existence. Why are we here? Where have we arisen from? It shows humanness emerging from the animal instinctive drives, so is therefore the human struggle to become a self aware human as we emerged from our animal background.

It shows this because it has a human face on an animal/lions body; because it is a very ancient carving, it portrays the great struggle humans go through in trying to find freedom from the animal instincts. The struggle still continues.

If they manage this the person becomes really aware of what he is dealing with, the enormous power of the instincts and how they rule ones life. A new realisation, and one not easily understood, for the person is still under the influence of the inner animal. It has lived its life from its own instincts without any thought, and is a creature of habits. Facing these and the tricks they play on the mind asks a lot. See Habits

People say that we are not instinctive, yet we are still almost controlled by the instinct to seek sex, the tremendous urge to seek leaders, the urge to survive, the mother and father instinct. To understand this you need to realise that the brain works in certain ways. It is something like the brain running a computer program, like a set of responses. Or it can be like something flowing – a stream – which creates channels. So our responses to information gathered is that it runs or triggers a program or set of responses. Or the reaction flows in already created channels.

Early life-forms had something like a program from which they responded to their environment in a manner to survive. This was a set of responses. One could also think of it as a limited repertoire, or set of repertoires which enabled the creature to survive. If something was not in its repertoire the organism could not respond. But the system was also an information gathering one, as this linked with survival and survival strategies.  The creatures lived in a completely different state of consciousness, one where they were in an ocean of awareness and instinctive information. See Brain Levels

There was a dramatic leap to another situation which was still survival based. Instead of being limited to a certain set of responses – the problem solving response function was able to do what we call dream. That is, it could experiment with situations, replay events in new ways, and try different responses. This produced a remarkable potential far beyond the actual survival needs. It was as if the process could play at life or creativity, erecting situations, forming events, trying out variety.

In this period a long struggle to deal with ones instinctive self is met, and in fact the pains and troubles of ones personality occurs. He/She must harness these impulses, not repress them, because they are the basic energy and creativity within one. Because these are all instinctive and habitual reactions, they must be slowly redirected.  They involve:

• Physical movement, so in traditional use of yoga postures the aim was to be able to sit without movement for three hours, and to do it each day for three months, because it took a long time to retrain the inner wildness. But any form of movement such as dancing, Tai Chi that requires a way to train ones body does the same, as does LifeStream and People’s Experiences of LifeStream.
• Sexual expression is another way the instinctive self expresses. Again it should not be harnessed by repression, but by gradually leading it up the body into higher forms of energy release. See Energy Sex and Dreams
• Hunger for food or sensual satisfaction is also instinctive. This can be seen when the first thing a new born baby wants to do after it starts to breathe, it wants to reconnect and feed from the breast. So regular fasting was an ancient method, but it should not be done from the attitude that one must lose weight. See Fasting
• The emotions and their instinctive expression in humans can be experienced as panic attacks, painful emotional reactions to relationships, suicidal tendencies, and generally being shattered by your emotions. This generally links with disturbed breathing patterns such as breath holding and not be able to breath smoothly. A traditional way of healing this is by using controlled breathing. Ways of doing this are – but remember, it takes time to change lifetime habits – so see 1-4-2 Breath Control and The Breath Meditation
• The voice is another way of instinctive expression. I have met a few people who cannot stop talking, and a way to deal with it is to become aware of it and harness it. Some of the great beings who took this path of the Ox Herding tell their story.

In 1927 Buckminster Fuller stood on the shore of Lake Michigan contemplating suicide. He said to himself: ‘I’ve done the best I know how and it hasn’t worked.’ He was still grieving the loss of a daughter who had died five years earlier; his business had just failed. He was penniless and 32 years old. He wondered how he could support his wife and newly born baby, but, after struggling with his despair for hours in the dark and the freezing wind, he decided to live the rest of life like an experiment. He wanted to discover whether the golden rule of life was dog eat dog. He would find out by seeing what could be physically demonstrated. To free his mind of conditioned thinking and reflexes he stopped talking for a year. He is now known for many, many achievements.

Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which provided direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.” [10]

• Mental activity is another escape route. It is a way people sometimes use to prevent them for experience other aspects of the mind or consciousness. Many disciplines tell people to stop thinking, to quieten their mental activity. That is one way but there is also Intuition which leads one past the age old responses. Also try Opening to Life  

 

Unicorn

The unicorn was always linked with image of a young virgin, so the unicorn represented male sexual impulse but of a magical type. It was magical because if the virginal  influence, because the virgin in mythology represents the possibility of dropping preconceptions, thus attaining an inner virginity and thus being receptive to the unseen or unconscious side of self.  This means that when we become empty of preconceived ideas we can receive and conceive, and even give birth to, an extraordinary impulse or power that can open us to a new life and purpose. See How I Became A Virgin

Therefore, what is received in that way, transforms the animal sexual impulse to a creative and caring impulse. So having a virginal mind opens huge possibilities. When we experience this personally, the child we conceive is the union between the receptive conscious self and wider awareness – between you and Life within you. This receptivity and virginity of mind leads to the birth in oneself of a force or activity that gradually transforms and enlarges ones life and experience. In the west we call what grows in us ‘The Christ’. Other cultures give it different names.

But as this photo suggests, that young teenage girls can become unconsciously sexually aroused, it shows also the horse holding the girl to it, so it is not a one way experience. I believe that young girls can allow such feelings saying they love the horse. So a magical erotic relationship exists. The painting has a very similar theme to the photo. 

 

Dragons

Dragons are very important, the are a huge part of stories, films  and peoples dreams, as seen in the series Merlin, How to Train Your Dragon, the film The Sorcerers Apprentice, Pete’s Dragon and many others.

But dreams are the place to really understand the enormous power dream dragons hold either of personal psychological illness or amazing transformation.

“In the dream I entered a cave and I saw a dragon resting inside, it woke up, saw me and we stared at one another for a moment and then it moved and I saw a sack of diamonds and diamonds over flowing, coming out from the cave wall, it looks like the dragon was guarding it.”

The dragon depicts the massive and irrational forces of the unconscious, the life urges and untamed fears and sexuality that one must face and deal with in order to gain the treasure of potential locked in sexual, mental and emotional energy, which is a treasure that does not rot, as with diamonds it lasts for ever..

The Christian tradition, that describes the enormous and terrible fight with the Devil, with the dragons we hold within us, paints a tragic picture of an enormous struggle with our own basic life giving energies.

It shows a never ending fight with our own nature. The picture shows this in St. George killing the dragon. A woman’s dream depicts this struggle, also her courage to actually integrate what she was horrified of.

“This dream I had few years ago but can’t get it out of my head ever since, I know it’s very important and related to my spiritual path.

So, I am holding a rope attached to the tail of a humongous black hooded dragon. I am struggling to hold on, it looks like we’re inside the earth, there’s dirt, mud and rocks everywhere and the Dragon seems like swimming in it. The dragon tries to throw me away with its tail but can’t do it, then he/she tries to eat me and appears as if she/he is chasing its tail, but can’t. The terrain is so rough and she/he can’t shake me off even though I am less than a mosquito to her/him. This goes on for a while but not for a moment I think of letting go.

Then the terrain starts to get softer, less rocks, more mud, the dragon does not fight as aggressively now and I start to climb the rope getting closer to the body. The terrain gets even softer and now water appears. Finally, I reach the dragon’s body, its colossal; I can hardly catch on to one scale. Now I’m on its back and we’re into water, the experience from horrifying becomes adventurous and then pleasant. I’m climbing its back slowly and it becomes easier by the moment, then we are out of the water and flying in the air, it’s wonderful. The air starting to get thinner there is no resistance at all and the colours are becoming so vivid and psychedelic, it’s ecstatic. Finally, I reach the head and I see its beautiful face it is rounded, thorny with fantastic yellow eyes. Awe is not enough to describe that moment, I feel warm safe and loved. I don’t remember any words only this endless bliss.”

So that is part of the treasure we can reach if we dare to continue against odds.

(I have a secret smile because the dragon in the St. George painting seems to be only a baby).

Other nations have very different views of the dragon. In Wales their flag is a triumphant statement of the dragon nature. It shows a very alive and vigorous red dragon, and stands for the passion of the nation. See Origins of Welsh Nation

The Chinese in particular have a great regard for the dragon, and see it and, “revere it as representative of the primal forces of nature, religion and the universe. They associated it with wisdom—often said to be wiser than humans—and longevity. They are commonly said to possess some form of magic or other supernatural power, and are often associated with wells, rain, and rivers. In some cultures, they are also said to be capable of human speech. In some traditions dragons are said to have taught humans to talk.” Quoted from Wikipedia.

Here is an image of the Chinese dragon looking very alive and virile. The people of China have a long held belief that they are descendents of the dragon, a tradition that is firmly embedded in their culture and one that is encountered across all aspects of Chinese society and in the minds of its people. Whereas in western cultures the dragon is usually regarded as a symbol of malevolence, in China it is held in high esteem for its dignity and power for good.

From primitive times people have regarded the dragon as supernatural and auspicious creature with the power to bless and influence their lives. _

 

Immovable Force Meets an Unstoppable Object

This mythological situation is usually depicted by huge cosmic events of clashes between Superhero’s, but the fact is it is a common life event.

I know it well because it happened to me. I must have been about twelve and had started masturbating. But my mother must have seen evidence on my bed sheets, and one day she exploded into intense emotional shouting that if I carried on doing it I would die. She screamed out, “Daddy and I don’t want you to die!!!”

That put the fear of death in me, so I tried to stop masturbating. To my horror I found that it happened while I was asleep. The horror was that I felt that I had become possessed by the Devil – in those days people were infected with such beliefs and I was scared. So I started wearing a tight swimming costume which would wake me as I fumbled with the costume. Well, it worked and for about nine precious years of my life I experienced no sexual activity, not even wet dreams. I had stopped the unstoppable force.

As I found, the sex drive happened while asleep; it wasn’t mine to control, in fact it was an instinctive force that most people go along with not recognising its power. People have admitted to me that they masturbate or have sex every day. People do not really own that realisation, but a great authority on sexuality, Wilhelm Reich, said in his book, The Function of the Orgasm –

“It was a blow in the face to conventional thinking. You think that you determine your actions with free will? Far from it! Your conscious action is only a drop on the surface of a sea of unconscious processes, of which you can know nothing—about which, indeed, you are afraid to know. You are proud of the “individuality of your personality” and of the “broadness of your mind”? What conceit! Actually, you are the mere toy of your instincts, which do with you whatever they please.”

I learnt that by trying to kill my sexual instinct, the result was conflict, resulting in neurosis and depression. But my mother’s fear and huge rant was not because of her ignorance. In that period of time TB was everywhere and I knew people who had it and were walking about with it. What I only learned later was that my mother had taken me to have a chest x-ray, and also that most adults knew that a person with tuberculosis often was very highly sexed and sought sexual expression with a vengeance.

That may have been because as they were dying they instinctively tried to procreate. My mother must have known that and her fear for me as a weak chick – the doctor had told my mother as he threw my premature and lifeless body aside on the bed – I wasn’t breathing – that I would be a weak child and wouldn’t live long and she could have more children. That is why my story is about the Unstoppable Object – the sexual instinct – meeting the Immovable Force – my fear of death.

But it is not simply my own struggle for it can exist between a person’s instincts and their personal experience. Many women driven by their instinctive desire to have a baby, finding they have not conceived are similarly torn. There are many cases of women in such torment stealing other women’s babies. Similar conflict can exist between any of our instinctive needs such as breathing, eating, and the desire to be loved.

Also the huge conflict between underpaid workers and some bosses.  

Jack and the Beanstalk

I feel that I have insight into what the story of Jack and the beanstalk is about.  Jack, a poor country boy goes to the market and trades the family cow for a handful of magic beans, which grow into an enormous beanstalk reaching up into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds himself in the castle of an unfriendly giant. The giant senses Jack’s presence and cries, “Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!” .

One of my sons dreamt he climbed up the huge beanstalk and felt the presence of the Giant Being. He also felt sure they were aware of him and that they would kill him.

That is exactly what the story is about. A young man goes to market –  the market is our contact with the world in general, the hustle and bustle, the commerce of life, the wide range of experience one meets in exposing oneself to more than ones close family and friends – there he finds himself exposed to many different views and opinions, one of which is that one can grow beyond the normal everyday experience of people and gain a much richer and extensive view – the magic beans, the power of personal growth.

People who never find this power pf personal growth may remain stuck in life situations from which they may never emerge. The situation might be one of never establishing a full and satisfying sexual relationship; constantly feeling hurt by the actions of others; existing in a state of depression or anxiety; forever having to seek activity or company to deal with ones own inner emptiness; experiencing enormous jealousy or anxiety in a relationship; feeling you have never made it in life – the list could be endless.

This grows in him and he is enlightened by it because he is able to see a vaster view than those locked in chasing after financial riches or being lost in worldly cares or desires. But this brings him to the world of Giants. As said, “The Life Will is an enormous activity, a giant in its abilities and coverage. Also, people meeting it fear they are dying or will killed. See Enlightenment

That is true; YES they will be killed, but not physically. It is a facing of the huge Life Will that seems threatening to the small and less powerful Conscious Will, your personality, as the massive influx of information and experiences is released from the Life Will. See  Death of Ego

The Life Will has a huge memory, has faced every life situation, has dealt with death over and over, has mated and lived in all animal forms, and is the greatest survivor. In animals we call it instincts and animals do not face uncertainty in life choices.  But humans have developed self-awareness, and have a sense of themselves as individuals, and that comes with a huge cost attached to it. The cost is that most of us are no longer guided by our instincts, their long and huge memory, and so often become victims of depression, mental illness, and feeling lost.

But that isn’t a new problem because it has been seen, recorded, written about for as long as humans had language and had the means to communicate. In doing so their stories are full of superheroes and amazing creatures. The stories are all about the wonder that we carry within us that we have forgotten, persecuted, even tried to kill out. After all, what is the New Testament, the Labours of Hercules about but superheroes or heroines. But of course, we have been told the stories are history, and so been deluded, when really the stories are about what we face in our lives now. 

Pan the Great God

We see a God in the Sun, shining in the sky, being born and giving itself to us every day, thus representing the cycle that governs our lives. Without the Sun, we would not exist. Therefore, it is revered as the bearer of the force, of the heat that germinates the seed in the earth and that melts the ice of the soil after the long winter. The god Pan is also tender with wild animals, and can wear horns on his head like those of the deer, thus symbolizing his connection with the non-domesticated animals.

Pan is here shown in his true form as a force in the natural world expressing as all the woodland creatures.

In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Pan (Ancient Greek:) Πάν, (Pan) is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds, rustic music and impromptus, and companion of the nymphs. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he is also recognized as the god of fields, groves, wooded glens and often affiliated with sex; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring. From Wikipedia

That quote appeals to me because in my youth I dreamt an amazing dream:

There is a forest of the soul that dreams can conjure,
Where creatures strange as dreams are seen,
And this one, tired of lights and people
Made a pathway to its places few had been.
This is the wood of dreamy strangeness,
And I, among its creatures wandered there,
Amidst its green and leafy places,
Through its thorns and damp cool air.

Then out into a clearing,
The beech nut path had led me,
Rounded by the sky and by the wood,
And there naked in the half light,
Still as a fawn in wild flowers and grasses,
A lovely maiden stood.

She was brown as the beech nut caskets
That lined the way as I came,
And like the soft silk of spring beech leaves,
Her skin was just the same.
For an age we stood and pondered,
What we saw in each other’s eyes.
And all to be said had been spoken,
And to talk with the tongue would be lies.

Then in a voice that was silent,
She called to my every cell.
She called in a way forbidden,
In a speech as old as mankind;
She called in a tone that shook me,
And I suffered the longings of hell.

But the voice within kept warning,
To think of those I loved,
To picture any woman,
Any girl who was beloved.
And that was the only way backwards,
From this supernatural shore.

Then to that clearing came forward,
One whom the trees had hid,
The great god Pan with his woodland creatures,

The rabbits, mice, deer and others

To aid Nature in her bid.
He told of a million secrets,
Of as many unearthly delights,
This nut brown woman could give me,
Through eternity’s days and nights.

But I clung to my picture of women,
I feared the mind diffuse,
That over all earth pervaded,
And for singleness had no use.
It was God’s idea to be different,
To rise up all alone,
to grow as a man individual,
And have a soul of one’s own

Yes, I clung to the love of my lover,
The commonness of a friend,
And the figures before me faded,
Into that woodland glen.

Slowly I traced my footsteps,
Back through the leaf green ways,
Over the beaten pathways,
Through the damp cool dells.
I can’t say I’m happy I’ve lost her,
For she’ll never come back again.

But sometimes I catch a whisper,
In the touch of a summer night’s rain.
That if I stay with mankind,
As the great star clusters stir,
Could it be the love I came back for,
Will grow to be like Her?

Unfortunately when Roman Catholicism saw anything from past beliefs as evil, Pan was shown not as a protector of the natural and instinctive life, of which we are a part, but as a devil who led people to hell, a place never described before.

For Hades, now labelled as Hell by Christianity, was not a place of torment and fire, but the unseen world the living lose sight of because, as modern scientific research says, “Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. Yet this view we take to be the REAL universe.”

Hades as a God figure, ruled the land beneath the surface of the earth where all dead things are thought to go; not to suffer Hell, but a place that was out of our ability to see and know – except those whose senses could go beyond the normal. For according to latest science, things can be in two places at once. Apparently distant objects, or people, are intricately linked in an immediate way. There is no separate existence as we previously thought. Our view of the world is not one supported by the facts of physics. Time and space are transcended.

“You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, and the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river… I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career’, beyond them all as beyond a veil.

‘Yes,’ said the doctor, still quite cool, ‘it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.'” This was said about Mary who saw the God Pan In her visions of ‘madness’. From the Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

That is an interesting statement because the ‘madness’ Mary suffered from was well known to the ancient Greeks. This could be linked with Pan (Pan-ic) who was the god of shepherds and of woods and pastures. The Greeks believed that he often wandered peacefully through the woods, playing a pipe, but when accidentally awakened from his noontime nap he could give a great shout that would cause flocks to stampede. From this aspect of Pan’s nature Greek authors derived the word panikos, “sudden fear,” the ultimate source of the English word: “panic”. The Greek term indicates the feeling of total fear that is also sudden and often attributed to the presence of a god.

This panic was expressed in a degree in the poem, “She called in a tone that shook me, And I suffered the longings of hell.” This is something that occurs to many people whose awareness begins to go beyond their normal world and begins to sense – the view of the world not supported by the facts of physics, where time and space are transcended – and one is aware of the presence of a God, “Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self and feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, and it is a shock. When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic.

One last thing, it was stated the Pan loved boys. Once gain this has been seen, by our modern sexually oriented culture as referring to homosexuality. I even found in searching for pictures of Pan I saw one showing two men having sex. But that was again like what happened with the Christian version of Pan a travesty. I am the father of four boys, and I loved them without any sex intruding, for in them I saw and felt their promise, their potential, their youthful beauty.  It said love not sex for the two are very different. 

 

Pandora’s Jar Box

I have witnessed this on several occasions. Like all Greek Myths it is a story about the human mind and the things we may meet if we dare to live a full and adventurous life, one that challenges the ‘normal’ and so breaks through the conventions and niceties most people are trapped in and live by.

If you dare to break through these niceties and rules you find yourself in the world the Greek myths graphically describe the hidden world within us below normal awareness, the unconscious.

Carl Jung says that, “When respect and obedience to law keeps you from seeing god.”

This ‘seeing’ means that just under the surface of your human personality is a level of yourself called the unconscious, a level of your mind or awareness where you have hidden from or repressed all you hurtful or shameful experiences; all your childhood trauma and hurts, all that you haven’t faced in yourself.

In general though a widening of experience occurs, and what is common to many people is that many turn back because of fear. This is because in opening themselves to experience more of themselves they meet a much large self. For no plant or creature grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So, the seed in your mother’s womb is as old as and even older than human kind, and you carry that wisdom or memories in you. But in this life you developed a new brain, and the memories you gathered this time are what you built your personality from, but beneath that is a very ancient and huge self.

Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking, and it is a shock. See Opening to Life

So Pandora’s Jar is the opening to all the things we haven’t faced in ourselves. In doing so we meet all the ‘evil’ we haven’t redeemed in our own life. She is a woman because women are, in their own body, the foundation of life, intuition and creativity.

Pandora name means the “gift”, thus “the all-endowed”, “all-gifted” or “all-giving” – not the giver of evil at all – realise the evil is live spelt backwards, and so is all that we have not lived fully and so becomes sickness within us. She gives everything to us, evil in us, pain we hold onto, but also our own Wonder.

But hope is at the bottom, for beneath the level where we store all our traumas and unlived  emotions there lies a world where pain, fear of death and emotional hurt disappears; that is the gift Pandora brings, for she brings all things; the wonder of our own infinite potential. See Potential  

 

Fairies – Little People – Leprechauns

In dreams and our inner life we tend to put pictures or images collected from everyday experiences to put an interpretation on what we meet in life that has no form, like electricity or forces of nature such as gravity. We do this because we tend to have an experience of the world based on our body senses, and our dreams and awareness are from a very different environment or dimension, so we tend to put such awareness in images and ideas we understand.

So, natural forces or processes, such as electricity, gravity, cohesion, magnetism, the unconscious, we tend to express pictorially – so the hugeness of the unconscious and life force can be illustrated by the dragon. But the fairy might also be a process or realisation within yourself which when we contact we also put  it in imagery, such as a fairy, little people, angels or even dark things.

