Author Archive

Have A Break – From What?

I have been interested in the ‘Who Am I’ meditation in various ways ever since reading about it in connection with Ramana Maharshi fifty years ago. Then in the early seventies Mike Tanner and I got hold of a booklet from America explaining how it was used in connection with a partner; the booklet called it ‘Enlightenment Intensive.’

It sounded as if it speeded up the process of enlightenment, and so we decided to try it ourselves, and ran a group with about twenty-five people in. We called it Who Are You? or some such name, and having no real idea of the format used in America, made up our own, which was to work for twenty minute periods each way. We both joined in – as was our way – not sitting out as administrators.

I remember that I went through all manner of states of mind and feelings. At one point I felt like I was wrapped in cotton wool and being pulled into sleep. At another I felt like an animal only able to make a noise to express all that I felt was within. Then on the second day my mind became really frustrated and struggling because it was confronted by the fact it didn’t have an answer to this question – amazing that I didn’t know who I was!

After that my mind gave up and I existed in a sort of mental collapse. Then something wonderful began to happen. Ashram at that time was a commune and we ran groups there, so the building was full of people on social security, babies running around the place, somebody playing the grand piano continuously. Outside dogs were barking. There were sounds of people and birds along with traffic noise. I began to hear all these sounds not as separate, but as different parts of one great and wonderful whole. And as I listened I began to hear what it was telling me. I realised it had always been speaking to me but I had never heard it before. But that was as far as I got. The weekend finished and I had not heard the message, only the voice.

At the second weekend, quite a long time later, I went through similar preparatory phases. Then at the very last suddenly broke through to directly knowing myself as a ‘wave on a shoreless sea’. It was the certain knowing that I had no beginnings and was moving to no goal.

I am a wave on a shoreless sea.

From no beginning

I travel to no goal,

Making my movements stillness.

Constantly I am arriving

And departing,

Being born and dying.

I am always with you

And yet have never been.

I am a feather blowing in the wind,

Reality my conception that I am.

The idea of self a mask

Of many pieces made,

Which at a touch disintegrates

Into specks moved and eddied

By the cosmic wind,

With no star a final backdrop

And no thought a finite wall.

This last weekend was quite different in a number of ways. For instance in the first two weekends I had not met any issues in my life, but had moved through various states to some degree of a direct experience. The other weekend workshops were run by me and Mike Tanner, but this one was run by a woman trained in the original method, started by Charles Berner along with his wife Ava Berner, with only six minute question periods. Berner combined “the 10,000 year old self inquiry meditation, ‘Who Am I,’ with a 20th Century western communication technique developed by Ava Berner.

The first of this day of this session was difficult. The non eye contact of the helpers didn’t make sense to me at first. I felt they looked deeply unhappy people, as they never smiled. This and the rules led to a strong feeling like I had in the RAF, as if there might be some plot to keep me there. Anyway I used the technique, which was to sit in the floor opposite to a partner – both sexes were involved. One of the partners asked the other, “Who are you?” This, was repeated every few seconds unless the partner was speaking. The person the question was aimed at was to be aware of their whole being, body, mind and intuitional feelings. It was not aiming to be an intellectual conversation but to report whatever the question provoked, whether feelings, memories, silence or even panic or anger. The instructions were to never express any of it physically on the other partner.

I enjoyed it, so it was not a battle or hardship in that sense. Usually with someone giving me attention I get very quick responses, but this was slow going. I kept coming back to what I call the empty cave; meaning that I had thought that our life journey would lead to a wonder experience. But all I found was an empty cave – all that was there was Myself. It is the sense I have been struggling with in different degrees for about two years now.

Quoting from my journal, January 1991 – I remembered the session of looking for something MORE. The ‘isn’t there anything else’ session in which having looked into the abyss I just sat. I remembered the time working on a dream in which I arrived at the goal of the pilgrimage; I reached the cave of the treasure after the incredible adventure and heroic confrontations of the journey. I was the warrior or brave who had dared the many demons, hardships, traps, conflicts and temptations, arriving at last to what had appeared to be something of inestimable spiritual value, only to find an empty cavern. And, having searched everywhere in the cavern found nothing. I had sat waiting in the cavern for something to reveal itself – but sat in vain. I finally realised that the only thing in the cavern was myself – I Am It! Is that possible? See The Mountain Path

After over thirty years of spiritual quest, twenty years of them intense, I had battled through all the psychotherapeutic shit of childhood traumas etc., to find this Holy Grail, this special cave – only to find it empty. It wasn’t that I doubted I was the centre of my search. That had come home to me again and again in the past. It was what I have come to call it, ‘this is my life’. In other words, although I have found the vital sense of myself as the creator, as an undivided part of the whole, I actually am alone in my cave. I do not have a vital sense of connection with the others who are also part of my whole. I exist in cosmic, but splendid, isolation and ‘dryness’.