What many people fail to understand is that people who have second sight/psychic vision are all experiencing the dream process breaking through into our waking awareness. So, I see all psychic phenomena as arising from the dream process breaking through or being allowed through while awake or in a semi awake state. I have experienced speaking in tongues, hearing voices, seeing visions and they were all normal everyday experiences as far as I was concerned – because I understood them and worked with them. See Psychic faculties in dreams – Intuition – Many Ways of Using It

 

Immense and Unseen Beings

My most impressive meeting with immense beings, beings that maybe have never had physical bodies, or have developed beyond the need for a body, was a dream I experienced on January of 2003; it was truly an amazing dream. In it I was walking home at night in the countryside, and I looked up at the night sky, and saw with wonder that huge stylised figures made of thousands of stars danced across the sky from horizon to horizon.

The figures truly were huge and living, although made of thousands of stars. It took me a long time to enter deeply into this dream, but when I did I met what I have called the Star Beings. I recognised them as what ancient cultures have called the gods. But they were in no way like the strange portrayals of the ancient gods we see in films and drama; powerful caricatures of human beings with amazing powers. These beings did not have human form with crazy quirks, angers and desire for power that humans have. I experienced them as the spectrum of fundamental forces and energies that work together to create the universe.

As the gates of my dream opened I became aware of meeting actual beings. I knew in a direct way that these beings were the very substance and processes of our universe. Literally, the air we breathe, the water we drink is a part of their ‘bodies’. But we must not think of them as like us in the way we have a body.

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

Modern astrology is a real sham. It doesn’t help us to connect with this underlying harmony and find our place in the cosmic scheme of things. It has become a type of fortune telling, a parade, and entertainment. So often it is advertised in connection with your “love stars” — a sort of erotic titillation. It’s true nature is far beyond that. It is a story in symbols of our emergence from these great beings, and a statement of the part they play in the changes and processes of life on earth and social events.

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At times I experienced other types of powerful beings. As an example at one time I felt myself in a quiet space. I was back in the big space of the mind, and I sensed a huge presence, something big that I could not yet define. I realised that most of my life I had explored this ocean of the mind alone.

Meeting the Huge Within

Then the huge unknown began to enter into my awareness. I felt the presence of an enormous creature rising to the surface of something like a swamp or a body of water, obviously my mind is using images gathered from everyday life. At first I thought it might be a whale, but as I paid attention to what was happening, it defined into a huge crocodile.

This huge creature looked at me and said, “Tony, join me.”

I laughed at this because it was so huge, and with so many associations of swallowing things, that I said something like, “What do you mean join you? Don’t you mean that you want to eat me?”

The creature replied to me, “No. No, it’s not like that, I’m just like a submarine. I have all these lives in me. I have many, many lives in me. I am life. I contain the many. You can swim this ocean alone Tony, if you wish. Or you can join me, you can join the many. You can always, if you choose to live your independent life again, leave us.”

I laughed here because I had the image of me being independent, stripping off, diving over the side of the boat into the ocean and swimming off. It is something I have often done in the sea, especially in the wonderful warm waters of Greece, and swimming long distances alone, or off to an island out to sea, by myself.

I began to give myself to that great creature which I now understood as what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, the unity of lives. It felt as if it was absolving me, much as I had experienced earlier on. (One of those strange and beautiful, and also moving coincidences just happened. I am reading this in using voice recognition, and it is proving to be very accurate. But in the sentence where I said that I felt it was – and the word was supposed to be absorbing me – the software used the word absolving. And here I am again, back in the ocean, weeping as I know there is no judgement on the life I have led so alone and cut off.)

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The next encounter was much clearer in showing what was actually involved.

I was led into a large official type building by a woman who was leading me and slightly pulling. Inside the front door of the building was a wide passageway probably about 15 or 20 feet wide leading straight ahead? Not far along this corridor something completely filled the space in front of us. It looked like frog’s spawn, but much more ethereal, perhaps like patterns of energy with just a little material substance.

With no real hesitation the woman and I walked into this wall of energy. I believe we knew more or less what would happen – that we would be absorbed and become wholly a part of this life form. As we walked into it I was trying to analyse what was happening and what it felt like. I lost all sense of my body as a dense form, but I could still feel my partner’s hand in mine in a very delicate way – again like energy playing upon energy. I could feel that the energy had totally penetrated me and was working on me in a healing way that would transform all of me. My impression was that thousands of individuals had merged to share their abilities and being with me, and I was sharing with them, forming an amazing wholeness. We were one huge being, yet maintained our awareness of our individual existence. It felt very healing. Also, I felt that we could decide upon our own movement, and it seemed as if we were still walking within this life form. So, I knew we could walk out again and return to our solid body form.

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The next description is an example of the huge dilemma or paradox, for our body senses tell us that we are separate and alone, yet when we explore the depths of our mind we often discover that we are not separate.

So, this is quite a strange response in a way because in the past I have fully given myself to inner God and yet here I was hesitating because of the sense of other dimensions and beings in those dimensions.

However, what happened was incredibly interesting. It was like being led to stand on the edge of something, on a border or frontier. On my side of the frontier was what I called myself. On the other side was something that I felt to be as yet unknown. Then gradually a knowing arose in me of what was beyond the frontier. I understood what it was I was opening to. It arose as if I were talking to myself. I was saying, “What am I giving myself to? What am I opening myself to?” Then it was as if I were answering my own question. “Listen to me Tony. It is yourself. There is nobody else is there? I am your potential self, trying to free you. You are opening to the highest in you. In the wider self there is only one being in the universe. There is nobody else. You are opening to yourself.”

Breaking through to the new

This points to a huge misconception by almost everybody because when we view such experiences from our body’s experience of time and three dimensional lives, everything is seen as separate and outside them. So people’s experience of meeting angels, spirits good or evil, of aliens, being attacked by animals or even projecting from their body, while it is true from a body perspective, is completely experienced differently when seen from the timeless and space-less side of us.

You or I standing before the immense

Part of the difficulty is that when experiencing such things, they enter into the dimension of dreams in which they appear to experience things as an external reality.  Such dimensional switching often produces a bleed through from the third dimension of waking experience. It bleeds through to the dream dimension that can be called the fourth dimension – as there are in borders of countries where people ‘bleed through’ without even understanding the language or customs of the new country. Such ‘bleed through’ is experienced as things that are often seen as not possible by the science of the day, or explained as an illness – because they have not learned the language. What is experienced are visions, hearing voices, having intuitions of things that cannot be accounted for by our physical senses; apparently travelling to distant places and witnessing events there yet the person has not physically been there; also, the psychic phenomena often called spiritualism; also, the sense that one is possessed by or contacting or threatened by discarnate beings, strange dreams, and nightmares. See Waking Lucid Dreaming

In trying to understand such paradoxes it is helpful to know something of the Big Bang, which scientists tell us was the start of our physical universe. At that moment it is stated that time and space began. That suggests that there was a condition before that where there was no time and no space – eternity. Unfortunately the same mistake of bleed though is made in understanding eternity as with what was said above – we think of eternity as being a long ‘time’, but we have an experience of timelessness.

Also it is shown in the charts of the Big Bang that the universe was in complete darkness and it took 300,000 years before light appeared – this is so like Genesis, ‘Let there be light’. See Secret Bible  

Aliens

As human mammals we tend to expect everything to be almost the same as us, so we tend to think every other type of intelligent creatures must have physical bodies, and travel in mechanical highly technological machines to contact us. So our search for other species is always very physical with physical type searches. Also when we look to our evolution we tend to still see it as mechanical as artificial intelligence in physical bodies, genetic engineering, cybernetics, and so on. Those are all possible, but there are other possibilities of human contact with other type of intelligences.

The following is a simple example of meeting a non physical being.

The Being: ‘Your race is linked with older races who had a much fuller awareness, and your organs that deal with the advanced awareness have atrophied, but the organs are still in you. They are now vestigial organs. When you start to really love these organs begin to develop. Other activities bring life to the other vestigial organs.”

T: “What we call love today I see as almost an infantile expression of need. So, I guess you’re talking about a form of love that doesn’t attempt to possess or control the person loved. Did I feel a pure love for J? No I didn’t. So, why did it have the effect on me? She was an alive, intelligent, and attractive female who was calling to me, and I was completely holding back all my response. She said to me one day, ‘Tony, are you going to come to me? Are we going to make a baby or not?'”

The Being: “What an amazing thing to say to somebody – that you want to create a baby with them.”

T: “So, this little vestigial tissue was awoken by that beautiful woman, and by my not responding – not responding sexually. And then what happens?”

The Being: “That caused you to put your head up above the level of your physical body and you came to the notice of the Gardener. You woke up. As a human being you have woken up. You are not just living on automatic, going about life out of your instinctive, social or instinctive urges. The pain has woken you up.”

T: “My God, I have that pain all the time. I had to find a way of dealing with it. So, I guess it was that pushing me towards delving into myself and waking up more fully. That is the path. So, it led me to start to clear out all the old channels and that enables the energy.”

“Somewhere about here the being who was explaining to me about the vestigial organs had touched me. I can say that in a few words – it touched me. But the experience was something that I find difficult to describe. First of all I was aware of a being who lived without any apparent physical form and in the dimensions that I do not know. It was communicating with me, and then suddenly it touched me. This was perhaps something like being electrocuted, except that it was not at all painful or destructive. Every part of me seemed to vibrate as an enormous charge of influence hit me. I had no awareness of having a physical body because it felt as if for moments I was transformed into existing in a new way. During that period there was no need to breathe, and it felt as if my being was frozen in a physical sense. I have no idea why that being touched me or what happened when that huge hit of energy was in me.

It then explained to me that because of what we humans are doing to the earth it was necessary to use some humans as channels for the passage of energy into the physical world. When it started communicating to me the things we were doing to the earth I at first thought it was going to lay blame on us and suggest we were causing a crisis. It seemed immediately aware of what I was thinking/feeling and communicated what felt like a smile, though there was no face or body to be aware of. Then it communicated to me that – my words – it was no big deal, and they would deal with it. That the problem was not simply with what we were doing to the earth, the problem was that what we have been doing has brought the earth out of harmony with the rest of the solar system. I had some sense of harmonics in the relationship between the planets and understood that the passage of energy through humans was to help balance the earth again in harmonic relationship.

I felt at this point that it was important to explain to people about these residual organs, to explain that we all have them, and ways of awakening them. Using the meditational approach without really understanding what you are doing is not all that helpful. Europeans need to understand what they are doing and why. They do not have the inbuilt sense of connection with what are called the gods, or the spiritual world. They need to understand the mechanics of their action. That is partly why I am being given this information.

Why did they need to awaken? What I am given to understand is that once those organs start to function it begins to transform the body. New energy or different levels of energy flow through the body. Sometimes the person feels themselves vibrating either as they meditate or sleep, and this is a sign of that new energy. It also shows that in some way, as suggested in the analogy of the seed, when the seed produces a stem and pushes above the soil, it can take in the energy of the sun. So, as these organs unfold in a person they become almost like leaves that taking this new energy.

There is something on my mind about all this. I am struggling with a concept – it is a social concept – that is difficult even to tell you (referring to R). The bloody inhibitions we have about ourselves because of social constraints. Here I am really struggling with this sense of the person l I was to communicating with. I really felt almost something like fear that if I said what was happening I would be seen as mad in some way.”  

Medusa

Medusa is shown as a female, and because she is a figure from the inner worlds, depicts the feeling, emotional and creative side of humanity. But creation is many sided, for in the beginning of Genesis, all was in darkness. Then light was created. So creativity can be of darkness and light, for both are necessary for the dual world we exist in.

Whatever emerges from the head suggests the thoughts and feelings discharged by the being. The snakes often have a dual purpose in us. So the snake’s energy is like the electricity in a house, so can be heat, power, sound or vision, and lies behind all our functions. So in some dreams the snake represents our sexuality; in others the rising of that energy up our body to express as digestion – the intestinal snake – or as the creative or poisonous energy of our emotions and thoughts, even disease. In the throat it becomes the destructive or constructive speech and language – expressed or repressed feelings and speech. In the head it becomes thinking, perception and higher cognition.

But the snakes emerging from Medusa’s head are definitely destructive and she represent her anger and malicious emotions which if  seen can cause a paralysis of your own flow of life.

The book Female Rage: Unlocking Its Secrets, Claiming Its Power by Mary Valentis and Anne Devane notes that “When we asked women what female rage looks like to them, it was always Medusa, the snaky-haired monster of myth, who came to mind … In one interview after another we were told that Medusa is ‘the most horrific woman in the world’ … [though] none of the women we interviewed could remember the details of the myth.”

Jung’s comment is, “In dreams a mirror can symbolize the power of the unconscious to “mirror the individual objectively — giving him a view of himself that he may never have had before. Only through the unconscious can such a view (which often shocks and upsets the conscious mind) be obtained — just as in Greek myth the Gorgon Medusa, whose look turned men to stone, could be gazed upon only in a mirror.” Below, Medusa reflected in a shield (a painting by the 17th century artist Caravaggio)

Also Beth Seelig analyses Medusa’s punishment from the aspect of the crime of having been raped rather than having willingly consented in Athena’s temple as an outcome of the goddess’ unresolved conflicts with her own father, Zeus.

True, in dreams such poisonous feelings are often not expressed outwardly and become the poisonous snake.

A dream told me by a woman I met in Mexico. She said that she dreamt a large snake was crawling up the bed and then bit her on her left breast. She said she then tried to suck out the poison.

In the destructive aspect the snake represents the poisonous thoughts and emotions that can destroy us. We tend to depict this snake biting or attacking us, even though we have ourselves given rise to such poisonous emotions as hate and guilt. Because our life energy flows into thinking and emotions, we are in this way directing the creative force of life. Directing it negatively has the power to bring illness and death, for we are dealing with the power of life and death itself.

I asked her to explore the dream by imaging herself as the snake, feeling it biting her. The result was that a story unfolded. She had felt, rightly or wrongly, that her husband had been unfaithful, and she had felt bitter and vengeful. But instead of expressing those feelings they had turned inwards and poisoned her, leaving her depressed. So the snake was an image of her poison biting her and poisoning her life. So do not be afraid of a snake biting you. It is not dangerous. The dangerous part is avoiding the bite, because the poison stays in you unmet.  

Sleeping Beauty or Little Briar Rose

“At the christening of a king and queen’s long-wished-for child, seven good fairies are invited to be godmothers to the infant princess. The fairies attend the banquet at the palace. Each fairy is presented with a golden plate and drinking cups adorned with jewels. Soon after, an old fairy enters the palace and is seated with a plate of fine china and a crystal drinking glass. This old fairy is overlooked because she has been within a tower for many years, and everyone had believed her to be deceased. Six of the other seven fairies then offer their gifts of beauty, wit, grace, dance, song, and goodness to the infant princess. The evil fairy is very angry about having been forgotten, and as her gift, enchants the infant princess so that she will one day prick her finger on a spindle of a spinning wheel and die. The seventh fairy, who hasn’t yet given her gift, attempts to reverse the evil fairy’s curse. However, she can only do so partially. Instead of dying, the Princess will fall into a deep sleep for 100 years and be awakened by a kiss from a king’s son. This is her gift of protection.

The King orders that every spindle and spinning wheel in the kingdom to be destroyed, to try to save his daughter from the terrible curse. Fifteen or sixteen years pass and one day, when the king and queen are away, the Princess wanders through the palace rooms and comes upon an old woman, spinning with her spindle. The princess, who has never seen anyone spin before, asks the old woman if she can try the spinning wheel. The curse is fulfilled as the princess pricks her finger on the spindle and instantly falls into a deep sleep.

The old woman cries for help and attempts are made to revive the princess. The king attributes this to fate and has the Princess carried to the finest room in the palace and placed upon a bed of gold and silver embroidered fabric. The king and queen kiss their daughter goodbye and depart, proclaiming the entrance to be forbidden. The good fairy who altered the evil prophecy is summoned. Having great powers of foresight, the fairy sees that the Princess will awaken to distress when she finds herself alone, so the fairy puts everyone in the castle to sleep. The fairy also summons a forest of trees, brambles and thorns that spring up around the castle, shielding it from the outside world and preventing anyone from disturbing the Princess.

A hundred years pass and a prince from another family spies the hidden castle during a hunting expedition. His attendants tell him differing stories regarding the castle until an old man recounts his father’s words: within the castle lies a beautiful princess who is doomed to sleep for a hundred years until a king’s son comes and awakens her. The prince then braves the tall trees, cuts his way through brambles and thorns (which it has been told many died in trying to reach the princess), and enters the castle. He passes the sleeping workers and guards in castle and comes across the chamber where the Princess lies asleep on the bed. Struck by the radiant beauty before him, he falls on his knees before her. The enchantment comes to an end by a kiss and the princess awakens and converses with the prince for a long time. Meanwhile, the rest of the castle awakens and go about their business. The prince and princess are later married by the chaplain in the castle chapel.” Quoted from Wikipedia

Such folk or fairy tales do not arise from the thinking intellectual mind but are produced by dreaming and arise from the unconscious. Such stories are all symbolical of great truths expressed in simple stories – symbol is from the Greek word that meant ‘bringing things together’. So in this sense a symbolic story is a way of expressing the enormous meaning that stays in the shadow unless it is understood.

The story is about a girl child growing into womanhood. She is a princess, a special person because when we can see the whole person and not just the strange view that the conscious personality has of simply the surface being, it sees that everyone born extraordinary. If you doubt this view this video of a girl child who when viewed from the surface view was mentally backward, when it was discovered that within her was a wonder. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNZVV4Ciccg

So this wonder, still in her childhood years was blessed with many talents, for I learned in exploring the unconscious that we are all born with an immense potential that often remains latent because of the condition of our body, our education, our prevalent social teachings, or our belief that what authority figures and parents say is taken as truth. As Plato said so long ago, “Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and a fool”.

But this young woman pricks her finger and bleeds – in other words she has her first experience of menstruation/a period.

During this cycle females face a great adjustment in the start of menstruation. For a young woman this may be particularly potent for it confronts her with the fact that she is part of nature’s cycles, that her body is not totally her own and that Life in her has its own agenda. It connects her with the forces of death and renewal occurring within her during every menstruation. It connects her with the tremendous link with natural forces of mothering and the strength of womanhood and the female principle in nature. For a female is not simply a human being a human personality, but can be the very essence of the female principle, merging with the male principle. So tbeing a female holds in it all that experience, all those patterns of behaviour, whether of the mother wolf with her cubs, or the eagle rearing its young. To touch such enormous wealth of experience is to be penetrated by the holy; something so beyond the limitations of our own small personality enters us and leaves its imprint.

Because of the new range of feelings, many young women experience a different relationship with religion and life’s mysteries. All this, as one approaches the age of twenty-one, produces an individual with some sense of social and individual responsibility; or if not that, the beginning of a sense of a direction or life purpose. This might not be recognised as such at the time. But it is a time of searching for life purpose, independence, a realization of choices plus a testing of social and personal limitations as well as an awareness of a burgeoning sexuality. As this is can be a traumatic period of life for most of us, it is also likely to be a time of many unforgettable experiences.

But most young women do not allow any of the instinctive or unconscious material into what they feel is them, their personality. So in a sense they fall asleep for they lose sight of their enormous innate potential, and dare I say it, their holy womanhood. For at this time they are often so immerse into worrying about their appearance and their clothes that their real wonder has been lost.

We are capable of creating devils and angels, monsters and they are so real to us that many people have to use antidepressants to meet this stress. How do we do all that? I am seeing it as something like the seashell effect. You put ithe shell up to your ear and you actually hear sounds in it – but the sounds are actually those you are creating in your inner ear amplified by the shell.

Of course it isn’t a sham. It is all our own ability, but people can’t see how magical it is. Of course, they may be constantly creating such horrible demons or deadly scenes of fear, guilt or alienation – thus being a victim of their own imagination. This reminds me of my eldest son. Sleeping in the same bedroom as his brother and sister, he started telling them ghost stories to frighten them. They promptly fell asleep, but he was so frightened he had to call us to help him.

The story says that our inner faculties fall asleep too – the castle workers. That is not unusual because most of us live in a world of experience that leaves us almost blind and deaf, for it has been found that compared with our animal companions we are only aware of about 1% of visible light and 1% of audible sound.

Our human senses are pretty incredible – but we only see, hear, and smell a tiny fraction of what’s out there, for animals sense their world in ways far beyond our human capabilities. Presented by physicist Helen Czerski and biologist Patrick Aryee, say we can travel beyond the limits of human perception and can be astounded by the surprising, weird and complex ways that our planet’s animals sense the world around them.

That is one of the super senses that we lose when we only live in our thoughts, for our body, linking as it does with our unconscious awareness still has all these abilities. If you doubt that please look at https://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/edgar-cayce-and-the-cosmic-mind-superminds/

But it can be woken, as the story says, by a daring and courageous mind that is not terrified of death and being torn by brambles. So the story is not simply about women but about humans – men and women that have been ‘put asleep’ by being raised in the culture that has no understanding of the wonders, the beauty within us. For the story says that when we wake that sense of beauty, we wake also our wider awareness. See A Huge Change Happening

The block that prevents us from claiming our heritage can be by passed by having a passive attitude while awake (See https://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/the-keyboard-condition/ – The Keyboard Condition). This allows for a little recognised phenomenon which, while awake and in a passive state, allows the intuitive process to break through as spontaneous movement, sound and emotion, exactly as with dreams. In the past, and still in the present, this spontaneous movements and speech are all things that happen when this dream process breaks through into consciousness. See https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ Opening to Life.   

Vampires

Many vampire fears or dreams are centred around all the vampire films now produced. Any fear of being possessed or attacked by an influence are actually a way of expressing one’s own fear of the unknown and unseen. There are sometimes also a response to the dreamer’s spontaneous life process being met and are interpreted as being taken over by a vampire, demon or even an alien. The reason is that we have now experience of such spontaneous interventions.

Example: I hurried away to find a police station to report this situation. When I found the police station I went in and said to them that they had some strange people in the town that seem to be like vampires, wanting people’s body or blood. There were four or five policemen in the police station, and they looked at me unsympathetically, their faces gradually changing. I began to recognise the same situation in them as with the dog and the man. They looked at me and told me to get out and mind my own business. They said that if I wasn’t from a country that would cause a fuss if I were to disappear, they would lock me in a cell and nobody would hear of me again.

I hurried out of the police station feeling, not terrified, but certainly anxious and worried about what was happening. I was still walking along the roads in this town that looked as if it were in Central Europe somewhere, not at all modern in its buildings or feeling. As I walked another dog began to follow me. This one looked aggressive and seem to be excited by my anxiety. I made the mistake of starting to hurry away, and the dog bit at my calf while my back was to it. I now turned to face the dog and it backed away but certainly did not run away. It was waiting to see what I was going to do. I had no weapon and could only stand and face it, wondering if the situation would now degenerate with other dogs or people starting to surround me. As I was thinking this, and noticing people watching from behind; stores or through windows, a young woman came toward me with a stout broom handle and drove the dog of. She took my arm and told me to hurry and come with her. She said I was in danger if I did not.

She took me to her home, which was very basic, stone walls, stone floor, and open fireplace. In her home she dressed my wound that was bleeding but not too badly, and would hopefully soon heal.

I asked her what was happening in this town that the people were so strange. She told me that the war and difficult times had done awful things to people giving them strange and extraordinary needs. She said they recognised in me something I did not realise I had, and wanted it from me. As she said this she was kneeling bandaging my leg and looked up at me, and I could see in her face the same hunger and strangeness as in the faces of the others.

She could see the recognition in my eyes and stared at me tears forming in her own eyes. “Please don’t be afraid of me,” she said. “I am needy too, but not in the awful way some of the townspeople are.”

She began to cry and look at me with great longing and earnestness. As she did so, to my astonishment her whole body and face began to change into that of a young girl of about 12 or 13. She stood up and reached her arms out to me to hold her. I could feel the pain and desperation, her need for love. I began to recognise this painful need was behind what I had glimpsed of her own inner vampire. I took her into my arms and held her. I felt a tremendous sexual stimulus, as if I were still holding the woman as well as the child. But somehow I knew that I must allow this feeling without acting upon it. And as I did so the girl relaxed in my arms as if she were exhausted and began to slip into sleep. I discovered her bedroom, tucked her into the bed and lie down beside her on top of the covers and also fell asleep. When I awoke in the morning she was still asleep, but now a young and very attractive woman again.

The above example is an excellent description of what makes a vampire in the inner world of dreams, and to some extent in the waking world.

But in the book Beggar Among the Dead by Hans-Ulrich Rieker, he describes a scene which he witnessed of a slinking human living among the sick in India living in extreme poverty going from person to person sucking their blood. It seems the answer is either love or lack of a caring society.

Gradually, as a child reaches the tremendous task of becoming independent of the mother and father, over the years, a tentative ego, or sense of individuality and separateness develops in the healthy child.  This can be seen in the child’s growing ability to be separated from the mother and family, and eventually to actually leave home. These are difficult points in life.  As this delicate separateness arises, the child frequently feels invaded by the being of the mother, father and others. Invaded in the sense that its own will, desires, feelings, are swamped by those of mother or father.  Very often, in finding these feelings during dreams or self-regulation, the image of a vampire, werewolf, witch, dragon or devouring monster or swamp arises to describe this aspect of our early relationship with our parents.

Also feeling that you are losing your very life force to someone or taking energy and life from someone else. Sometimes sex is felt as this. The umbilical connection in the womb is sometimes felt as the life giving connection that if cut off prematurely, is such a loss that expenditure of energy in sex may be felt as vampirism.

“Here was the foundation of my experience of connection with another being. My experience was that I have not grown beyond the point of only being able to receive. So, when my body grew and started the connection with another being through sex, the deepest part of me only knew how to connect in the process of receiving. It had not developed the point where it could in any way give. It had not developed anything to give. So, my sexual experience was one of being ripped apart, of being vampirised, of being sucked dry of the energy that I needed. As I saw this, as I understood this, I felt that perhaps if that part of me that I have now contacted could grow and develop, there may be a time when connection through sex would lead to a very different experience.”

In his book Dreams and Nightmares, Hadfield suggests that crab, spider and vampire dreams depict the internal bodily feelings connected with orgasm. The crab, he says, portrays the tension in the abdominal muscles which produce a gripping sensation. The relaxed, perhaps ‘washed-out’ feeling of fatigue following orgasm, are shown as the sprawling legs and soft underbelly of the spider image. Therefore the blood being sucked dry by the vampire figure is an excellent   description of what is experienced.

Werewolf Lycanthrope

Within ourselves there often lurk the most awful fears and feelings. Usually these monsters were hatched out of early childhood experiences at a time when we could not easily understand or deal with what was happening to us. Difficulties may have occurred when we felt overwhelmed by being anaesthetised, or by a demanding or threatening parent. Something felt as if it were overwhelming us or taking over who we were.

For instance, research has shown that the horror of some haunting and repetitive ghost dreams, had as their base the fact that while the person slept as a child a parent would creep into the bedroom on some errand. The child, hearing noises it couldn’t account for conjured awful fears. Our werewolves and walking dead are just as much creatures we have given life to. Unfortunately, our emotions are very real, and the monsters we create really do influence us, so need to be met and their twisted life taken from them and used in a more constructive way. See: Vampire; Animals.

 But the tales of a human being turning into a wolf are very old, and possibly started because most tribal people used to put on animal skins during hunting, rituals or battle. The picture above shows a Viking warrior with a wolf’s skin on, and on the right a Native American hunter wearing a wolf skin.

The picture shows hunters using deer skins to get closer to the deer

Wearing such skins often repressed the social taboos and the wearer could act like a wild animal, making them into fierce warriors or frightening human animals.  

The Holy Grail

When people think of sexual activity it is usually seen or even shown in films as a backward and forward movement with both sexes. Today it is often depicted as a frantic grabbing and ripping of clothes to get to it. You can’t say it is making love, it is better seen as having a quick shag.

Yet in both the experiences I had of what was obviously sexual there was no body movement, just a full and enveloping wonderful experience. That must give us direct information about sexuality. It leads me to believe that our basic sexual life is not stimulated by or produced by developing glandular activity but is in us from our long evolutionary past as a form of unconscious knowing; something that derives from a realisation deep in us that it is almost holy. By holy I mean something that is so beyond the limitations of our own small personality that enters us and leaves its imprint. Also, a common action that we take for granted that are actually the foundations of life on Earth. Being the foundations of our existence, they are seen as holy by our feeling self – such common things such as sex, eating, water, caring for our children, giving of ourselves, are all holy. The church treats eating and drinking as holy by making it a sacrament – disguising the fact that every act of eating is eating the body of Life and has sex also as a sacrament by the marriage rite. See Parenting is a spiritual path

Such realisations came to me slowly again through events I experienced. One such stands out for me because of the enormity of the impact on me. I remember my mother asked me to collect something from a woman she had met or knew. She told me the directions to the woman’s house which I knew well because there was no danger for children in those days, so I had wandered everywhere in Amersham. The house was a grand big place owned by what we knew as Toffs – a rich or upper-class person. The house was in spacious ground and the woman led me and a friend, Brian A. who I used to go everywhere with to a large barn. The lady of the place had stored what she wanted to give to my mother in a loft in the barn and the woman climbed up the ladder. There, beneath that stable loft, looking up I first glimpsed the top of a woman’s soft white thighs as she climbed the ladder to the loft. The beauty of her naked thighs I can never forget.

What was the beauty I saw? It was not a sexual feeling, so what was it? I was caught up in seeing the holiness that is a part of women, though hardly any women are aware of it. Today looking up women’s skirts is seen as a sign of pornography, but you can’t tell me that most children are perverts.

When I was in secondary school about eleven or twelve, we had an attractive young female teacher who had her table placed directly against our school desks. My desk was placed fairly near to the boy’s desk which was against the teacher’s table. And day after day, as I too did, we crawled under the desks to see if we could see up her skirt. Again, I cannot remember it being a planned sexual exploit, more of a compulsion to try to see that wonder.

Recently I saw a documentary about an Africa tribe that to avoid surprising attacks on them they built their house way up in treetops. The men explained to the film makers that the men always climb the long ladders first to avoid the temptation of looking up the women’s skirts.

I find it so awful as a male to see women in such short skirts showing so much and yet hiding what lately I called the Holy Grail. In a way I feel like it is sexual harassment for women to walk about tempting men to want them sexually. At one period of my life, I found it awful to be turned on sexually by so many women showing themselves like sexual temptresses. Male sexual responses are not learned, they are hard wired. Tests on researching unconscious men’s gaze found that the eyes first went to the face and then directly to the crotch. It was also found that men looking at photos of naked women showed their eyes dilated and admitted they felt a change. Women too when shown photos of naked men also experienced dilated eyes, but they denied any form of response. This suggest that women have learned to deny any sexual feelings about things they experience. A young Russian woman who felt she could do away with upskirting, without realising it showed exactly what men wanted to see, the crotch, the holy place.

In the book Naked Island by Russel Braddon, that is about the Japanese prisoner of war camp in Singapore, tells how before the Japanese took the island the soldiers were stripped naked for medical examinations. At one time all the men were paraded in that way and a woman came on the scene, immediately many men experienced an erection. That was without any attempt to get an erection by masturbating – it is hard wired.

Later I found that the holiness factor was much deeper than modern influences. The Twelfth-century pilgrims, the Crusaders and song writers were the first ones who thought of courtly love in a similar way to the way I discovered it. The whole notion of romance didn’t exist until medieval times and the troubadours. Romance is described in dictionaries as “a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love.” It was this mystery that the ancient Crusaders sought. This mystery was felt and seen as what lies beneath the tremendous urge for sex and yet was more than that. These ancient people always painted the Holy Grail being held by a woman.

The Holy Grail had it start in the stories told by Denis de Rougemont, they said that by the end of the 11th, and throughout the 12th centuries, when the poets of southern France invented ‘l’amour courtois’ (courtly love), love emerged as an essential theme in the relationships between men and women. Courtly love was a brand new, even revolutionary idea, that was opposed to marriage and its sacrament. With this conception, true love only existed in a chaste form and was not linked to marriage, because marriage was only the glorification and sanctification of a physical sexual and ordinary love. In his famous thesis dedicated to the myth of love, Denis de Rougemont (1939) showed that chivalrous love towards a noble lady is mainly symbolic. This Lady in thoughts represents the spiritual and angelic part of the human being, the true self. In this way, the stories, and characters in early novels such as Tristan and Iseult merely reflect man’s adventure in the conquest of his own soul.

In the past they symbolised womanhood by a cup. It was not a particular woman’s personality that was seen as holy but her creative power. They realised that no personal woman could create a baby out of her body, for no person could control and direct the miraculous immense number of intricate steps that are in the creation of a babe. But at the base of a personal woman is the wonder of creation and it is this central aspect of woman they worship. Yet women, every female creature, is the source of all living beings. 

The Christmas Myth

Millions of people still see Christmas as an event that began about two thousand years ago, so why should it be seen as an archetype? Yet even a great thinker like Carl Jung sees it as a myth – “Such a myth, however, consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung.

The fact is that what we now call Christmas was celebrated in different time by different cultures thousands of years prior to the Christian version. It is all described below. That makes it a Cosmic event that we humans through the ages have been sensitised to, felt the wonder of it and celebrated it.

Below is a man’s description of meeting that Wonder.

“I found myself standing before large heavy floor to ceiling curtains. I moved to the curtains and pulled them apart. This revealed the immensity of a clear night sky, filled with brilliant stars. As I looked at this natural splendour, a star fell to earth, leaving me with a sense that something wonderful had happened that I must go in search of. Then there was a sudden shift, and I was now a herder of flocks, a shepherd, looking for the star that had come to earth. Others were searching too, and when we found what we were looking for, I was astonished to discover it was a baby.

A Baby

I was not in any way asleep, or in a trance. My evaluative rational self was keenly observing all that happened, but not interfering with what I was experiencing. Nevertheless, profoundly felt imagery and feelings flooded my awareness. I realised I was experiencing the New Testament story of the birth. But this did not seem to interfere with the flow of what poured into my feelings. My whole body felt the wonder of the baby and I fell to my knees before it. I knew as if intuitively, that all the cosmos had somehow come alive as this helpless vulnerable child. I was so overwhelmed, all I could say over and over, between sobbing cries was, ‘A baby’ – ‘A baby.’

The flowing emotions and the opened intuitive sense informed me that what I knelt before in tears was not a particular child. It was every baby ever born. For the first time I had been allowed to experience the enormity of birth, the holiness of every baby, though some babies despite having the highest in them are born with enormous heavy loads to deal with.

Suddenly the scene changed again, and I was standing with others by the side of a dusty unpaved road. People were excitedly waiting for someone, and I was curious to see who it was.

It was a man, and as he walked the road he saw me and came toward me. This part is difficult to describe, as I feel incapable of communicating the power of the event. The man was ordinary in appearance, but as he got near to me it seemed as if a great force surrounded him that penetrated me completely. The force was love, buffeting me like waves I could barely tolerate. The man stood before me and took my hands and said, ‘You are my disciple.’

At this, love so immense touched me that I fell backwards, the contact too painful for me to bear, and the man walked on.

I knew who he was. I also knew, because it was welling up from within me as sure knowledge that he was the man I had killed. It was his blood I had on my hands. It was his death I felt guilty of. But he, in some strange paradoxical way, was myself. He was the cosmic mystery I have been born as and with. He was the very best of myself I had killed, murdered. He was my youthful sexuality I had suffocated to death, helped by the tenets of a religion that was supposed to be teaching his way, the way of life, the way of recognising one’s cosmic link.

The impact of that meeting was extraordinary. Unable to stop the emotions surfacing, I felt impelled to move to each person in the group rubbing my hands on them. It seemed to me that a magical influence had touched my hands and I wanted everyone around me to receive some of that magic. Even years afterwards, when describing the event, the wonder of it can penetrate me again, and I am overcome by emotion.

The meeting presented Christ paradoxically as something exterior to me, and at the same time something that was a fundamental and integral part of my own nature. I believe many people today have also met Christ in this way.”

The birth of Christ is a cultural image depicting the meeting or birth of the Christ power within us, it is. the power of our own highest possibilities. It is the outreach to us of collective human love. It is an age-old symbol and can still stir us but we must remember that the story of Jesus was not new 2000 years ago, for 1400 years before that Mithra was born in a cave, also on the 25th December. He was too born of a Virgin. He travelled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator of men. His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring equinox (Christmas and Easter).

The Second Book of Enoch contains a section, called Exaltation of Melchizedek, which says that Melchizedek was born of a virgin, Sofonim (or Sopanima), the wife of Nir, a brother of Noah. The child came out from his mother after she had died and sat on the bed beside her corpse, already physically developed, clothed, speaking and blessing the Lord, and marked with the badge of priesthood.

According to tradition, Zoroaster’s mother, Dughdova, was a virgin when she conceived Zoroaster by a shaft of light. Attis was born to the virgin Nana on December 25 – Heracles was born on December 25 to a virgin. Romulus was born to Rea Sivia, a mortal Vestal virgin.

Siddartha who became the Buddha. Also involve virgin birth, for the story of Gautama Buddha’s life (567- 487 BC) starts at preconception when his mother, Queen Maya, is said to have dreamt that a six-tusked elephant pierced her side with one of its tusks. This produced an immaculate conception. She understood the dream to mean the resulting child would become a monarch whose domain was the world.

 Tammuz of Babylonia was born to a virgin, named Mylitta, on December 25.

Mary is an image of your own human situation and represents the possibility of a virginal mind and feelings.  Put simply this means that we drop preconceptions, we melt away fixed opinions, rigid attitudes, perhaps through prayer, meditation, or perseverance, and in that state one can receive a conception from Life itself – in other words a divine interception. “Such a myth, however, consists of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.” Quoted from Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung

I believe today’s Christmas celebrations are a faint and buried memory of something that is as old as creation. To eat and drink enormous amounts are ways of forgetting what the above picture is about. The star shining down on the baby illustrates the cosmic influences there are behind the creation not only of the universe but of ourselves, of every baby born.

The animals in the manger show that we are part of a humble past and are still an animal that has reached self-consciousness. If we cannot see our dependence and link with the animal consciousness, we have missed self-understanding and our way in life.

The angels above the child are telling us, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” As Meeker tells us, “The fact remains that in spite of ‘science’ and …the professional debunkers, there is more, far more in the universe that we are totally in ignorance of. We are limited by our five senses. Once in a while we get a few fleeting insights on inexplicable phenomena, but that doesn’t mean the whole of the inexplicable should be rejected because ‘they cannot be duplicated in a laboratory.”

The Virgin and Joseph are reminders of what we can give birth to in our own life. Mary represents virginity of mind, living without preconceptions, Joseph the intellectual thinking mind, the carpenter, building with dead materials, old thoughts, and ideas. So, there is a virgin posture of the mind which is an attempt to bring about an inner state, an inner feeling of fertility and love towards your invisible and unknown potential – purity from preconceived ideas – the offering of your whole being as material for your potential to use in creating a new self – the act of supplication in which you let go of your thoughts, emotions and body, so they can be played upon as a piano or organ by Life. There should then arise a feeling of warmth toward and desire for the unseen Life, openness to any possibility Life may have in store for you, good or bad, allied with trust. If you have a temperament capable of this, then make it an act of love, a real devotion, an approach to one’s darling.

If you cannot be the parents of your own inner wonder, then perhaps you can kneel before the mystery than keeps you conscious, the miracle that you are as a breathing living being.

Lastly the wise men bringing gifts. They are that aspect of yourself or humanity who like this man had a vison of what the tiny baby has to offer:

“I seemed to be any person who had ever lived, a nameless representative of humanity, and yet a composite of all persons. Then with an awe that was almost overpowering, I had a momentary glimpse of what man would eventually evolve into, of the heights he would sometime reach, and of the development as yet unimagined. For the most part, that glimpse will forever remain indescribable.  For in this stage of evolution which far surpassed that of my actual self, serenity, tranquility, and joy continuously enfolded me. In addition, my thoughts became crystal clear, flowing quickly, yet as gently as a moving stream.”

It All Leads To

The Sacred Heart 

The Christian Mythology

YES, THIS IS THE NEXT STEP IN OUR EVOLUTION – IT STARTED THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO – BUT THERE HAS BEEN A WAR AGAINST KNOWING IT AND SO IT WAS SUPPRESSED BY FORCES AGAINST IT

Some of the force used was by the Christian church. “The early Christians used every means possible to conceal the pagan origin of their symbols, doctrines, and rituals,” Manly Hall says, “They either destroyed the sacred books of other peoples among whom they settled or made them inaccessible to students of comparative philosophy, apparently believing that in this way they could stamp out all record of the pre-Christian origin of their doctrines.”

“This is called the second library of Alexandria, the former having been destroyed under Julius Caesar. The nucleus of this one was the gift of Antony to Cleopatra, who added to it and improved it immensely, till it contained all the existing literature of the world; and–why, they are deliberately concocting Christianity out of the books there! and, so far as I can see, the Gospels are little better than Ovid’s Metamorphoses (historically, I mean),–so deliberately are they making up the new religion by replanting the old on the Jewish system.

 If they could be recovered we should have absolute proof of its concoction from Hindû, Persian, and other originals;–the interpolations, extracts, and alterations proving this. They show, too, that the name first adopted for the typical man was more like Krishna, and that Jesus was a later choice, 3 adopted at Jewish suggestion, in order to suit a Jewish hero. 2 Every detail of the Gospel history is invented, the number of the apostles, and all the rest. Nothing is historical in the sense supposed. I see the Serapeum destroyed; –not only the library but the temple, so fearful were they of leaving any trace of the concoction. It was destroyed by Christians at the instigation especially of Theodosius, Ambrosius, and Theophilus. 3 Their motive was a mixed one, each of the leaders having a different aim. The object of the concoctors themselves was to sustain and continue the ancient faith by transplanting it to a new soil and engrafting it on Judaism. And they accordingly fixed and accumulated upon Jesus all that had been told of previous Christs,–Mithras, Osiris, Krishna, Buddha, and others,–the original draft containing the doctrine of the transmigration of souls most explicitly and distinctly. 4 The concoction was undertaken in order to save religion itself from extinction through the prevalence of materialism — for the times corresponded in this respect exactly to the present.”

 Quoted from Kingsford, Anna. Clothed With The Sun

Anna Kingsford was a remarkable woman and doctor, who was also a great Seer.

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The teachings on the inner path to Christ that follow are not uniquely my ideas. I followed clues left by disciples from the long past. Here and there in the world’s literature there are fragments and sentences referring to this path. So, I pursued this trail as it led into the jungle of ideas surrounding Christianity. I hacked a way through, and gradually, with loving persistence uncovered the ancient landmarks of this way. It is a path leading to the Mother Church the central core of human experience, as old as time, preceding any external religion. 

Looking back over the journey, something about it has deeply impressed me. The early Christians discovered something extraordinary. It completely changed lives, healed sickness, made people want to go out and tell others, and in some cases was worth dying for. And that has been true for me too as I took this path of discipleship.