So, here it was again – this is my life. With each partner I came to this sense of being, of clear existence, but empty, unrelieved. The All One was Al-one. But the first breakthrough occurred when I admitted, then deeply felt, how I had shut people out of my life because of the childhood experience of being an alien in my own village during the war because I had a father with an Italian name. The war was on and Italy was on the enemy list. I remember the experience of some years ago when, after struggling a whole year with my difficulty of taking groups, the Life Essence of Humanity had stood before me and told me that I knew in my heart why this was, and for me to tell It. I managed to squeeze out of myself the admittance that I wanted to be different; a tortured stumbling confession. But I had not cried then as I cried this time, asking for forgiveness. I feel very sure that it was telling this to a stranger, another ordinary human being like myself that made so much difference. In a sense I was telling the people I had rejected.

After this it quickly arose that there was a reverse side to my wanting to be different – it was wanting to be accepted, wanting approval, wanting to be told I was okay. I felt this quite intensely, wanting Jan or one of the helpers to tell me I was good, doing it well, etc. It was a very child level of feeling.

This didn’t emerge so much in any one period of working with a partner, as something that crept out through the cracks in between. Something that particularly struck me was that while doing a work contemplation in the kitchen cleaning copper, and feeling very bubbly, Dan came to me and asked how I was doing. As far as I am aware there was no warning this was going to happen, and I had not seen him asking other people. My inner reaction was quite enormous – I had been singled out for criticism. I wasn’t doing it right. I internally collapsed into panicky feelings and was very defensive and ready to be aggressive, yet not feeling at all strong. I couldn’t understand right away what was happening, but I see this as part and parcel of feeling alienated as a child, and fearing criticism. I actually gave up at school quite early on as a junior, and was expelled at fifteen. Also while still in junior school while with other boys of my age hanging on the back of a large horse and cart, grabbing and eating wheat grains there, suddenly the farm hand driving the cart turned and hit me full in the face with his horse whip, shouting at me, “Get off you little Mussolini”! I didn’t understand what the words meant, but I fully understood what the whip in the face meant.

So, these feelings make sense in that connection. I was back at that war time being picked on again. I explained a little of this to Dan the next day, as I could see he hadn’t expected that reaction, and didn’t deserve aggression and defensiveness.

The second day seemed eternal. Not difficult, but it was hard to remember that events in the morning were actually on the same day. I am not sure now of the sequence of things, but I think what came next was my gradually going into a very powerful state of existing in the moment. This first came as a fairly fleeting but clear sense of being naked, invisible space, consciousness, being. That first phase is quite difficult to recapture now, as it didn’t get deeply established. But it was a shift from being thought, or emotion, or body centered, to being centered on naked awareness. It was a wonderful experience, in that it brought great order into my being. It made sense of my structure. Thoughts, emotions, my body, all shift and change, but my naked being was always the same, changeless.

This led to a prolonged experience of just being. It was still the empty cave experience, but this didn’t matter. It was pleasurable because thinking and feeling had largely dropped, and there was a gentle blissfulness just in existing. It was wonderful just to be. This got stronger and stronger and lasted longer than I have experienced it before. I remember saying to my partner that my existence explained itself, and there was no need for me to say who I was. It is/was such a delicious state I want to come back to it again and again. There was no effort in it at all, neither physically or mentally from the question. Usually if I sit for long periods I have pain in my right leg, and in my hips, but I felt my body had no pain, the pain was gone wiped away by touching the bliss. Also, while in this state I sat opposite a large man with glasses. While he was talking, I felt I could see on his body all the pain and tension he was carrying yet not admitting. He was saying he was fine yet his whole body was tight, his face lined with tension, and even the words he was using were telling me of his condition, yet he was not aware/admitting it, even to himself. I felt I wanted to bathe him in the peace and joy I felt but somehow, he didn’t seem to notice.

At this point, Jan – the director – said it was time to have a break, and for me this was a wonderful joke; a break from what? From existing? From life? From oneself? Where was there to go? Why did one even need to move? It was such a pleasure to just be. Of course, there was no problem about moving, but one could do it out of this state of existing. Why did people need to move away from themselves?