 Those early Christians expressed what they found in language, and in imagery, that was understandable to them. What they found was something that worked. Just as, in a more recent age, the use of electricity was discovered and applied; and this discovery of electricity was the application of previously unknown natural processes. So. the Christian discovery was one of natural processes of the mind and emotions too. Unfortunately, as time has passed, the language in which those findings were expressed has come to mean less and less to many people. In fact, we may view their statements and perhaps referring to the realm of ‘beliefs’ or dogma rather than of practical principles.”

When the unfortunate tendency in humans began to organise Christianity, to place dogmas and rigid rules around it, Christianity had the misfortune to be scarred with battles between sects, intolerance of other races and cultures, and ruled by male authoritarianism.  Nevertheless, I believe there is something real in the sense defined above.  Through it an individual can arrive at a greater personal peace, and harmonise with their own nature, without having to join any sect or give themselves to a rigid set of beliefs.  They can also meet and converse with the Master and receive the teachings at first hand. This path has been known for centuries and practised by individuals and groups who were frequently persecuted by the organised church. In fact, the power and love that touched the early Christians has been innate in men and women from the beginning, and is lying dormant in each of us. This inner power is the Mother Church, not build with bricks. We enter it and are transformed by following the Christian pathway, the Christian discipline.

What I aim to do in the following paragraphs is to remind you of the original gospel statements, and then try to define them in terms of today’s view of the world, and today’s information about the mind and emotions. For I believe the original teachings refer to an extraordinary possibility in you.

Just as the process of electricity is open to verification with the right equipment, so the extraordinary possibility described by the early Christians is open to verification if you apply yourself in the right way. It doesn’t take belief in a lot of statements, but it does take your effort to try an experiment. It is a path leading to the Mother Church the central core of human experience, as old as time.

What follows is the whole story and it is very large, so to read on and to open the next chapter click Christian Mythology

Zombies

This is about something you sense in yourself or others that is moved by other than human and conscious motives. It is like being asleep and sleep walking, there is no sense of any response there. Or at least they are moved by urges that control them and they are controlled by. This is something like we meet when we see people moved by habits, by propaganda, by religious bigotry or political brain-washing.

In a sense we are all zombies, or have a part of us that is a zombie. It is because we are all programmed and what we do is not from our real selves. If you find it difficult to believe read Programmed and childhood

But the basic of it seen from the inner world is that we live a life that is so repressive that we bury or kill parts of our own nature and beauty and then meet them as monstrous figures or fears.

ZOMBIES – I HAVE BEEN ONE

A friend had recently visited my wife and I, and had asked if the house was haunted. A couple of nights later I dreamt that my wife was asleep beside me and I was sitting up in bed with my friend’s words in mind. So I challenged any such ghosts to show themselves, feeling I could handle them. Nothing happened so I lay down thinking I had solved the problem – there were no ghosts.

Quite soon afterwards, still dreaming, the sound of a door creaking open made me sit up. Then from behind me two black men who looked as if they had risen out of a grave with flesh peeling off them approached me. I quickly made the sign of the cross and said some holy words and the figures disappeared.

I lay back again thinking it was a good thing I knew how to get rid of them. But as soon as I settled to sleep again the door creaked open and the two figures appeared once more. This time all my hand waving and holy words had no effect on their advance, and their hands closed around my throat and I woke screaming in terror.

Yes they were zombies of the worse kind. My wife, feeling my fear, got up and we switched on all the lights.

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That was about 1958, and as I knew nothing about exploring dreams at that time I did nothing about it. But soon afterwards I started practicing yoga. I realise looking back that it was the the breathing control and fasting that were part of what worked and helped me to meet what was behind the nightmare. I could see that each of these were ways of struggling with my instinctive drives.

I had repressed my sexual feelings so severely, that for eight of my teenage years and early twenties, I had no sexual release at all. I had killed and buried my youthful feelings and they had rotted inside me. Now in my early twenties, not knowing how to love – just having sex without any love – I had called up the terrible things I had created. That is what zombies are – the life in us that has been crucified. There are plenty around, and coming alive again was extremely painful.

The Living Dead   

The Gods

In the paradigm of the present western society there are no such things as gods – maybe for many not even God. See Archetype of the Paradigm

But from the point of view of dreams and from the cultural traditions of many other countries, gods exist. Even Christianity clearly mentions gods, even though it is denied. In Genesis it says “God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.” As it says, “let US make man.”

The word Elohim is used in the original script of this piece and it means, to quote from The Unknown God by F. J. Mayers, “Elohim” is a plural name, and yet in our bibles it is always treated as a “singular” one, and always used with a singular verb. In this verse, Elohim, in using the phrase “in our image,” etc., treats Its self as a plurality.” So the unknown God – ain soph (the unknown god) – in expressing Its self, becomes many. So there are many expressions of God. In one statement it calls this ‘The One in the many’. After all, God is beyond description and so can be an unknown paradox. In many dreams gods are also shown, and are seen as the consciousness resident throughout the cosmos, as it knows itself in various forms. And although we are used to seeing gods portrayed in human form of a mixture of animal, human forms and huge natural forces such as gravity, electrify, negative and positive magnetism, so  these are simply human ways of describing their attributes. They are often felt as beings of different dimensions, or sometimes are the consciousness behind the natural creative forces of our own lives and solar system.

But something most Christians do not known is that we need to remember Christianity as it is expressed today, was set in this way by the Roman Catholic church many years after Christianity started – The early Christians were named ‘Atheists Of The Ancient World’. Inhabitants of the Roman Empire had a variety of gods and goddesses, but there were people back then who would be considered early Christians. Ironically, these people were considered atheists by the ancient Romans because they didn’t pay tribute to any of the pagan gods.

But their refusal to acknowledge traditional pagan gods wasn’t the only reason early Christians were considered atheists. These Christians didn’t really practice an organized religion, had no temples or shrines, and no priests. As a result, these people were ostracized from society as salacious rumors regarding their lives would often float around.

But many people, who have explored their own depths, find God is not outside them, but is the very basic core of their being. We are in fact all holy – as it says in Genesis “God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.”

Example: I experienced what I saw as interface between all that we are as our everyday waking personality; between all that we have gathered and understood and lived in this lifetime, and the immensity of what we are as a spiritual being. I saw the details of this and it is quite difficult to summarise or to explain in any way. But as clearly as I can it was like the processing of information so that all that you are formed is a sort of the pattern, a synthesise or a signal, and that signal called out of the immensity of the spiritual life what was relevant to you and your further development. Now that is a very clumsy description because even as I say it I sense an enormous subtlety of what I met and experienced. What I saw was that the interface is unique in every being. This is because every being is unique and creates their own pattern, as with fingerprints. And that pattern calls out of the infinite something different. So in this sense there are as many faces of God as there are human beings.

As I saw all this I realised that if one could help people to come to that point, to bring themselves to that meeting, then they would begin to receive that influence that frees them. It frees them by growing them, by giving them more of themselves.  See Healing Experience

The gods are recorded in most cultures who had entrance to the inner life that in modern humans is seen as the unconscious. So in today’s humans we are blind to this enormous awareness that includes the gods. We are so blind to what the gods are that when we portray them in drama or films they are shown as human beings who are in conflict with humans and each other. That is ridiculous.

The gods are the creative and destructive manifestations, energies or attributes of the one creative reality in the cosmos – the creative force behind the Big Bang. It is like the seven colours in the one light. Thus many ‘gods’, under the direction of the unifying ‘Clear Light’, created the being of man. This means that the many attributes of God, or the gods, are active in man’s being. Man is an image of these forces.

There are some modern humans who are not blind to this inner world.

“It took me a long time to enter deeply into this inner world, but when I did I met what I have called the Star Beings.I will simply say that I recognised them as what ancient cultures have called the gods. But they were in no way like the strange portrayals of the ancient gods we see in todays media; powerful caricatures of human beings with amazing powers. These beings did not have human form with crazy quirks, angers and desire for power that humans have. I experienced them as the spectrum of fundamental forces and energies that work together to create our universe.

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

Here is a quote from Plutarch’s Moralia in Sixteen Volumes, Vol. V, published by William Heineman

“All good things, my dear Clea, sensible men must ask from the Gods; and especially do we pray that from those mighty Gods we may, in our quest, gain a knowledge of themselves, so far as such a thing is attainable by men. For we believe that there is nothing more important for man to receive, or more ennobling for God of His grace to grant, than the truth. God gives to men the other things for which they express a desire, but of sense and intelligence He grants them only a share, inasmuch as these are His especial possessions and His sphere of activity. For the Deity is not blessed by reason of his possession of gold and silver, nor strong because of thunder and lightning, but through knowledge and intelligence. Of all the things that Homer said about the Gods, he has expressed most beautifully this thought: wisdom. I think also that a source of happiness in the eternal life, which is the lot of God, is that events which come to pass do not escape His prescience. But if His knowledge and meditation on the nature of Existence should be taken away, then, to my mind, His immortality is not living, but a mere lapse of time. Therefore the effort to arrive at the Truth, and especially the truth about the Gods, is a longing for the divine.”  

Evil Spirits Devils and Demons

The world ancient people’s lived in was one filled with spirits and demons, gods and goddesses, good and evil forces.

The many intangibles they were surrounded by, the immense uncertainties they faced, were quite usefully called spirits – invisible/mysterious yet potent powers that could act upon one for good or ill.

Spirits were invisible forces that could influence you or kill you. Today we call these same invisible forces bacteria or viruses and have ways to deal with them. But unfortunately we have taken the word spirits too often to mean something evil can hurt us. We can see that in the past we were attacked by illness/ bad spirits, but today’s evil spirits we haven’t yet recognised as our own huge anxieties, illness creating fears, stresses, emotional disasters in love, as the great evils that are attacking us.

But this view should not be seen a superstitious or from ignorance. The words devil and spirit simply meant an unseen and powerful force. Before the invention of the microscope disease was in fact an ‘unseen force’ that could kill you. The devil was a destructive force and spirits could be helpful or destructive. We discovered that people could be helped or even healed by what we now call placebos. The magic rituals and amulets were just that.

Such misunderstandings arose about many such ancient beliefs. For example, not eating pork, the need to have the males circumcised and also the warning not to touch dead bodies. Today we have proof why these were all taboo subjects. The pork is or was very evident, for if pork were not cooked at a great temperature the bacteria and viruses caused great illnesses. So such taboos arose out of everyday observation as the other taboos.

Touching the dead or ill we understand now because nurses and doctors wear rubber gloves and masks as protection against the evil of disease.

That’s how serious we are about dealing with disease – fully protected in both directions – giving and receiving.

Many ‘religious’ beliefs were created by living close together in small communities were people could watch the whole lives of several generations, and there where those who were geniuses of their time and took note of things. Such information was passed on to those who wanted to learn and so it was seen what effects arose from certain behaviours. So circumcision arose because it was seen that less illness was experienced or transmitted by circumcised males. This was brought to a head in Africa where men were seen to pass AIDs on to their sexual partners, and it was seen that circumcised males were not doing it so much. So, African authorities set up centres for males to be circumcised to stop the spread of the disease.

Such folk wisdom was seen as so important because of its truth that it became holy.

 

 

 

 

Self-Help Techniques To Use

Tony Crisp

A new relationship with everyday life Self Observation Observing your own ebb and flow of thoughts and feelings, your own habits and responses to things, is one of the most powerful of tools to use in transforming your life. This also leads to a fuller connection with your intuitive connection with your core. Much of our behaviour is largely or wholly unconscious. Becoming aware of something can by itself produce a change. If you are not aware of how you act or respond, there is less likelihood of satisfying change. Such observation can begin anywhere and should be continued until it becomes a habit. Once you learn it in connection with one thing the skill can be used in any other direction in your life or in your own behaviour. But before you start, remember that some things you do are not comfortable to become aware of. Personal growth is not a constant delight. There are growing pains occasionally. Remember also that self observation is not aimed at correcting wrong behaviour. There are not a set of right things to do. But there are ways you can discover of satisfying yourself more fully, and there are ways of responding and living that have the opposite effect to producing satisfaction and peace. How Do You Do That? When I was a child a nurse came to the school I attended and examined every child’s feet. I was one of the children who was told that I had flat feet, and myself along with others were shown how to use our feet in a different way. In fact we were shown how to be aware of the way in which we walked. I made a habit of this until it became second nature. What I learned over 50 years ago is still a part of the pleasure I experience today in walking. Becoming aware of how you walk can be an easy and pleasurable way to start self observation. It seldom confronts you with any great emotional hurdles to cross, but it can produce a real change in the way you feel about an everyday part of your life. Approach it slowly. To start with, choose a time when you can spend perhaps 20 or 30 minutes playing with the process of observing yourself walking. It might be best to start off indoors, or where you cannot be seen. Then be aware of every movement, every motivation, that goes into the process of walking. Take a step, but do it slowly watching each movement. At first this will feel very awkward. It is natural to feel that, so do not be concerned. As you make your slow moves, observing how you place your foot on the ground, how your body feels as your balance shifts, and notice how the rest of the body moves in the process of taking a step. This is rather like doing something in slow motion, and of course it feels strange. In fact it is strange. But the point of it is to notice exactly what you are doing with your body, especially your legs and feet. If you take time with this there is an extraordinary amount to learn about yourself. You can learn not simply how you are walking, but what from your past has gone into walking the way you do. So questions to consider as you observe yourself at this point are things like how am I using my feet? Am I placing them flat on the ground, or am I using the heel toe movement? If I were watching these movements on video would it look as if I am using my body well, or are my feet flying out at angles wasting energy? Whatever you notice in the way you walk, see if you can bring about a sense of greater ease, motivation and pleasure or well-being in what you are doing. Experiment in this by using your legs and feet slightly differently. Watch the way the rest of your body feels and improve that too, perhaps by a slightly different posture or way of moving. But remember that what is habitual, even if it is posturally damaging, feels right. So any improvement in walking may feel strange at first. If you have worn high heels for any period of time, you may have lost the natural heel toe movement, and need to relearn it. Whatever it is you carry into the improved and more pleasurable sense of walking, practice this until you can walk at a normal rate or speed still maintaining that sense of pleasure and well-being. Once you have reached that point use your self observation at times in your everyday walking, to see what feelings, what posture or stance, even what motivation you are expressing in the way you walk. For instance sometimes we walk as if life is a great burden. Other times we might walk with real energy or pleasure. There are frequently attitudes we unconsciously express in the way we walk, and thereby in what we are expressing of ourselves to other people. Take time to see if you can create a different attitude that allows you to walk with a greater sense of life and fullness. Renovating Your Living Space All of us live in a world largely of our own making. Considering that when you are asleep or knocked unconscious there is no world, no people, no body, no taste, no sound that you are aware of, then your consciousness, your self-awareness IS the whole world. Nothing exists outside of your awareness. The television picture you watch on a screen is translated from signals the TV set is sensitive to. The TV changes these signals into pictures, colour and sound. The signals are not in themselves images, colour or sound. Similarly your eyes and ears, nose and tongue, along with your nerve endings in your fingers, receive ‘signals’ that are not in themselves, images, sounds, sensations or smells. As with the TV, the world you feel so sure you are seeing and experiencing, is one your brain has created in order to enable you to deal with survival. Considering that you only experience a virtual reality of the external world created by your brain – and that is itself limited to a tiny fraction of what is actually surrounding you – you cannot take seriously your perceptions of the world or people. There are so many radiations, energies, and depth upon depth of texture in the cosmos and objects around us, that in effect we are almost blind and deaf. So you do not know much of what is actually going on in the world anyway. Your eye, as a lens produces an upside down image of your surroundings, and this is ‘corrected’ to help you move around more easily. You Are the Creator So it is true to say that you live in a world, in conceptions of yourself and your surroundings that are a self-created virtual reality. Even if we cannot accept this completely, it still means that much of what we experience is self-created and therefore in some measure capable of being transformed by self observation and developing a new relationship with oneself. This can be done, not in one great leap, but step-by-step. Just as you learned to speak word by word, so you can transform your being one bit at a time. So here are some possible feelings for self observation that can bring very big changes. 1) Notice what you are editing or blocking in your thoughts and feelings. Much of the time we have blocks set up to stop ourselves thinking or feelings things. Sometimes this is because our cultural training has told us that certain things are not good or right to think about. We may also have had personal experiences that we do not wish to consider again. Unfortunately this means that we often close down the flow of energy and creativity that we allow ourselves to express. So observing what you allow yourself to think and feel, what you edit, can produce a revolutionary change. 2) Notice how often you blame events or other people for problems or difficulties. Blaming someone else or outside influences leads to a loss of power and initiative. It means you take no action yourself to change things. You might argue that it is really true someone else was at fault. Nevertheless, as a general rule, transformation comes from taking responsibility and not blaming. 3) Observe how you deal with other people. For instance do you truly recognise that the person you are dealing with is a completely different person to yourself, with their own unique desires, dreams and needs? These may in no way match your own. But through negotiation and communication you may find ways of achieving a mutually satisfying relationship. See if, through observation, you can begin to recognise the other person’s uniqueness, what they want and seek, and who they are. Listening to Your Intuition Intuition is one of the greatest of life skills you can use in living a life that is creative and expressive of your own relationship with the directives arising from your core self and from observations of everyday life. Some of us feel we do not have any intuition, but in fact we all use intuition – often called wisdom or experience – more than we do reasoning or thinking about things. This is because we seldom take time in daily life to analyse situations. Instead we act on what we feel, or on the impulses arising from within that comes from past experience. So intuition frequently arises as a strong feeling, or what people sometimes call a hunch or gut feeling. But if we have not learned to know the difference between intuition and anxiety, or hunches and feelings arising from anger, or ingrained patterns of behaviour, we can easily act on prejudices or fears. So the ability to use intuition consciously and well needs some training and practice. In many older cultures some people were trained in this way. Their intuitive faculties were then tested to see if they could receive accurate information and guidance. Steps to Develop Intuition Laura Day in her book Practical Intuition says there are seven steps to effective intuition. Step One – Opening. Much of the time we are focussed on our physical impressions, and the sort of responses and memories associated with what we experience through our senses, and what we are involved in. This is a bit like running into a store to look for what we want and not finding it there and hurrying on. But if we ask the storekeeper if he has what we are looking for he can often find things that are not immediately on view. We not only have a lot more memories and experiences than are immediately available to everyday thinking, but our mind at times reaches right beyond what we personally know. Some years ago a friend of mine, Cliff, broke the neck of his guitar and couldn’t afford to get it mended because he was saving to get married, and the price at the local shop was high. I suggested he sit quietly for a while and imagine standing right in the center of a large round room, representing his mind, and say to himself that he was allowing all the doors of his mind to open, so he could access information that would solve his problem. When I saw him the next day he told me he sat and did what I suggested and nothing happened. Then he smiled and said, “But as soon as I gave up I remembered an old music shop near where I used to live. I knew this was the answer, so I drove there right away. I showed the owner the guitar and he said he could fix it for a fraction of the price asked at the other shop.” Cliff created a situation in which he opened himself to a wider influx of memories or impressions than he usually allowed. There are many other methods of doing this than the one he used. See: Arm-Circling Exercise; Seed Meditation. Noticing. Cliff took notice of what he received when he opened to his intuition. Also he tested it and found it to be correct. This is important because unless we take notice and observe what we receive in times of being open, we do not retain what arises. Testing it also helps to refine and develop the skill. Pretending. Maybe this one could be called imagining or creativity. People with satisfying and productive lives take what resources they have and use them. They also try out new ways of using what they have. What you receive from your intuition is often of great value. It therefore needs to be used and built into your way of seeing things and living your life. Cliff is a good example again because what he saw immediately fired his imagination enough for him to go and test his information. Trusting. This is a tricky one because until we have tested what we receive from our intuition we are not sure whether to trust it. Trust comes from learning to use this resource of intuitive insight and testing it enough times to develop trust. But often intuitive information may seem to lead you into untried directions, and so you might decide to pull back. But if you have reached trust, go beyond your usual boundaries and thereby discover new levels of yourself and your place in the world. Reporting. In a sense, this should be linked with Noticing. When we have received something definite from our intuition we need to record it in a journal. This becomes an amazing resource. From it you can look back and check how correct or otherwise your intuition has been. You can also gain great strength from the wisdom already gained and the suggestions received about directions to take and work to do. So it is worth while to also note developments and observations connected with the original intuitive information and insights. See: Journaling. Interpreting. Dreams and waking fantasies are powerful ways in which intuition presents itself. But in such cases the information may be expressed in symbols that need to be understood in everyday language. Symbols in dreams, fantasy or visions are like the icons on a computer desktop. Click the image and it connects with a mass of information or processes held deep in the computer. Similarly, approaching the image in the right way can open up a mass of information or feelings that were connected with it. See: Peer Dream Work; Stepping Into Your Dream. Integrating. To integrate what we have received intuitively means to live it, to let it penetrate into the way you naturally respond in your everyday life. That takes time, but by using your insights they gradually become habitual, just as learning to drive a car or bicycle becomes second nature after long practise. See: Intuition and Common Sense; Developing and Using Intuition; Using Your Intuition in Business; Using Intuition.. A creative relationship with your dreams If certain things are seen clearly from the beginning, then you can understand your dreams in a practical and useful way. Firstly, you as a person are a tiny spark of consciousness, a little bit of self awareness riding an incredibly ancient animal you call your body. Remember that your body has formed from cells and genetic information that has gradually developed over millions of years. It holds that information in it unconsciously. If you are unclear about this take time to recognise that as a personality you are almost totally unaware of what is taking place in your body right now. You are not aware as personal experience of the huge history of evolutionary changes your being has gone through in order to become you. You perhaps have little conscious insight into the massive background of social, religious and family influences that go together to enable you to function as an individual and a social entity. Your self consciousness may not include awareness of how your present personality was shaped out of those influences. Maybe you do not know what the major life lessons are that confront you, or what your innate genius and passions are. In general you are barely awake to who you are! But that is not unusual, most of us are in the same boat. Only here and there does an individual wake up and shine with light, love and creativity. If you can accept that you are barely aware of your body and all you carry within you, that is still only part of it. You also exist in the midst of an incredible universe, a universe that we know most intimately in the processes of nature in and on our planet Earth. And how much of that interrelationship that you have with this planet and the universe are you aware of? I am not asking you about philosophical speculations or beautiful poetry of idealism. I am asking about your day to day relationship with all that is around you and of which you are an integral part. Is This Relevant to You? If you think this is not a relevant question – not relevant that is to your daily life as a mother, worker, lover, student, business person – then stop for a moment and realise that without the universe you do not exist. You have no existence outside of it. You only exist as a totally embedded part of it. If you have no awareness of a life giving and sustaining relationship with it, aren’t you missing something? Perhaps you are also missing an awareness of the intricate web of language, ideas, perceptions and drives that have meshed into what you are as a person. In some ways this is like owning a wonderful car or computer, and not knowing how it functions or how to use it well. Okay, if you have come this far, let us take the next step. Sleep! Your tiny spark of self awareness, existing as it does in the midst of this huge area of living processes that we call the universe, Earth, your body, the language and culture you express through, regularly slips back into its primal level of existence that we call sleep. In sleep we become completely unconscious – or at least, most of us do. Maybe at most we remember an occasional dream. Some people don’t even capture that. Their sleep is a period of total unconsciousness. But for some that is not the case. They remember their dreams. Perhaps they even carry awareness into the world of sleep. In recent times this awareness of what is usually an unconscious world has been called lucidity, and if the lucidity occurs within a dream we call it lucid dreaming. What remembering a dream and lucidity does is to extend your self awareness beyond the usual limitations and boundaries of waking life, and allow you to become more aware of the biological, sociological, racial and universal background, or underpinning, of your existence. Take time with this because it is about something amazing that we all share. In dreaming or becoming lucid you are experiencing something of the usually hidden world of your body, of your mind, of your whole biological past, and life in you that lies beyond the frontier of your personal awareness. Let us define that a little more. The Starting Point – Your Body Our most obvious fact is that we have a body relating to the physical world. Our body’s most immediate needs are air, water and food. This links us with the biological processes of our planet. And this biological aspect of us is quite wonderful. To state it briefly, over millions of years simple life forms emerged. These gradually developed into more complex forms, and these learned to work together in groups, and then as multicellular organisms, with different cells doing different jobs. In our body today we still carry these tiny life forms, trillions of them that we call our cells. But beneath that level of our being is another strata, the atomic and subatomic processes. Those incredible levels of activity and process are the platform or foundation upon which your personal awareness is built and exists. In one way or another you are relating to them all the time, and sometimes that relationship is so bad that ill health occurs. To be more aware of what your relationship is with that deeply unconscious world would be of great help in remaining healthy and creative. Existing as an apparently integral part of your body is the self awareness that you give your personal name to. You only exist as Sheila or Dave, or whatever your name is, because you are awake, because you have consciousness. Without that self awareness you have no self, no identity or personality. But strangely enough, this sense of self also has levels. Helen Keller, who became blind and deaf when very small, says in her autobiography that until she learned the deaf and dumb language she had no sense of herself. She was aware, perhaps as an animal is aware, but with no self, no personal identity. See Helen Keller – and Animal Children. Today this sense of self is often called the psyche. In the past it has been called soul. A simple definition of it might be that your sense of self, of existing as a distinct person, comes about because you have memories and experiences that are distinctly your own. You exist in a body that is distinctly your own. So there is an area of awareness that is separated from everyone else. But as already suggested, this area of personal awareness is largely unconscious of what it exists in – the body and the environment that gives rise to the body. Also, what we can gather from the life of Helen Keller and children raised by animals, is that awareness can exist without having a psyche or self awareness. But self awareness cannot exist without language. So personal memories and a distinct body are not enough to bring about self awareness. You need the organising principle of language. Language is like a computer program that transforms the functioning of the body/brain/computer. You are a Multilevel Being With Multiple Possibilities So what we are arriving at is a multilevel view of what we are as a whole.  The universe. We are an integral and unseparated part of it.  The fundamental subatomic processes underlying atoms, molecules and cells. Without them we have no molecules, no cells, no body.  The biological level consisting of molecules, cells and the organs and systems they give rise to.  Awareness or sentience. Without self awareness this is experienced as a universal level of consciousness. This ties in with subatomic particles, because the latest concepts of reality all include consciousness as fundamental to the universe. See – Quantum – A Huge Change is Happening  Self awareness, with its personal memories and idiosyncrasies. Coming back to dreams and remembering dreams, if you can agree that a memory of a dream is a glimpse into a world or worlds beyond the boundaries of your waking consciousness, then you have a clear but basic picture of their value and possibilities. Prolonged studies and exploration suggest that dreams and lucid dreaming can allow you:  Greater insight into the functioning and health of your body’s organs and cells, along with insights into what is necessary to maintain or improve health and well-being.  Awareness of your forgotten journey from conception, through birth and childhood. This enables you the possibility of clearing any difficulties of development that occurred in that unfolding.  Gradual awareness of the incredible ancestral journey you are the end product of.  Recognition and entrance into the level of awareness or consciousness out of which your personal self awareness has emerged and is immersed in.  Beginning the journey along what has been called in the past the spiritual path. In plain words this means the slow entrance of your personal awareness into what exists beyond the frontier of sleep. Taking the focussed light of self awareness into the darkness of the unconscious world of sleep and the body. If you take this path, at some point you will confront the fundamental consciousness of the universe and recognise your existence in it. So here, if you have the will to use it, is a master class on dreams. There is no financial cost. But there is something you need to give. It is your honest and persistent attempt to delve into that pool of wonder that your dreams provide. See Lucidity – The New Frontier. A Master Class on Dreams Step One Step Two Step Three Step Four Step Five Step Six Step Seven Step Eight Step Nine Your body as a great transformer That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without your conscious effort or participation. You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with most other life forms that exist with you on this earth. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins. Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence. Without it you would immediately cease to be. In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part. Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process. However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process. Your body is far more than you perhaps generally consider it to be. Recently the National Geographic Magazine has started the Genographic Project. This involves a mapping of the development and journeys of the earliest of human beings to ourselves in the present. This mapping can be done because our DNA holds in it a full record of how life and then the human animal, evolved from the beginning of life on this planet. Your own body, in your blood and in your cells, holds that record. You have in you the collected experience of life on this planet. Geneticists think of this only in terms of physiological, social and psychological development. But some explorers of human consciousness such as Stanislav Grof have found that we each hold not just physical memory in terms of our DNA, but we also can achieve a personal awareness of our long past. (See The Symbol and the Reality). My work, over the past thirty years has been in helping people discover for themselves the wealth of history and of healing capacity they hold within their own body. I know from personal experience, and from working with many people, that your bodymind has little know abilities to heal and to unfold a wealth of its long history and wisdom to you. (See National Geographic Genographic Project; Rituals of Beauty and The Secret Power. This becomes easier to understand if you think of yourself as a seed that has grown. This is not an act of imagination. You were a seed – the joined sperm and ovum – that was planted in a fertile womb and grew. As such, just like any growing thing your development took you through different stages as the potential within yourself as the seed unfolded. The most extraordinary and delicate shifts and changes occurred, all of it spontaneous. This process carried on its work after your birth, taking you through the wonderful odyssey of being a baby, through childhood, youth, and then into adulthood and perhaps old age. Strangely few people I have met give much thought to this incredibly amazing process of life within them. Few attempt to discover how it works in them now, here, today. Perhaps they even try to dull its sensitivity, or manipulate it with drugs and medicines. But few stand before it in awe and say to it – “Teach me. Unfold me still further.” One of the wonderful and mysterious things I have found through helping people to listen to and cooperate with this mysterious life process within them, is that although its potential unfolded into who you are today, it still has what is perhaps an infinite potential still waiting to unfold. But to do so it needs your conscious willingness to go along with the process. Let us backtrack a little. You are one of the life-forms on this planet. As such you are an expression of life. But life can be anything from a virus to a tree or an elephant. Life can be almost anything, take any shape, exist in almost any way. Sometimes people say to me that one needs oxygen to live, to be alive. Well, that is true at the moment, but in the earliest stages of life on this planet, 3000 million years ago, organisms formed that did not need oxygen. As time passed an organism formed called stromatolites that started pouring out oxygen. This led to an oxygen rich atmosphere that killed out nearly all the life that had previously existed. The surviving organisms were the start of the creatures from which we evolved. But the point I am making is that life can take any shape. It has an infinite potential, and that potential is what lies behind your own growth and existence. But do you suppose that as a human being you have exhausted that potential? Do you feel you have even attained your own best? Have you reached a full flowering and fruition in your life? Even if you have, there is still more, and cooperating with the process of life within you, learning how to let it unfold more of who you are, allows you to move toward allowing that mystery that is Life to know itself in you. That is an extraordinary possibility. It has happened to many people all over the world. It can happen to you. Like any plant that grew from seed, life in you reaches toward its fulfillment in flowering. In your case part of your flowering has been to become conscious. Further opening means to become conscious of yourself as life, as the mystery behind all life forms, as the most amazingly creative force. Meeting your essence in this way means you will find the resources to face and deal with the social and world changes that appear to be arising. We must find our own personal transformation along with a new relationship with the processes of life on this planet. The very nearest planetary life processes to you is your own body. If you cannot become aware of the profound processes within your own body, you have little hope of relating in a meaningful way with other life processes. So here is a Master Class on opening this doorway your bodymind provides. I have nothing to sell you. There is no trick in my giving this knowledge away to you. It is not because I do not value it. In fact I value it so highly that I cannot put a price on it. I do smile as I offer it though, as I know that some of the most precious things in life cannot be seen for what they are. As I say, there are no tricks. In one sense life is extraordinarily simple. You were a seed. You grew from your own innate process of life. You can continue this growth if you consciously open to life again. Step One Step Two Step Three Step Four Step Five Step Six Step Seven Step Eight Step Nine Step Ten The Great Mental Powers One of the greatest of mental powers, and one often largely unused or overlooked is imagination. Many people will claim they have little or no imagination, and yet are fantastically capable with it, but are using it unconsciously and often to their detriment. Most of us have an experience of this at some time. We enter our home and see a stranger standing in the hall and our heart races and we feel scared. Then we realise suddenly that the stranger is a coat hanging in an unusual light. Maybe it wasn’t a coat, but some other thing we mistook for something or someone and we experienced the racing heart or the surge of hope. The point is that we believed or imagined that what we saw was someone or something and it wasn’t. It illustrates that when we believe something strongly and with conviction our body acts upon it exactly as if it were true. In this sense there is no difference between conviction and fact; between imagination and reality. Perhaps it is difficult to simply arouse that level of conviction from a cold start, but we can certainly find ways of getting our conviction level rising up the scale. And if you can, then use the power of imagination to improve your health, change self destructive energy into creative and satisfying behaviour, and create your own future. Life energy is like electricity. The wires carrying the electrical supply to the house are not in themselves the electricity. The current is invisible, but it has great potential for good or harm. So we usually deal with it carefully, and have means of controlling it via insulation, fuses and switches. When the electricity is wired into the house, its potential can be expressed in a huge variety of ways. It can manifest as heat, light, and power to move or do things, such as with a drill or vacuum cleaner. It can produce sound or images as with television, and can, via programs for the computer, manifest in almost magical ways, storing and retrieving huge amounts of information and manipulating it. So the potential of electricity is limitless. A new apparatus connected to the supply will manifest a new function. But, like the psychobiological energy of our body, electricity is only latent potential until given an apparatus to express through. The usefulness of this image of the house with its electricity is that you can use it as an analogy of energy in your life. Your potential can express as cellular activity, or physical movement. You can experience it as sexual drive and pleasure, as emotions, as sight, hearing, sensation, smell and taste. You can express it as thinking, and vocalising in speech or singing, or as the creation of a personal virtual reality, as you do in fantasy and dreams. As with electricity, your potential is probably limitless, and depends upon the state of body and mind you use to approach and express it. However, all the time we are directing our energy, whether it is sexual or mental creativity, we are using what I have called imagination. To be clear about what I mean by that, supposing you have been invited to meet someone you really like, but you refuse because you feel inadequate, or believe you are looking too old, or no match for the person, then your imagination has been used against yourself. You have erected an imaginative picture of yourself that paints you as inadequate, or whatever the off-putting feeling was. So it is better to direct your imagination rather than be its victim. See Energy Sex Dreams. Better still to remember that your life can never be summed up in one feeling or sense of yourself. So be suspicious whenever you label yourself or are labelled by anyone else. See Using Imagination; Use Imagination to Access Your Inner Guidance; Imagination for Healing and Growth. However, the great use of imagination, especially when it is spontaneous, is as a means of communicating with and staying in touch with ones core self. We see this so easily when we look at our dreams. Each night our creative imagination produces a new wonder of imagery and strangeness. Such imaginative scenes have not arisen from conscious intention. And if we accept that dreams show us something of our own inner world and life, then the images are forms of communication. A way to work with ones spontaneous imagination is given in The Arm Circling Exercise and Exploring Spontaneous Imagination. In exploring your imagination in this ways you have to realise this allows the less focussed and conscious side of you to express. In a way it is like dreaming while awake, in that your body often acts out a theme or a mime. However, because you are witnessing this while awake, the theme can gradually emerge fully into words and direct insight. This needs help sometimes, and we need to think of the spontaneous fantasy or play as a communication in mime that you need to at and explore much as you would the game in which you guess a book name or play from a person acting out movements or facial expressions. Although this sounds a little like a poor form of communication, when become adept at it the process passes beyond just physical movement into subtle imagery and feelings that are often even more powerful communicative than words. Reaching Beyond I have recently been reading a book by Keith Reid called Nature’s Network. It is about the basics of ecology – (unfortunately out of print now, but available at Used Book Search). In the book Keith explains clearly how everything living is interwoven with every other living thing. Nothing can exist in isolation. Even the lowliest of microbes is necessary as part of the whole flow of living things. As explained in the section on A Creative Relationship with Your Dreams, our awareness as a person rests upon all the levels of nature that we see outside of us – from subatomic particles up to the air we breath, food we eat and water we drink. Within this scheme of things we have a personal awareness of our own memories and experiences, but the greatest area in which we exist lies beyond our personal memories and experiences. In the section on The Core Experience on this website I examine this aspect of our total self quite thoroughly and call it the Core self. To quote a little of that: That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without your conscious effort or participation. You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with all the other life forms that exist with you on this earth. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins. Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence. Without it you would immediately cease to be. In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part. Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process. However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process. The important point being made is that although this core of life process within us is unconscious in a general way, it is still accessible to us if we approach it in the right way. Of course, this is not a new idea arrived at in our times. It is so important and universal that cultures in all periods explained it in their own way as sacred information. At times it was so revered that it was often a subject of worship or of religious belief, and has been given a multitude of names. Many ways of meeting it and being healed or guided through a fuller relationship with it have also been described by these different beliefs and cultures. So all I wish to do here is to remind you that in meeting the changes that you and I will be involved in during the coming years, remember you are not alone in the universe or on this earth. No matter what difficulties you face, when you get to the end of your own resources, reach sincerely into the larger realm of life and consciousness. It doesn’t matter whether you call that MORE of yourself the Core, the unconscious, God, Spirit, the Creator, Life. What matters is that your passions and need, your love and struggle to meet what is in front of you transcend your own limitations. What matters is that you draw into your life and action the power of that wider wisdom, power and love of which you are an integral part. That also means other human beings who are struggling alongside you. Be of mutual support. We are all a part of the web of life. See: Active Imagination – The Oracle Within; Systematic Problem Solving Method; Fighting Porn Addiction: The Seed Meditation; Meeting Your Inner Child and Birth; The Power of Prayer; Probing the Power of Prayer The Winged Mind There is an old saying that life sleeps in the minerals, dreams in the plants, wakes in the animals, and knows itself in man. Certainly we have arrived at self awareness, but few of us know ourselves as Life. Mostly we are sure our consciousness is inextricably linked, chained, welded onto our body. This is not a universal view. Many other cultural viewpoints are very different, but the Western rational mind or worldview is largely one of the body being the source of and container of personal awareness. From that point of view, at the death of the body the awareness we call self blinks out like a guttering candle. However, this is not how thousands of people worldwide who have met a near death experience see it. (See I Died – But I’m Alive; The Near Birth Experience; An Amazing Near Death Experience; Out Of Body Experience). From their experiences they know that consciousness exists without a living body. They know that they have a ‘winged mind’ that can enter into realms of experience unknown though our physical senses. They know that while our body has been a sort of mother and father to our personal awareness, we are not limited to life in the body. The human possibility is to grow beyond the limitations of the senses and gradually become inhabitants of dimensions beyond the narrow three dimensional world we grew up in. To put it another way, unless we gradually penetrate the realms of consciousness lying beyond the senses, our race will be trapped in its own home town. Start reaching beyond the frontier that is sleep. Even a remembered dream is a step beyond the boundaries of the physical senses. Reach beyond your own limitations. Just as you intend to stretch an arm when you reach out to open a door or touch someone, intend to reach out your imperishable body of mind and touch a friend, or stretch to receive knowledge beyond what you have read or seen with your eyes. Intend to fly with the winged mind. The power of relationship Being in the company of someone who loves or cares for us is one of the greatest blessing life offers. To receive love is to receive the greatest medicine and healing. It doesn’t matter if you do not accept the New Testament as a historical account of a man called Jesus, the story of Christ healing others by touching them or being with them is an illustration of the power of love to change a person’s life and body. Any relationship you are in, whether one of close intimacy, or one in which you deal with someone in passing through your work place, calls on you for love and understanding in some measure. And don’t think of this as something you give as a sort of charity to another person or creature. It is nothing of the kind. To give love is to experience love. To experience love is to be healed, moment by moment. But sometimes the giving is hard. There are shadows in us that block the light, rocks that stop the flow. And so the giving of love and the receiving of love challenge us to deal with our shadows and bend our back to shift the rocks. Yes, we all have shadows. Perhaps there was a time when someone you depended upon or trusted hurt or betrayed you. Those things hurt deep down. We recoil and things happen inside us that sometimes we are not fully aware of. My story is that my mother did things to me that led me to pull back from her and sever any loving or trusting connection with her. I was only five at the time, but strong willed. Unfortunately for me, in severing any emotional connection with my mother, I cut the trust I had for any woman, and suffered years of being unable to get really close in a loving relationship. I was married, but not truly partnered, being what I called independent. Of course that was a sort of lie. It really meant that I was scared of really loving in case I got hurt again – and when you are little, hurt is devastating. How much better it would have been to forgive my mother and express love. That would have wiped out all those years of living in shadows. So learning to love is not a charitable giving of something to another person. It is a courageous facing of oneself in claiming the most wonderful gift you have. It takes guts to love. You have to become a full woman or a full man – and that doesn’t mean a macho strongman or a extreme feminist. It means you become a whole person and can meet other people face to face, body to body, love to love. The standard to measure oneself by is to ask yourself if you can love unconditionally. And that simply means that you love the person for who they are and not for what you can get or need to get from them. It means accepting them as they are, and not forever wanting them to be someone or something different. It means being able to let go of them if they wish to let go of a close relationship with you. And that does not mean disinterest. Someone you love forever has a link with you, and you with them, despite where they go or who they go with. Lastly, unconditional love means we never own the person we love. But of course we are not perfect human being. So unconditional love does not come easily. Also it does not mean complete acceptance of the crazy or hurtful things people do, or that you yourself do. That may sound like a contradiction, but unconditional love is being presented here as a guide to your own ability to experience and give love. It is a handy guide, not an absolute measure. For instance, if the person you love turns to another person and gives them more attention and time than they give to you, and this leads to you being deeply hurt and trying to hurt them, or to pester and try to control them, then the idea of unconditional love gives you a reminder of your own problems. It gives you a mirror to look in and see what shadows still haunt you, what pains are still in control of your life. It is not a command that you must still be a victim to the other person and their behaviour. But it is a way of finding your own healthy reactions to a changing world and relationships. So unconditional love is not a moral issue. It is not about being ‘good’. It is a guide to help you begin to face up yourself when you start to feel you own someone, or try to control them through jealousy or through your own emotional pain, probably arising from childhood. It is a wonderful feeling to gradually drop those childhood urges and miseries away. What happens if we do not blame somebody else for our own pains and jealousies, is that we begin to confront ourselves. We begin to own the pain as our own, and discover what a hold the pain or jealousy has on us. Like weeds, we can then begin the process of rooting them out of our life. See: Unconditional Love; Social Priorities; Healing Social Relationships; Enrich Your Relationship; Healing Relationships Through Primal Awareness; Ages of Love. Parenthood as a transforming influence Parents provide the environment in which we make the long and often difficult journey toward emotional and physical independence. During those early years the most fundamental lessons of our life are learned. As a child we have a desperately felt need to be wanted, to have emotional and physical shelter in which we can survive, and to be given love and attention. Being a parent, especially if you are the mother, is one of the most demanding, fulfilling, challenging and rewarding experiences any of us can meet. Unfortunately, northern European and American attitudes to parenthood have moved into a strange artificial condition for many people. Yet being parents is one of the most fundamental expressions of being alive. It extends and nurtures life. It is a doorway through which the future emerges. And it can also be a way of exploring one of the greatest mysteries of life – the emergence of a conscious personality from a tiny mammalian life form. As explained elsewhere, the personality of a child is not innate in the physical body. Left alone without being cared for or spoken to, no personality would spontaneously bloom in the body of the child. (See Animal Children). Any personality that does develop is an amazing weaving of parental and social relationships, interlaced with the quality and hereditary traits carried in the body. Nature and nurture work together within the framework of infinite possibilities. (See The Nature Nurture Debate). Parenting is like a work of art, and the canvas you work with, while not a complete blank has an incredible range of possibilities. As can been seen from studies of poor parenting, and nurturing parenting, you can raise a stunted criminal personality, or a gifted radiant person. Some parts of the art need much work, that involves some pain and struggle. But great art is never done without a full engagement of the artist. So bring to your creation all the skills you have. Use your wisdom and discernment. Do not let failures turn you from creating what can be a great painting. Being a Parent is a Spiritual Path But looking at parenting from the light of personal transformation, being a parent is a spiritual path. Strangely I have never seen this mentioned in books on mysticism, yoga or the inner life. Nevertheless parenthood has all the disciplines of great spiritual endeavour. (See definition of the word spiritual). In the incredibly intimate relationship between mother and baby, or parents and baby, you meet the mystery of LIFE face to face. In various spiritual disciplines or belief systems this is stated in a variety of ways. In Christianity it appears as, “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” In other words you are dealing with an expression of the divine in dealing with your child. In helping your child to discover its own depths and potential, you are helping Life to discover itself. Perhaps the greatest preparation for this approach to parenthood is for you to have opened your life to the influence of your own Core or Spiritual influence. This amounts to an attempt to live your life with fuller awareness of how who you are and what you do interacts with the depths and heights of life around you, within you, and beyond your present knowledge. See The Core Experience. Love is a Strange Word Love is a word that is often used in all sorts of crazy ways in songs and in general use. But love is at the base of our existence in a very obvious way. It is at the very foundation of being a parent. The physical foundation of parenthood is the moment the sperm and ovum meet. The base of your own physical existence is the coming together of the sperm and ovum that formed your body. That moment when the sperm and ovum meet is a mysterious and magical moment of love. When the two different tiny beings meet they give up their separate lives completely and totally merge to form a new entity. That total dying to what they were is an act of love that underlies every person alive. That act of love is fundamental to life on earth. It is something few of us can live up to or even get near to. Our own acts of love are so self centered and withholding in comparison. But this level of love is how Life works. It gives itself totally. The mystery that is behind the phenomena of the universe is seen to give itself totally when it loves. This is a fact of nature. Life feeds life. The sun is dying as it pours its energy into mother earth. And mother earth surrenders her mineral wealth to her children, the plants, trees and creatures that the sun energy, and the earth have brought forth. Parenthood is a pattern throughout the universe. Your own journey into parenthood links you with this cosmic mystery, and that’s why it is a spiritual path. See – Woman – The Greatest Love Story in the World. As parents we do not simply help create a body for a being who has never existed before. We are a doorway for Life to enter on another stage of its eternal journey into discovering its own wonder and place in the scheme of things. If we are open to it, we may consciously take part in this. My own experience of this was when I dreamt that a being wanted to enter into my wife. It asked me to have sex with my wife to form a body for it. We did this and I then dreamt my wife was pregnant with a son. See Knowing the Baby Before it is Born . There is a mass of wonderful information on the page Your Baby and its Birth. Here are some useful links – Pregnancy Week by Week; Healthy Kids; Research – Parenting; The National Childbirth Trust UK; Dad Cafe – For Dads New To Fatherhood; Parenting for a Better World; The Royal Child. These books are worth looking at if you are a reader. How to talk so kids will listen By Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Raising Cain by Dan Kindlon and others. Magical Parent, Magical Child by Michael Mendizza and others. Spiritual – Best understood if we approach it using the old definitions of human nature as being a body, soul and spirit. It can then be seen in context. In this sense the body is a living process of change that is born, matures and dies. It is subject to time and the physical limitations of space. The soul is the experience of personal awareness and personal memories. Rudolph Steiner points out that while the body feeds on physical substance such as food and water, the soul feeds on the experiences gathered via the body. In this way it learns, and we are referring to the soul when we say something like, “Through that experience I learned something.” The ‘I’ being the soul. The spirit is the polar opposite of the body. It is not born and does not die. It is your fundamental core beyond the limitations of time and space, with no beginning or end. It is probably the same as the core of the universe we exist as an integral part of. Just as our physical universe – according to the big bang theory – emerged from a condition prior to the existence of time and space, so the human being emerges from and is rooted in that same mystery. So taking the ‘spiritual’ path would mean opening your personal ‘soul’ or self to the influence of the timeless that gave rise to your present life. See: Special Times – Work to be Done – The Core Experience. How Can I Learn Being More Spiritual The strange thing is you cannot learn it because you were born with it as a central part of you. So trying to or struggling to learn it is ridiculous. It is as ridiculous as trying to become more spiritual or meditate to climb higher. The glaring truth is tha we are creations of the immense forces that created the universe. To try to better than them is a huge folly. Our attempts to increase our spiritual nature are all produce by our conscious self that has lost touch with our Core. R. D. Laing, the psychiatrist, in describing the search for one’s fundamental self said, ‘The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.’ One of the sites listed has a heading, ‘What you are looking for is what is looking.’ This change is not a state of mind you can create or develop. It is something beyond any change, outside of anything you can develop. After all, development suggests change. The frustrating thing about finding this is that the harder one tries to grasp it, the further away from it one gets. The more effort one makes in trying to achieve it, the less one finds of it. It is the ever present, self existent core of yourself that remains when all else drops away. So the question should not be can I develop the state of mind that is sometimes called enlightenment, but how can I be this fundamental state? “The Self is the Self and there is no such thing as realising it. For who is to realise what, and how, when all that exists is the Self and nothing but the Self.” Sri Ramana Maharshi

Your Body is a Great Transformer

Tony Crisp

That mysterious and wonderful process of life that brought you to birth occurred quite without your conscious effort or participation. You share that journey from conception to birth in kinship with most other life forms that exist with you on this earth. But unlike most of the other creatures you developed self-awareness and can look back on your origins. Nevertheless, even though you have attained some level of self-awareness, the process that brought you into being still functions within you to continue your existence. Without it you would immediately cease to be. In fact most of the vital processes within you still occur without any conscious effort or participation on your part. Your ego, your conscious self, is a tiny and almost insignificant part of the process. However, what you do, what you think and what you feel can enhance or interfere with that core process.

Your body is far more than you perhaps generally consider it to be. Recently the National Geographic Magazine has started the Genographic Project. This involves a mapping of the development and journeys of the earliest of human beings to ourselves in the present. This mapping can be done because our DNA holds in it a full record of how life and then the human animal, evolved from the beginning of life on this planet.

Your own body, in your blood and in your cells, holds that record. You have in you the collected experience of life on this planet. Geneticists think of this only in terms of physiological, social and psychological development. But some explorers of human consciousness such as Stanislav Grof have found that we each hold not just physical memory in terms of our DNA, but we also can achieve a personal awareness of our long past. (See The Symbol and the Reality).

My work, over the past thirty years has been in helping people discover for themselves the wealth of history and of healing capacity they hold within their own body. I know from personal experience, and from working with many people, that your bodymind has little know abilities to heal and to unfold a wealth of its long history and wisdom to you. (See National Geographic Genographic Project; Rituals of Beauty and The Secret Power.

This becomes easier to understand if you think of yourself as a seed that has grown. This is not an act of imagination. You were a seed – the joined sperm and ovum – that was planted in a fertile womb and grew. As such, just like any growing thing your development took you through different stages as the potential within yourself as the seed unfolded. The most extraordinary and delicate shifts and changes occurred, all of it spontaneous. This process carried on its work after your birth, taking you through the wonderful odyssey of being a baby, through childhood, youth, and then into adulthood and perhaps old age. Strangely few people I have met give much thought to this incredibly amazing process of life within them. Few attempt to discover how it works in them now, here, today. Perhaps they even try to dull its sensitivity, or manipulate it with drugs and medicines. But few stand before it in awe and say to it – “Teach me. Unfold me still further.”

One of the wonderful and mysterious things I have found through helping people to listen to and cooperate with this mysterious life process within them, is that although its potential unfolded into who you are today, it still has what is perhaps an infinite potential still waiting to unfold. But to do so it needs your conscious willingness to go along with the process.

Let us backtrack a little. You are one of the life-forms on this planet. As such you are an expression of life. But life can be anything from a virus to a tree or an elephant. Life can be almost anything, take any shape, exist in almost any way. Sometimes people say to me that one needs oxygen to live, to be alive. Well, that is true at the moment, but in the earliest stages of life on this planet, 3000 million years ago, organisms formed that did not need oxygen. As time passed an organism formed called stromatolites that started pouring out oxygen. This led to an oxygen rich atmosphere that killed out nearly all the life that had previously existed. The surviving organisms were the start of the creatures from which we evolved.

But the point I am making is that life can take any shape. It has an infinite potential, and that potential is what lies behind your own growth and existence. But do you suppose that as a human being you have exhausted that potential? Do you feel you have even attained your own best? Have you reached a full flowering and fruition in your life?

Even if you have, there is still more, and cooperating with the process of life within you, learning how to let it unfold more of who you are, allows you to move toward allowing that mystery that is Life to know itself in you. That is an extraordinary possibility. It has happened to many people all over the world. It can happen to you. Like any plant that grew from seed, life in you reaches toward its fulfillment in flowering. In your case part of your flowering has been to become conscious. Further opening means to become conscious of yourself as life, as the mystery behind all life forms, as the most amazingly creative force.

Meeting your essence in this way means you will find the resources to face and deal with the social and world changes that appear to be arising. We must find our own personal transformation along with a new relationship with the processes of life on this planet. The very nearest planetary life processes to you is your own body. If you cannot become aware of the profound processes within your own body, you have little hope of relating in a meaningful way with other life processes.

So here is a Master Class on opening this doorway your bodymind provides. I have nothing to sell you. There is no trick in my giving this knowledge away to you. It is not because I do not value it. In fact I value it so highly that I cannot put a price on it. I do smile as I offer it though, as I know that some of the most precious things in life cannot be seen for what they are.

As I say, there are no tricks. In one sense life is extraordinarily simple. You were a seed. You grew from your own innate process of life. You can continue this growth if you consciously open to life again.

Tony’s Books

Dream Dictionary: An A-to-Z Guide to Understanding Your Unconscious Mind

by Tony Crisp  | 29 Jan 2002

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My Dream Journal: Uncover the real meaning of your dreams and how you can learn from them

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Peer Dreaming: How To Understand Your Dreams

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Meetings With Christ

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The Instant Dream Book

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Be Your Own Dream Interpreter: Uncover the real meaning of your dreams and how you can learn from them

by Tony Crisp | 11 Sep 2018

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The Many Ways to a New Life

by Tony Crisp | 28 Oct 2021

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Dreaming about Death: Insight Into The Beyond

by Tony Crisp  | 27 Oct 2020

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Four Great Meditations

by Tony Crisp | 26 Sep 2021

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ARCHETYPES: The Huge Feelings We have Influencing Us

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Super Heroes and Mythical Creatures

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Every Seven Years You Change: Does Your Personality Change Too?

by Tony Crisp  | 22 Jul 2018

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Devenez l’interprète de vos rêves – Découvrez la signification et les enseignements de vos rêves

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End User – An unusual life

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The Sacred Tree – In Dreams and Myth

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Gypsy Secrets of Hand Reading

by Tony Crisp  | 1 Feb 2021

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Do You Dream

by Tony Crisp  | 11 Dec 2010

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Tony’s Experience of a Stroke

by Tony Crisp  | 6 Aug 2016

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Coincidences – Toward Greater Understanding

by Tony Crisp | 27 Feb 2011

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The Power That Transforms Lives

by Tony Crisp  | 9 Jul 2020

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House of the Ancestors

by Tony Crisp | 7 Jun 2011

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African Sky Stories

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New Dream Dictionary: Handbook of Dream Meanings and Sleep Experiences

by Tony Crisp | 7 Apr 1994

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Relax with Yoga

by Tony Crisp  | 20 Jan 2011

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Lucid Dreaming: Use Your Psychic Powers to Explore the World of Your Dreams

by Tony Crisp  | 15 Apr 2006

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Mind And Movement: The Practice of Coex

by Tony Crisp  | 31 Oct 2010

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Dream Dictionary: An A to Z Guide to Understanding Your Unconscious Mind

by Tony Crisp  | 1 Mar 1998

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Your Dream Interpreter: Over 1,200 Symbols And Themes Revealed To Bring Clarity And Insight To Your Life

by Tony Crisp  | 27 Jan 2005

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Liberating The Body: Movements That Awaken the Inner Self

by Tony Crisp  | 23 Nov 2018

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Dream Power Kit

by Tony Crisp  | 11 Aug 2003

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Are You Multidimensional: Travel Through Space and Time

by Tony Crisp  | 26 Nov 2018

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Using Your Intuition

by Tony Crisp  | 12 Nov 2010

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Transformation

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Super Minds

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Learning How to Love

by Tony Crisp  | 23 Nov 2012

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Dreams and Dreaming

by Tony Crisp  | 12 Mar 2011

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The Hidden Bible: The Hidden Meaning of Genesis

by Tony Crisp | 1 Jan 2019

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Yield

by Tony Crisp | 13 Jan 2011

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Integration and Life’s Little Secrets: Meeting Yourself

by Tony Crisp | 3 Oct 2014

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Coincidences:

A Look Beyond Logical Thought (Alternatives S.)

by Tony Crisp  | 4 Aug 2000

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The Complete Guide to Reading Hands

by Tony Crisp and Neal Criscuolo | 1 Jan 1997

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Yoga and Childbirth

by Tony Crisp  | 18 Apr 1975

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Yoga and Relaxation (Nutshell Books)

by Tony Crisp  | 1 Dec 1970

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I Ching – The Chinese Oracle

by Tony Crisp | 10 Jan 2011

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The Hand Book: The Complete Guide to Reading Hands

by Neal Criscuolo and Tony Crisp  | 1 Dec 1995

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A JOURNEY THROUGH DEATHS WONDERS

The Death Experience Story of Mellen. Thomas Benedict Mellen speaks:

In 1982 I died from terminal cancer. The condition I had was inoperable, and any kind of chemotherapy they could give me would just have made me more of a vegetable. I was given six to eight months to live.

I had been an information freak in the 1970s, and I had become increasingly despondent over the nuclear crisis, the ecology crisis, and so forth. So, since I did not have a spiritual basis, I began to believe that nature had made a mistake and that we were probably a cancerous organism on the planet. I saw no way that we could get out from all the problems we had created for ourselves and the planet. I perceived all humans as cancer—and that is what I got. That is what killed me.

Be careful what your world view is. It can feed back on you, especially if it is a negative world view. I had a seriously negative one. That is what led me into my death. I tried all sorts of alternative healing methods, but nothing helped. So I determined that this was really just between me and God. I had never really faced God before or even dealt with God. I was not into any kind of spirituality at the time, but I began a journey into learning about spirituality and alternative healing. I set out to do all the reading I could and bone up on the subject, because I did not want to be surprised on the other side. So I started reading on various religions and philosophies.

They were all very interesting and gave hope that there was something on the other side. I ended up in hospice care. I remember waking up one morning at home about 4:30 AM, and I just knew that this was it. This was the day I was going to die. So I called a few friends and said goodbye. I woke up my hospice caretaker and told her. I had a private agreement with her that she would leave my dead body alone for six hours, since I had read that all kinds of interesting things happen when you die. I went back to sleep.

The next thing I remember is the beginning of a typical near death experience. Suddenly I was fully aware—and I was standing up but my body was in the bed. There was this darkness around me. Being out of my body was even more vivid than ordinary experience. It was so vivid that I could see every room in the house. I could see the top of the house, I could see around the house, I could see under the house.

There was this Light shining. I turned toward the Light. The Light was very similar to what many other people have described in their near-death experiences. It was so magnificent. It is tangible; you can feel it. It is alluring; you want to go to it like you would want to go to your ideal mother’s or father’s arms. As I began to move toward the Light, I knew intuitively that if I went to the Light, I would be dead. So as I was moving toward the Light I said, “Please wait a minute; just hold on a second here. I want to think about this. I would like to talk to you before I go.”

To my surprise, the entire experience halted at that point. You are in control of your life-after-death experience. You are not on a roller coaster ride. So my request was honored, and I had some conversations with the Light. The Light kept changing into different figures, like Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, mandalas, archetypal images and signs. I asked the Light, “What is going on here? Please, Light, clarify yourself for me. I really want to know the reality of the situation.”

I cannot really say the exact words, because it was sort of telepathy. The Light responded. The information transferred to me was that during your life-after- death experience your beliefs shape the kind of feedback you are getting before the Light. If you were a Buddhist or Catholic or Fundamentalist, you get a feedback loop of your own stuff. You have a chance to look at it and examine it, but most people do not. As the Light revealed itself to me, I became aware that what I was really seeing was our Higher Self matrix. We all have a Higher Self, or an oversoul part of our being. It revealed itself to me in its truest energy form. The only way I can really describe it is that the Being of the Higher Self is more like a conduit. It did not look like that, but it is a direct connection to the Source that each and every one of us have. We are directly connected to the Source.

So the Light was showing me the Higher Self matrix. I was not committed to one particular religion. So that is what was being fed back to me during my life-after-death experience. As I asked the Light to keep clearing for me, to keep explaining, I understood what the Higher Self matrix is. We have a grid around the planet where all the Higher Selves are connected. This is like a great company, a next subtle level of energy around us, the spirit level, you might say. Then, after a couple of minutes, I asked for more clarification. I really wanted to know what the Universe is about, and I was ready to go at that time. I said, “I am ready, take me.”

Then the Light turned into the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen: a mandala of human souls on this planet. Now I came to this with my negative view of what was happening on the planet. So as I asked the Light to keep clarifying for me, I saw in this magnificent mandala how beautiful we all are in our essence, our core. We are the most beautiful creations. The human soul, the human matrix that we all make together, is absolutely fantastic, elegant, exotic, everything. I just cannot say enough about how it changed my opinion of human Beings in that instant. I said, “Oh, God, I did not know how beautiful we are.”

At any level, high or low, in whatever shape you are in, you are the most beautiful creation. The revelations coming from the Light seemed to go on and on. Then I asked the Light, “Does this mean that Mankind will be saved?” Then, like a trumpet blast with a shower of spiraling lights, the Great Light spoke, saying, “Remember this and never forget; you save, redeem and heal yourself. You always have. You always will. You were created with the power to do so from before the beginning of the world.” In that instant I realized even more. I realized that WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN SAVED, and we saved ourselves because we were designed to self- correct like the rest of God’s Universe. This is what the second coming is about. I thanked the Light of God with all my heart. The best thing I could come up with was these simple words of total appreciation: “Oh dear God, dear Universe, dear Great Self, I Love My Life.” The Light seemed to breathe me in even more deeply. It was as if the Light was completely absorbing me. The Love Light is, to this day, indescribable. I entered into another realm, more profound than the last and became aware of something more, much more. It was an enormous stream of Light, vast and full, deep in the Heart of Life. I asked what this was. The Light responded, “This is the RIVER OF LIFE. Drink of this manna water to your heart’s content.” So I did. I took one big drink and then another. To drink of Life Itself! I was in ecstasy.

Then the Light said, “You have a desire.” The Light knew all about me, everything past, present and future. “Yes!” I whispered. I asked to see the rest of the Universe, beyond our solar system, beyond all human illusion. The Light then told me that I could go with the Stream. I did, and was carried through the Light at the end of the tunnel. I felt and heard a series of very soft sonic booms. What a rush! Suddenly I seemed to be rocketing away from the planet on this stream of Life. I saw the Earth fly away. The solar system, in all its splendor, whizzed by and disappeared. At faster than light speed, I flew through the center of the Galaxy, absorbing more knowledge as I went. I learned that this Galaxy, and all of the Universe, is bursting with many different varieties of LIFE. I saw many worlds. The good news is that we are not alone in this Universe! As I rode this stream of consciousness through the center of the Galaxy, the stream was expanding in awesome fractal waves of energy.

The super clusters of Galaxies with all their ancient wisdom flew by. At first I thought I was going somewhere, actually traveling. But then I realized that as the stream was expanding, my own consciousness was also expanding to take in everything in the Universe! All creation passed by me. It was an unimaginable wonder! I truly was a Wonder Child; a babe in Wonderland! At this point, I found myself in a profound stillness, beyond all silence. I could see or perceive FOREVER, beyond Infinity. I was in the Void. I was in pre-creation, before the Big Bang. I had crossed over the beginning of time/the First Word/the First Vibration. I was in the Eye of Creation. I felt as if I was touching the Face of God. It was not a religious feeling. Simply, I was at one with Absolute Life and Consciousness.

When I say that I could see or perceive forever, I mean that I could experience all of creation generating itself. It was without beginning and without end. That is a mind expanding thought, isn’t it? Scientists perceive the Big Bang as a single event which created the Universe. I saw during my life-after- death experience that the Big Bang is only one of an infinite number of Big Bangs creating Universes endlessly and simultaneously. The only images that even come close in human terms would be those created by super computers using fractal geometry equations. The ancients knew of this. They said God had periodically created new Universes by breathing out and recreated other Universes by breathing in. These epochs were called Yugas. Modern science called this the Big Bang.

I was in absolute, pure consciousness. I could see or perceive all the Big Bangs or Yugas creating and recreating themselves. Instantly I entered into them all simultaneously. I saw that each and every little piece of creation has the power to create. It is very difficult to try to explain this. I am still speechless about this. It took me years after I returned from my near-death experience to assimilate any words at all for the Void experience. I can tell you this now: the Void is less than nothing, yet more than everything that is! The Void is absolute zero, chaos forming all possibilities. It is Absolute Consciousness, much more than even Universal Intelligence. The Void is the vacuum or nothingness between all physical manifestations. It is the SPACE between atoms and their components. Modern science has begun to study this space between everything. They call it Zero point. Whenever they try to measure it, their instruments go off the scale, or to infinity, so to speak. They have no way, as of yet, to measure infinity accurately. There is more of the zero space in your own body and the Universe than anything else!

What mystics call the Void is not a void. It is so full of energy, a different kind of energy that has created everything that we are. Everything since the Big Bang is vibration, from the first Word, which is the first vibration. The biblical “I AM” really has a question mark after it. “I AM—What am I?” So creation is God exploring God’s Self through every way imaginable, in an on-going, infinite exploration through every one of us.

I began to see during my near-death experience that everything that is, is the Self, literally your Self, my Self. Everything is the great Self. That is why God knows even when a leaf falls. That is possible because wherever you are is the center of the Universe. Wherever any atom is, that is the center of the Universe. There is God in that, and God in the Void. As I was exploring the Void during my life-after- death experience and all the Yugas or creations, I was completely out of time and space as we know it. In this expanded state, I discovered that creation is about Absolute Pure Consciousness, or God, coming into the Experience of Life as we know it. The Void itself is devoid of experience. It is pre life, before the first vibration. Godhead is about more than Life and Death. Therefore there is even more than Life and Death to experience in the Universe!

When I realized this, I was finished with the Void and wanted to return to this creation, or Yuga. It just seemed like the natural thing to do. Then I suddenly came back through the second Light, or the Big Bang, hearing several more velvet booms. I rode the stream of consciousness back through all of creation, and what a ride it was! The super clusters of Galaxies came through me with even more insights. I passed through the center of our Galaxy, which is a black hole. Black holes are the great processors or recyclers of the Universe. Do you know what is on the other side of a black hole? We are; our Galaxy, which has been reprocessed from another Universe. In its total energy configuration, the Galaxy looked like a fantastic city of lights. All energy this side of the Big Bang is Light. Every sub atom, atom, star, planet, even consciousness itself is made of Light and has a frequency and/or particle. Light is living stuff. Everything is made of Light, even stones. So everything is alive. Everything is made from the Light of God; everything is very intelligent.

As I rode the stream on and on, I could eventually see a huge Light coming. I knew it was the First Light; the Higher Self Light Matrix of our Solar System. Then the entire Solar System appeared in the Light, accompanied by one of those velvet booms. I could see all the energy that this Solar System generates, and it is an incredible Light show! I could hear the Music of the Spheres. Our Solar System, as do all celestial bodies, generates a unique matrix of light, sound and vibratory energies. Advanced civilizations from other star systems can spot Life as we know it in the Universe by the vibratory or energy matrix imprint.

It is child’s play. The Earth’s wonder child (Human Beings) make an abundance of sound right now, like children playing in the backyard of the Universe. The Light explained to me that there is no death; we are immortal Beings. We have already been alive forever! I realized that we are part of a natural living system that recycles itself endlessly. I was never told that I had to come back. I just knew that I would. It was only natural, from what I had seen during my life-after-death experience. I don’t know how long I was with the Light, in human time. But there came a moment when I realized that all my questions had been answered and my return was near.

When I say that all my questions were answered on the other side, I mean to say just that. All my questions have been answered. Every human has a different life and set of questions to explore. Some of our questions are universal, but each of us is exploring this thing we call Life in our own unique way. So is every other form of life, from mountains to every leaf on every tree. That is very important to the rest of us in this Universe. Because it all contributes to the Big Picture, the fullness of Life. We are literally God exploring God’s Self in an infinite Dance of Life. Your uniqueness enhances all of Life. As I began my return to the life cycle, it never crossed my mind, nor was I told, that I would return to the same body. It just did not matter. I had complete trust in the Light and the Life process.

As the stream merged with the great Light, I asked never to forget the revelations and the feelings of what I had learned on the other side. There was a “Yes.” It felt like a kiss to my soul. Then I was taken back through the Light into the vibratory realm again. The whole process reversed, with even more information being given to me. I came back home, and I was given lessons from my near-death experience on the mechanics of reincarnation. I was given answers to all those little questions I had: “How does this work? How does that work?” I knew that I would be reincarnated. The Earth is a great processor of energy, and individual consciousness evolves out of that into each one of us. I thought of myself as a human for the first time, and I was happy to be that. From what I have seen, I would be happy to be an atom in this Universe. An atom.

So to be the human part of God—this is the most fantastic blessing. It is a blessing beyond our wildest estimation of what a blessing can be. For each and every one of us to be the human part of this experience is awesome and magnificent. Each and every one of us, no matter where we are, screwed up or not, is a blessing to the planet, right where we are. I went through the reincarnation process expecting to be a baby somewhere. But I was given a lesson on how individual identity and consciousness evolve. I was so surprised when I opened my eyes. I do not know why, because I understood it, but it was still such a surprise to be back in this body, back in my room with someone looking over me, crying her eyes out. It was my hospice caretaker. She had given up an hour and a half after finding me dead. My body was stiff and inflexible. She went into the other room. Then I awakened and saw the light outside. I tried to get up to go to it, but I fell out of the bed. She heard a loud “clunk,” ran in and found me on the floor. When I recovered, I was very surprised and yet very awed about what had happened to me during my near-death experience. At first all the memory of the trip that I have now was not there. I kept slipping out of this world and kept asking, “Am I alive?” This world seemed more like a dream than that one. Within three days I was feeling normal again, clearer, yet different than I had ever felt in my life. My memory of my near- death experience came back later.

I could see nothing wrong with any human Being I had ever seen. Before that I was really judgmental. I thought a lot of people were really screwed up. In fact, I thought that everybody was screwed up but me. But I got clear on all that. About three months later a friend said I should get tested, so I went and got the scans and so forth. I really felt good, so I was afraid of getting bad news. I remember the doctor at the clinic looking at the before and after scans, saying, “Well, there is nothing here now.” I said, “Really, it must be a miracle”’ He said “No, these things happen; they are called spontaneous remissions.” He acted very unimpressed.

But here was a miracle, and I was impressed, even if no one else was. During my near-death experience I had a descent into what you might call Hell, and it was very surprising. I did not see Satan or evil. My descent into Hell was a descent into each person’s customized human misery, ignorance, and darkness of not knowing. It seemed like a miserable eternity. But each of the millions of souls around me had a little star of Light always available. But no one seemed to pay attention to it. They were so consumed with their own grief, trauma and misery. But, after what seemed an eternity, I started calling out to that Light, like a child calling to a parent for help. Then the Light opened up and formed a tunnel that came right to me and insulated me from all that fear and pain, That is what Hell really is. So what we are doing is learning to hold hands, to come together. The doors of Hell are open now. We are going to link up, hold hands and walk out of Hell together. The Light came to me and turned into a huge golden Angel. I said, “Are you the Angel of Death?” It expressed to me that it was my oversoul, my Higher Self matrix, a super ancient part of ourselves.

Then I was taken to the Light. Soon our science will quantify spirit. Isn’t that going to be wonderful? We are coming up with devices now that are sensitive to subtle energy or spirit energy. Physicists use these atomic colliders to smash atoms to see what they are made of. They have got it down to quarks and charm, and all that. Well, one day they are going to come down to the little thing that holds it all together, and they are going to have to call it – God. We are just beginning to understand that we are creating too, as we go along. As I saw forever, I came to a realm during my near-death experience in which there is a point where we pass all knowledge and begin creating the next fractal, the next level. We have that power to create as we explore. And that is God expanding itself through us.

Since my return I have experienced the Light spontaneously, and I have learned how to get to that space almost any time in my meditation. Each one of you can do this. You do not have to die or have a near-death experience to do this. It is within your equipment; you are wired for it already. The body is the most magnificent Light Being there is. The body is a Universe of incredible Light. Spirit is not pushing us to dissolve this body. That is not what is happening. Stop trying to become God; God is becoming you.

Here. I asked God: “What is the best religion on the planet? Which one is right?” And Godhead said, with great love: “I don’t care.” That was incredible grace. When Godhead said, “I don’t care,” I immediately understood that it is for us to care about. It is important, because we are the caring Beings. It matters to us and that is where it is important. What you have is the energy equation in spirituality. Ultimate Godhead does not care if you are Protestant, Buddhist or whatever. It is all a blooming facet of the whole. I wish that all religions would realize it and let each other be. It is not the end of each religion, but we are talking about the same God. Live and let live. Each has a different view. And it all adds up to the big picture; it is all important. I went over to the other side during my near-death experience with a lot of fears about toxic waste, nuclear missiles, the population explosion, the rainforest. I came back loving every single problem. I love nuclear waste. I love the mushroom cloud; this is the holiest mandala that we have manifested to date, as an archetype. It, more than any religion or philosophy on Earth, brought us together all of a sudden, to a new level of consciousness. Knowing that maybe we can blow up the planet fifty times, or 500 times, we finally realize that maybe we are all here together, now. For a period they had to keep setting off more bombs to get it in to us. Then we started saying, “we do not need this any more.” Now we are actually in a safer world than we have ever been in, and it is going to get safer.

So I came back from my near-death experience loving toxic waste because it brought us together. These things are so big. As Peter Russell might say, these problems are now “soul size.” Do we have soul size answers” YES! The clearing of the rain forest will slow down, and in fifty years there will be more trees on the planet than in a long time. If you are into ecology, go for it; you are that part of the system that is becoming aware. Go for it with all your might, but do not be depressed. It is part of a larger thing. Earth is in the process of domesticating itself. It is never again going to be as wild a place as it once was. There will be great wild places, reserves where nature thrives. Gardening and reserves will be the thing in the future. Population increase is getting very close to the optimal range of energy to cause a shift in consciousness. That shift in consciousness will change politics, money, energy.

After dying, going through my near-death experience and coming back, I really respect life and death. In our DNA experiments we may have opened the door to a great secret. Soon we will be able to live as long as we want to live in this body. After living 150 years or so, there will be an intuitive soul sense that you will want to change channels. Living forever in one body is not as creative as reincarnation, as transferring energy in this fantastic vortex of energy that we are in. We are actually going to see the wisdom of Life and death, and enjoy it. As it is now, we have already been alive forever. This body, that you are in, has been alive forever. It comes from an unending Stream of Life, going back to the Big Bang and beyond. This body gives life to the next life, in dense and subtle energy. This body has been alive forever already.

 

My Missed History

BORN – May 10th 1937 at 10am, Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England. Two months premature at a time prior to intensive care and antibiotics; born of an Italian father and a country girl mother, half old English and half Irish.

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

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

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

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

 

 

The Builder

Things often happened in my life that promised so much but at the time never developed further. I often wondered about that, and it is only my long life that allowed me to look back over the years and begin to see the work of the Builder.

I see The Builder as a function of our consciousness that is a part of what I call our Core self. The Core is most important part of anything; a person, a machine, an organisation, a fruit, is the core of it. An apple is an example: the core carries the seeds, that are the most important thing as far as Life is concerned. The same goes for the person who may believe their body, the external them, is the most important, but it is their core being that is the most important and carries their essential self. Basically, your core is the deepest and most real part of you. Unlike your personality or everyday self which constantly shifts, changes and eventually dies, your core can never be dissected or die. The most important part of anything; a person, a machine, an organisation, a fruit, is the core of it. In different cultures it has different names, such as Spirit, Atman in Hinduism – the life principle of the universe, Creator, especially when regarded as immanent in the individual’s real self.

To give an example, something that I have mentioned often is when at sixteen I spent three months practising an advanced method of relaxation for half an hour each day. It led me to experience remaining awake in the depth of sleep. That was such an extraordinary thing, for I lost any sense of having a body yet was fully aware as a bodiless consciousness. See Relaxation

At the time I didn’t really understand what it was that had happened. But it was such a stark and real thing that it made me realise there is so much more of us than ordinary waking awareness in life allows. So, I went in search for more understanding and found it in ancient cultural writings, especially those of the Chinese and East Indian nations. For in their statements they said they had explored the area we call the unconscious and were conscious within it. See The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali – Buddhism and Awareness

Example: For some weeks I had been practising a meditation in which I slowed my breath. Then suddenly one day my thinking stopped. What this felt like is extremely difficult to describe because all of us have lived in this world of thoughts and emotions all our life. We are so immersed we don’t even recognise it – rather like the story of the fish who doesn’t know what you are talking about when you mention water. It only knows it has been in the water if it jumps or is lifted out one day. This is how it was for me. I had never known that ‘I’, ‘me’ could exist without thoughts. The freedom was wonderful, almost as if I had arrived at a different world or universe and was looking back at what I had thought was the only way of life. To have this alternative gave me a new way of responding to life, because thoughts are so clumsy and can only deal with tiny pieces of experience. So. our view of things is limited to what we can think with words. Beyond that are immense spreads of experience not limited to defining concepts. Mary P.

So I now see that something I call The Builder had laid a brick. I think somehow the foundation had already been laid at my birth. And to that brick other bricks were laid adding to my understanding. The next brick came when I was eighteen and because I was born in 1937 I spent two years in the Royal Air Force doing national service. This next brick was laid while I was in Germany serving in the RAF. It taught me so much so that the connection between the other brick was a revelation.

“At the time I had a room to myself and had gone to bed early. I had read that yoga adepts can experience their awareness going long distances away and visit others, and I wanted to see if I could be with my mother. I tried hard and long but nothing happened, and I went to sleep.

Then I was awoken by a feeling of rushing upward followed by a sense of sudden expansion, which I likened to a cork being pulled out of a wine bottle. Now I was amazed because I was able to see, and realised I was floating near the ceiling, and saw my body asleep in bed.

Looking down on my sleeping body suddenly I was terrified, I guess I thought I was dying. I didn’t at the time understand this terror, but the thought came to me in a flash that this what was I had read about – i.e. people leaving their body in projection. The fear immediately vanished to be replaced by uncontrollable laughter. Looking back I think the terror arose because I was certain I was dying. The laughter came at the realisation this was not so and was a release of tension brought about by the terror.

Then I was travelling across the German countryside where I was living, curled up with my knees to my chest. I could clearly see the countryside below me, and I noticed what were like radiations coming from certain points below. I wondered at the time

 

whether they were from people praying or sending thoughts.  Then I was over the sea and could observe the large amount of shipping near a Dutch harbour, but suddenly I found myself standing in our sitting room at home in London. It was such an astonishing experience I stood in shock looking down at my body, feeling it and trying to understand.

My body felt solid and real, and I was dressed in outdoor clothes not my pajamas. Then with great enthusiasm I looked up and saw my mother sitting alone knitting, our Alsatian dog lying asleep in front of the gas fire. I felt sure my mother would see me because I felt physically present and absolutely and vitally awake, in a way I had never experienced before. So I called out to her, “Mum, look what has happened.” She stopped knitting for a moment but obviously didn’t see me or hear me. So I felt if I shouted this would reach her. “Mum” I shouted, “look it’s me Tony”.

This another brick in my building understanding, and I learned enormous and important lessons from that. I saw that because I was present without a physical body my mother couldn’t hear me. She needed physical sound to know I was present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me in thought I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts. The reason being that in the body most people cannot communicate via thoughts.

The experience not only helped my understanding to grow but laid the foundation for other realisations to grow from. For instance, many cases of Out Of Body (OBE) experiences occur in a near death situation, where a person has ‘died’ of a heart attack for instance and is later revived. Because of this there are attempts to consider the possibility of survival of death through study of these cases. In fact many people after experiencing an OBE have a very different view of death than prior to their experience. From the opposite point of view, that of the external observer who is not asleep, many OBE’s have been witnessed by relatives of people actually dying through war or accident. During the two world wars, many cases were reported and later corroborated, of seeing the dying person appear, and of them telling of their death, or silently communicating it. I believe this points out the deep connection between an OBE and dying, pain and stress. I have felt that the OBE is in fact the remains of something that existed in primitive animals as a survival mechanism. It was a way of communicating the cause of death to those with genetic bonding. This awareness would help in avoiding the same death.

Something important in explaining The Buider is that I thought that I must now have developed the ability to project my consciousness, but I could never do it again, that is why I see these experiences as steps in a teaching process.

Early attempts to explain an OBE suggested a subtle or astral body, which is a double of our physical and mental self, but able to pass through walls and transcend the physical limitations of distance. It was said to be connected to the physical body during an OBE by a silver cord – a life line which kept the physical body alive. This is similar to the concept that the people we dream about are not creations of our own psyche, but real in their own right. This theory has limitations as it can be observed that many people in this condition have no silver cord, and have no body at all, but are simply a bodiless observer, or are an animal, a geometrical shape, a colour or sound. Analysis of many OBE’s therefore suggests that the ‘body’ and many of the other aspects of the experience are as much a creation of one’s psyche as are the objects and people in a dream. It is tempting to think that we are our body, and any attack on it in dreams is an attack on us. But this is not so. See: identity and the dreamer.

Later I came across the old saying, ‘Man proposes, God disposes.’ It was something I saw in action in such cases. For my long attempts to leave my body failed, but when I had given up it happened spontaneously with no efforts by me. I witnessed this happening several times in my life. But it is echoed by others. To quote just one:

Eileen Garratt the famous explorer of the extraordinary echoes the same opinion. She writes: ‘I have heard it said that in supernatural sensing, concentration and meditation are necessary. But this seems contrary to anything which I have learned from my own experience in clairvoyance telepathy and projection. I would say that an ease, a nonchalance about the process, are prerequisites to the production of such states.’

She says later that complete relaxation and surrender of the conscious self, allows the super conscious self to become dynamic and active at a conscious level.

Since that time in the RAF I have had many more amazing experiences, many single never to be experienced again. But each new experience has taught me new wonders – for example that the dream process is behind hallucinations and psychic experiences; that so called near death experiences acn be experienced while fully alive; that we live in a multi-dimensional world in which everyday experience is one level of many more.

It might make more sense if you read Going Beyond and Criticisms – Answers To

Lord Of The Dance

Dreams – Messages from Your Highest

Over the years many theories to explain the ‘why’ of dreams have been put forward. These range from dreams being messages from spirits; being results of food eaten prior to sleep; the mind freewheeling nonsensically; the garbage disposal system of the mind; suggestions from waking experience; a computer re-programming for the brain; to Freud’s wish fulfilment and Jung’s compensation theory.

But I feel I know the function of dreams, and it isn’t knowledge gained through neurological experiment or scientific thinking. It is through years spent in delving into what is usually unconscious. My experience of this started in 1953, when I was sixteen, and already deeply interested in the possibilities of the human mind, I took a course in deep relaxation.

I practiced every day for three months, tensing my muscles, relaxing them, then passing my awareness over and over my body, dropping the feeling of tension. After three months I was quite proficient. One evening, after coming home from dining out with friends, I went to bed thinking I would leave my usual practice, but in the end decided to practice even though it was late. After going over my body several times I suddenly lost any awareness of my right arm. I had no sensation of it other than space, hugeness. Then I lost my left arm, and – my whole body. It was like falling through a trap-door into the huge space. I had no sense of having a body. Thoughts had ceased, except for a murmur apparently a thousand miles away. Yet in blackness, in immensity, in absence of thought I existed vitally as bodiless awareness.

As I could pass into that state quite often after that I wondered what had happened and what the possibilities of it were. What I eventually, after much more experience what I realised is that I had fallen into deep dreamless sleep and yet held onto awareness. Usually we are unconscious in sleep, so I was exploring what was for me a new world of experience. Of course I realised later that most ancient cultures had already written about this.

You might be able to get a sense of this by trying an experiment. Before going to sleep and while lying in bed, make yourself comfortable and with eyes closed imagine yourself standing on the lip of an active volcano. It is not erupting but the hot lava is shining below you. When you are ready, jump into the hot lava.

If you are not experienced in dreaming you may have fears or hesitations about doing this – but nothing can hurt you and you are only experiencing your imagination. So as you fall into the hot lava feel your flesh and bones disappear until you know yourself as naked awareness.

That naked awareness without the sense of space and direction is what we are basically – naked awareness. That awareness is enormous because there are no boundaries of size and body, and many people in dreams are very frightened as they even brush by their hugeness. That naked awareness feels like nothing and people who have not experienced it therefore say that at death we are nothing. True it is the polar opposite to focussed body awareness, but it is far from nothing – it is everything, for everything arises from it. Because it is everything we cannot think of it as something, for it cannot take shape. That would be something. See A Dual Being

The next step

 About two years later I experienced another inner wonder. I had an amazing experience of my awareness leaving my body – I had an extraordinary out of body experience. I was in the RAF living in Germany, and one night I had gone to bed early. I must have fallen asleep when suddenly I felt as if I were shooting upwards and experienced a feeling of coming out of pressure and was now free – like a cork out of a bottle. Then I was awake and looking down at my sleeping body and felt terrified (I realised afterwards it was terror that I was dying). Then I remembered reading about experiences such as this and was laughing uncontrollably through the release from terror. Then I was flying across the German countryside where I was living, curled up with my knees to my chest, looking down at the countryside beneath me. I noticed as I passed over the rural countryside what looked like radiations emerging from several places; they were a bit like ripples on the surface of water when a stone has been thrown into it. But these ripples were three dimensional, and I wondered it they were emerging from people, perhaps praying.

Then I was over the sea and saw many ships below, but suddenly I was standing in our sitting room at home in London. It was such an astonishing experience I stood in shock looking down at my body, feeling it and trying to understand. My body felt solid and real and I was dressed in outdoor clothes not my pyjamas. Then with great enthusiasm I looked up and saw my mother sitting alone knitting, our Alsatian dog lying asleep in front of the gas fire. I felt sure my mother would see me because I felt physically present and absolutely and vitally awake in a way I had never experienced before. So I called out to her, “Mum, look what has happened.” She stopped knitting for a moment but obviously didn’t see me or hear me. So I felt if I shouted this would reach her. “Mum” I shouted, “look it’s me Tony”.

There was no obvious sign that she had heard me, but two things did happen. One was that I saw or realised that she had an upstairs side of her and a downstairs side. Her upstairs (conscious) side had no awareness of me, but her downstairs side (unconscious) gave me a wonderful welcome and I had the awareness of us knowing each other in a formless love.

My dog Vincent in front of the gas fire – 1956

Then at the same time my dog must have heard me shout because he woke and came rushing to me and was so full of love for me he rushed around where I stood barking and showing his joy. I later heard from my mother saying she had had been alone that night as my father was out, and she had seen the dog get up and bark and jump around behind the settee, where I stood, for no apparent reason.

I learned enormous and important lessons from that. I realised that having no physical body the living cannot usually hear us. They need physical sound to know we are present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts. The reason being that in the body most people cannot communicate via thoughts. I also learnt that I had an inner life as real to me as the ordinary waking life. This inner life was a fusion of the bodiless awareness and the life of form we experience in the body. This was obvious because my sleeping body was dressed in pyjamas, and my body I knew in the experience was dressed in outdoor clothes. Also it was not limited to space and time as the physical body is – shown by my sudden shift across mile to my home in London. Somehow it stood between two very different worlds of experience. I say that because although I was invisible to my mother, I was visible to my dog with much finer senses. Remember that humans can only see 1% of visible light, and hear only 1% of sound so are virtually blind and deaf. See Inner World – Jesse Watkins Enlightenment 

Another step

 Having realised that we have a core self which is felt by some to be nothingness, it is important to realise that during dreaming (REM sleep) our voluntary muscles are paralyzed – except for our eyes. It is thought this was developed during a period when our forebears were sleeping in trees. Any movement would have made them fall. The eye movements were of course not dangerous.

An important fact about dreaming is that all the signals for movement while we dream are sent by the sleeping brain to the muscles but are blocked by a part of the brain called the pons. See Sleep paralysis

But this block can be bypassed by having a passive attitude while awake. (See The Keyboard Condition). This allows for a little recognised phenomenon which, while awake and in a passive state, allows the dream process to break through as spontaneous movement, sound and emotion, exactly as with dreams. In the past, and still in the present, this spontaneous movements and speech are all things that happen when this dream process breaks through into consciousness. Things like Seitai, Subud, Chi Gong, Shaktipat, Pentecostalism, and Reichian therapy, where spontaneous movement is practiced by thousands of people.

Remember that our life depends and arises from our core self, whereas our ego and personality are all the time upheld and given life by what flow from what is largely unconscious. So the movements that the dream process gives rise to are for our benefit, and are not a threat. But when this spontaneous movement breaks through to consciousness many people are frightened of it and rush to the doctor to sedate it. See Life’s Little Secrets; Reaction to the unconscious

So here is real lucid dreaming because it happens while you are awake. Apart from that it is very clear and can be seen to stay on a theme until it works out. As such you can witness the ‘dream process’ coming slowly from a formless beginning and making its way to conscious awareness.

Linking it all up 

It is worth reading the piece How it Flows. 

A couple of examples may help to make this clear.

Example: I felt as if I were falling down a long hole, like Alice in Wonderland. The observing part of me understood that I was dropping backwards through my whole life. At times I seemed to bang into things, or bump off things, and these were the painful times in my history. At one point I wondered if I were experiencing some sort of healing regression, but I had only touched the events of my life as I fell back.

Eventually I came to rest. It was wonderfully peaceful and even my thinking had stopped. I didn’t have any feelings of having a body or shape. I simply existed. Again the observing part of me wondered if this was the womb, but it quickly became apparent, or I knew, that this wasn’t the womb, it was the basic level of my awareness, how it felt to be before my thinking and speech were learnt. I began to feel afraid as I realised that if I dropped any further back I would cease to exist. Then I knew the fear was unnecessary as every time we go to sleep we drop back into the condition where we lose any sense of personal existence, yet we emerge none the worse the next day. So I let myself drop.

I fell into immensity, black and without features. Suddenly I was aware that something held me. It was the process that had grown me from seed in the first place. My ego had not created me or grown me. But now this deep part of me was unfolding me again, like a plant opening. I understood that we each have this force at our centre, and as I watched it working in my body and life, it seemed to communicate with me. At least I understood from it that if I opened to it each day, if I surrendered to its action, then it would grow me to a fuller life and realise itself in me. This felt like a holy gift, that the mystery of life would live in me.

Here he touches or experiences his centre – his core self – which was without features and yet held him. He also felt that although he had fallen into nothingness yet it communicated with him. He also understood that we all have this force at our centre out of which our growth and awareness comes – and it brings understanding of ones life and purpose. He says later on about his purpose, “I was lying on my back as I was experiencing these things, and I felt directed by that inner force, and saw that my hands and feet were like roots into the earth, and my penis was a tree, and when it was full of branches and leaves it could give shelter to other beings who sought to grow.” See The Sacred Tree

The Age Old Secret 

To show you examples of this I will quote from people’s experience of the different ways this has been used throughout history.

Shaktipat

I am not sure What one came first, but considering Buddha was known to have lives around 500 BC, Shaktipat may have been practised long before the Pentecostal experience.

In his article Between Coma and Convulsion, in Energy and Character, David Boadella quotes the report of a person studying the self regulatory practices in India. Although this is a recent account, the yoga practice it describes has been used for many centuries in India:

I have been in India for about four months now and I thought the readers of Energy and Character might be interested in the similarities between Reichian work and Shaktipat or Kriya Yoga. The Sanskrit word ‘shakti’ means energy, bio-energy, or more correctly, bio— cosmic energy. Shaktipat is a practice which is described as the loosening of this energy by a guru from the way it may be blocked in us. When this Shakti energy is loosened and no longer tightly bound by the control of the conscious mind it begins to circulate in the body. It is then said to open up energy channels or pathways, and usually begins to manifest in what are known as ‘kriya’. Kriyas are spontaneous movements of the body and of the respiratory system. One interesting aspect of kriyas, which resemble Reichian abreaction, is that they very often manifest as highly involved asanas (body postures) and as mudras (meditational postures involving the hands). I have seen many persons who practice Shaktipat enter a phase of intense energy flow in which breathing becomes rapid and involuntary and in which people begin with great rapidity to do asanas they never knew and which they ordinarily would never have been able to perform.

Although the conscious practice of asanas facilitates this process, true hatha yoga (Indian techniques using physiological processes to integrate ones being) occurs involuntarily in this kriya phase. The burst of energy that results is sometimes astounding and may continue for well over an hour. The movements in some individuals are so intense and frantic they appear dangerous. In other persons the movements are soft, delicate and flowing. Thus some persons may breathe like locomotives, beat themselves repeatedly, stand on their heads, bellow, twist their limbs in the most unbelievable postures; others begin to dance harmoniously, to sing softly in languages they have never learned, to become playful and flirtatious and to utter strange sounds. See People’s Experience of LifeStream  

The explanation for this is that the shakti is opening or purifying obstructions in the energy pathways, that the individual is working out the results of past actions and experience, and that an evolutionary process is allowed to unfold which eventually will result in an expansion of awareness.

In this kind of meditation the individual sits still, but not rigidly; he doesn’t concentrate in any way, but simply relaxes as much as possible and permits the energy to do its thing. The energy is of course thought of as ultimately cosmic or divine. Hence the path of enlightenment lies in relinquishing ego control and identifications and allowing this bio—cosmic energy to express itself and lead us. The final result of this process is the opening of the highest brain centres in a new type of consciousness in which the individual merges with the universal consciousness. The total process takes a very long time but this should not dissuade us as each stage has its own rewards. The bodily spasms, automatic breathing, asanas, contortions and reflex patterns that manifest spontaneously as the energy gains momentum all serve to purify the organism. Though some of these phenomena may sound strange they are not experienced as unpleasant once the practitioner no longer totally identifies with bodily processes. Thus the meditator can be totally in their body without identifying totally with its experiences.

Pentecost

Pentecostal Christianity speaks of gifts of the spirit. These are listed as the gift of: the word of wisdom; the word of knowledge; faith healing; the working of mira­cles; prophecy; the discerning of spirits; diverse kinds of tongues; and interpretation of tongues.

Most of these are easily recognizable descriptions of faculties of the unconscious. The unconscious is constantly scanning information and considering the highest probable outcome – thus prophecy. Access to universal aspects of consciousness allows the gaining of insights which might also account for prophecy, wisdom and words of knowl­edge. See Edgar Cayce

Speaking in tongues is a common way in which the unconscious expresses its feelings and insights. It is a level three expression in Van Rhijn/Caldwell’s levels of con­sciousness. When the ‘tongues’ are considered as symbolic expression they transform into meaningful words, just as dream symbols do. My experiments with such phenomena convincingly show the common link between these often considered unrelated phenomena and LifeStream. See How it Flows

Discerning of spirits means the ability to look into a human heart and see what is hidden there. Considering how much we can learn subliminally through body langu­age and verbal cues, this is another straightforward uncon­scious faculty.

But imagine a group of people all ‘worship­ping’ as is described of Pentecost, when the disciples were taken to be drunk. (Acts 1:12 to 2:13) There were 120 gathered in a room, men and women being equals – “All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.” Considering present day Pentecos­talism and other forms of LifeStream, this large group would include people who would be shouting in tongues, others would be crying, moving their bodies, discerning spirits, and generally creating a bedlam of noise. Any newcomer to the group, not having had explained what was being attempted – that each be open to the Spirit and be moved by it – might think the people were crazy or drunk.

Franz Mesmer 

Coming nearer to our own times we find a connecting link between past and present in Franz Anton Mesmer. In about the year 1775 Mesmer, a qualified doctor three times over, began to experiment with magnets. He found that patients who had previously been incurable were healed when these were placed on their bodies. For a year he had a mania for experimenting with magnets in quite extraordinary ways. But within that period he realised the same healing results could be obtained without using the magnets. He found that simply by stroking or touching the patient along the line of the nerves, the muscles would begin to twitch. This twitching, he said, should not cause alarm, even if it led, as it usually did, to an intensification of the patient’s symptoms or even convulsive movements. Throughout these releases, noisy and explosive though they were, he saw how patients could experience a healing of the distressing symptoms.

Prior to this time these convulsive releases were considered to be the work of devils or spirits. This attitude arose out of Christian belief, and Jesus and the disciples clearly used the same technique. In the New Testament are descriptions of people cured by these convulsive releases. Mesmer is a transforming link with our own times because his approach to this phenomenon was an experimental and evaluative one. Nevertheless he was still bound to the past by his belief that another human beings presence was necessary to act as a channel for a cosmic energy to reach the sick person. Thus he still remained, in this aspect, in connection with the guru as agent of change tradition.

Stefan Zweig, in his book Mental Healers, describes Mesmer’s way of working as follows:

With a serious and dignified mien, calmly, slowly, radiating tranquillity he would draw near to the patients. At his proximity a gentle fit of trembling would spread through the assembly. He wore a lilac robe, thus calling up the image of a Zoroastrian or Indian magician.

Usually no great time elapsed before one or the other of the company would begin to tremble, then the limbs would twitch convulsively, and the patient would break out in perspiration, scream or groan. No sooner had such tokens manifested themselves in one member of the chain, than the others too, would feel the onset of the famous crisis which was to bring relief. Some would fall to the ground and go into convulsions, others would laugh shrilly, others would scream, and choke, and dance like dervishes, others would appear to faint or sink into a hypnotic sleep. According to Mesmer’s ‘theory of crisis’ the malady had to be provoked into its utmost marge of development, it had so to speak to be sweated out of the organism if the body was to retain healthy.

The importance of Mesmer to the history of homeostasis is that, to the individuals who claim to have ‘discovered’ a new approach to human ills via abreaction, or say they have channelled a new cosmic force for the use of humanity, Mesmer stands as a direct contradiction. Three hundred years ago, despite his exotic dress and manner, he ran individual and group psychotherapy of a very successful nature. Although he thought of himself as a channel for a cosmic energy, he nevertheless recognised an agent other than technical psychiatric skill at work. Perhaps the ‘cosmic energy’ theory was not so far out either, as Reich revived it in new form in our own century. The work of Mesmer gradually moved into greater and greater complication — people dancing around trees for instance — instead of simplification and clarity. Out of it came Mesmerism which took the form of positive suggestion, completely leaving behind the aspect of allowing the organism to discharge its own tension and negativity. The spontaneous forces capable of self healing were ignored — even suppressed. The vainglorious power or forceful skill of the mesmerist or therapist took its place.

The Method Never quite Dies

The approach started by Mesmer has never completely died out. While living in Russia in 1912 Sir Paul Dukes met Lev Lvovitch who used a self regulatory method to deal with a variety of illnesses. He would stroke patient’s limbs and induce shaking and trembling. In his book Unending Quest he describes the case of a boy whose legs were paralysed. “There was a broken exclamation from the boy in the middle of the room. ‘It’s b-b—beginning!’ The lad was quivering from head to foot so much that he had to hold oil to his chair.” After several treatments Dukes observed that the boy’s condition improved, and in a few weeks he was cured.

Only in very recent years has any serious scientific work been done in understanding what takes place in this healing which arises from within — with or without the help of an outside agent. Despite this research there is still virtually no socially established ways in which individuals are taught to trust their own internal processes. People in the West, and especially those trained in the helping professions, are forever committing the crime against human nature of ‘doing something’ to it, and seldom letting ‘It’ do something to them. Nevertheless some individuals and groups have done a tremendous amount to make us aware of our lack, and point out ways of overcoming it. Freud does not leave us with any sense of there being a powerful and helpful self—regulatory action in us. He gives no sense of finding a transformative power with which one can work toward spontaneous analysis and self help. But in Jung we find again and again very clear reference to what has been named in this book as homeostasis.

Carl Jung Linking East and West 

In Psychological Commentary On The Tibetan Book of The Great Liberation, Jung says:

“If we snatch these things directly from the East, we have merely indulged our Western acquisitiveness, confirming yet again that ‘everything good is outside’ whence it has to be fetched and pumped into our barren souls. It seems to me we have really learned something from the East when we understand that the psyche contains riches enough without having to be primed from outside, and when we feel capable of evolving out of ourselves with or without divine grace. . . We must get at the Eastern values from within and not from without, seeking them in ourselves, in the unconscious. Because of these resis­tances we doubt the very thing that seems so obvious to the East, namely, the SELF LIBERATING POWER OF THE INTROVERTED MIND. This aspect of the mind is practically unknown to the West, though it forms the most important component of the unconscious.

The whole process is called the ‘transcendent function’. It is a process arid a method at the same time. The production of unconscious compensation (self-regulation) is a spontaneous PROCESS; the conscious realisation is a METHOD.

In Jung we find something of the reverence for what is met within a human being – a reverence for life itself. A great deal of Jung’s attitudes and thoughts have already been quoted, enough to show that he did not use the self-regulatory process in such a cathartic way as Mesmer.

Reich – Cosmic Energy and the Death of Guru’s

Dr. Wilhelm Reich offers us a very different approach to this world of experience. In the 1920’s Reich gradually felt his way from an orthodox use of Freudian psycho-analysis to a more biological, physiological or energetic point of view. Not that he lost sight of the human soul, but he realised how much body, energy and personality are uni­fied. By working with body attitudes or postures he found he could help the patient melt tensions and emotional blocks. By relaxing muscular tensions, flows of energy, movement and feeling were unblocked. Perhaps more than any other clinical therapist or doctor of his time, he recognised that a spontaneous, self-regulating activity or energy was at work in all living organisms. He says of this energy, which he eventually called orgone that it was cosmic and acts on the human being.

Gradually Reich developed very definite techniques, working with respiration, muscular tension and character attitudes. He particularly explored the place of sexuality individual, social and political structures. He helped people release their own self-regulatory process and work with it toward health and wholeness. As people learnt this they experienced spontaneous movement, trembling, changed feeling states and emotional and sexual release.

The actual results, as compared with those already mentioned in this short history, were no different to those in Shaktipat or in Mesmer’s work. Nevertheless Reich brought a new open­ness, a new technical understanding to the subject with his genius. Unlike Mesmer he did not rest until he had pin­pointed clearly what released self-regulatory action into conscious operation. He did not stop, as Mesmer and the gurus did, in believing himself and certain other special men and women were the channels of a cosmic energy which healed. Reich made the tremendous step, while yet remaining a scientist and clinical therapist, of seeing an integral law of human nature at work, and active in indi­viduals quite apart from his personal influence.

In this Reich helped people in the present to begin a link with their spontaneous energies which earlier peoples had known only in a religious context. The deeply religious, surrendered attitudes so prevalent in the past are seldom found today in the West. Certainly not in the way demon­strated by the original Christians who surrendered body and mind to a force they trusted. Looked at in this way, even the Godly in the West are frightened of God’s power. Jung makes the statement that people in the West cannot find God because none of us can bow low enough. Being unable to form the trust out of our religious convictions, Reich enabled people to meet this vital part of themselves from a different more acceptable starting point. The new standpoint is that which includes our critical and analytical intellect. To deny it in an attempt to emulate the East in approaching their inner life uncriti­cally would be to do ourselves a great disservice. Reich proved that as Westerners we can still touch our deep spontaneous energies while retaining our new-found intellect.

Also a person close to Reich is reported to have said that Reich told him that cosmic consciousness was available via this method.

The Way of Subud

Considering Reich’s work it is interesting now to look at the influence of Muhammed Subuh. He was born and lived in Indonesia, working as an accountant for many years. His main interest in life was to seek out some of the many gurus in his country, and attempt a deeper aware­ness of life’s mysteries and the nature of God. In his late twenties, in the year 1925, he experienced a vision while out walking. It seemed to him that a ball of light or fire rushed across the sky and descended on his head. He began to shake and tremble, and felt a powerful and divine energy had begun to work in his being. On reaching home he opened himself to the influence of this power and found spontaneous movements and experiences occurred.

From that time onwards he frequently ‘opened’ himself to what he felt to come from God, and found that each time move­ments, sounds, and a wide variety of inner experience arose. He observed that the movements and experiences were ways in which his being was gradually cleansed and made whole. It was as if some influence were gradually guiding him through experiences in a direction he could not preconceive, but IT could. Also, his physical health improved, his experiences educated him regarding his and other people’s life on Earth, and he found his intuitive faculties enormously enlarged. Often he could also be instrumental in helping other people to experience healing. The film star Eva Bartok told her story in the newspapers at the time of her own healing in connection with Pak Subuh and her baby.

By 1932 Pak Subuh had discovered that other people who relaxed in his presence could also receive the same experience and be led through cleansing and integration. Groups of people in Indonesia began to practice this ‘opening’ to what they felt to be the grace of God working in their lives. The manner of these group experiences is like that described under Shaktipat. People found their bodies making spontaneous movements; they experienced themselves in a wide variety of ways, were led through catharsis and great inspirational insights. Like the Pente­costal approach, there was a tendency toward remaining on the symbolic level, and editing all but the transcendental.

The experience of being moved from within was called ‘Latihan’, which in Indonesian means to be moved, cleansed and disciplined by the power of God. But until 1957 comparatively few people were in these groups doing latihan. Those who were had mostly been using latihan several times a week for many years. Sometimes the length of practice was ten or fifteen years. These practi­tioners had found that their nature and body had been gradually changed by the practice. Their awareness and sympathies had widened. Problems had shifted, and in general they felt more in touch with the force or meaning behind their existence.

At this point a European working in Indonesia – Rofe – asked to be introduced to the lati­han. Rofe taught it to people in England who started an international centre at Coombe Springs. From there the practice went world-wide, and at one time the follower’s numbers were claimed to be 200,000. People of all nation­alities, religious belief, political views and social status found they could experience the latihan. The lives of many were deeply changed by it.

If we are to understand how modern men and women relate to their core self there are things we must be aware of in re­gard to the latihan, and the organisation named Subud. J.P. Barter, for instance, writing about his involvement in the latihan says, “We do not know for any certainty why the force which is received in Subud has been made uni­quely available to mankind today rather than at some earlier period in history.” The statement is typical of the sort of historical blindness and spiritual pomposity that is common in the practice. Pak Subuh states that the experi­ence is unique to him and new in the world. When I myself started a coex group many years ago, based on Reichian work and Mesmer’s groups, a spy was sent from a Subud group in a nearby town to find out where or how I had stolen their latihan. That people like J.G. Bennet, a well educated man, and Barter, bright enough to write an orderly account of Subud, can accept such statements is a warning that the Western mind, in attempting to re-establish connection with the deeper layers of the psyche, can often revert to primitive attitudes, ignoring or discarding information and lessons learnt through hard experi­ence.

In later years Pak Subuh told his followers that the experience was not unique.

Summary

A lot of words, but I hope it clearly shows how we each have an inner life which owes its existence to our core self. I believe I have given enough examples of how our core self works, and how it is the polar opposite to our conscious personality. I hope too that it can be seen that dreams arise from our core self and are a half way house between the formless core self and out conscious min, and how dreams are part of the action of our growth and well being from the deep well of our innermost self.

See: compensation theory; movements during sleep; the dream process as computer; Adler; Freud; Jung.