Enlightenment Intensive Retreats around the world – Wikipedia EI

Association of Ideas and Dreams

Associations are the real way to understand the language of dreams. Everything we see during the day we form associations with – even the association of disinterest. When I was working on the new site design, the designer said to me, “What’s the point of dreams – they don’t mean anything do they”. I noticed he had a T-shirt on that looked as if had been used quite a lot. So I said to him, “What about that T-shirt? If you dreamt of it what would you think it meant?”

He said it wouldn’t mean anything. So then I asked he where he had got it and what memories were attached to it. He said he had got it in America, but when pressed to explain his memories he refused to answer, looking embarrassed. I felt he associated and hid T shirt with a relationship he had experienced while in America. So any object or thing can represent anything you associate with it.

Prior to the publication of Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams David Hartley had written his work on psychology titled Observations on Man – 1749, and James Mill had written Analysis of the Mind – 1829, both of which examined association and set the foundations for modern psychology in the Associationist movement.

In 1899, Edouard Von Hartmann published Philosophy of the Unconscious in which he stated that there were three layers to the unconscious discoverable by the observation of association of ideas, of the use of language, wit and ones emotions. In the same period the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys – a French professor of ethnography who taught Chinese and Tartar-Manchu – anonymously published a book titled Les Reves et les Moyens and Les Diriger – Dreams and How to Guide Them – in 1867. Saint-Denys had observed and recorded his dreams from the age of thirteen. From his observations he argued that ‘The moving panorama of our visions corresponds exactly with the train of ideas arising in our mind.’ In connection with the association of ideas he gives the example of a dream from his childhood in which he was dining with his family. But also at the table was the bishop of his diocese and two mythological divinities. The association of ideas Saint-Denys discovered between his dream and his experience was that while he was translating a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which divinities appeared, he was asked to change the dirty jacket he had on for a cleaner one as the bishop of the diocese had arrived and was going to dine with the family.

Many thinkers and observers of dreams felt that it was not enough to say dreams could be understood through the association of ideas. This could mean that association explains the whole phenomena of dreaming. Through their work Freud and Jung showed the wealth of information and experience that can be uncovered within a dream’s imagery and drama. Henry Maudsley, the British doctor after whom the Maudsley Day Hospital and school of psychiatry in London was named, wrote – “We are dealing with … an actual constructive agency’ in dreams ‘whereby ideas are not merely brought together only, but new products are formed out of them.” He says elsewhere that he is struck by “the extraordinary creations of dreams,” and that a study of dreams would be “full of promise of abundant fruit.”

If we are going to use association in exploring dreams, it is helpful to recognise the difference between free association, and looking for associations with a dream’s contents. Jung points out that with free association the starting point can be anywhere – dreams, ink-blots, clouds, shapes of landscape, a prayer wheel or rosary. He gives the example of a colleague who described to him a long train journey in Russia. Not knowing the language he found himself wondering what the strange shapes of the Cyrillic characters meant. Relaxing he began to imagine all sorts of meanings for them. One image and feeling led to another until, to his annoyance he found that long buried memories and difficult emotions had become stirred up.

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The point Jung makes in connection with dreams is that if one took a dream image and ‘free associated’ with it, this could certainly lead to an uncovering of ones complexes or neuroses, but what one arrived at might have little or nothing to do with integral links with the dream. For instance the dream of the divinities and the bishop mentioned above, might, in free association, lead to a remembrance of a traumatic bullying at school, which had nothing to do with the feelings and links invested in the dream.

Finding ones memories and feelings associated with the dream however, leads to a clear realisation of how our own mental and emotional experience and structure have formed the dream. In one of my own dreams in which I was in my father’s shop attending to a man who had been shot in the arm, exploring the associations led me to uncover massive feelings to do with my relationship with my father. I felt for the first time in my life, how his lack of praise and support had led to an injury to my self confidence. In just the way my left arm supports the action of my creative right arm, and its injury would mean I could not be so effective with my right arm, so this lack of confidence had undermined my outward expression, something I was trying to attend to at that time. Working in this way, where the dream is honoured as something important instead of simply a starting point to lead elsewhere, was a turning point for Jung. He says he came to believe the dream ‘expressed something specific that the unconscious was trying to say.’ Therefore, after each excursion into associations, Jung would return to the dream and continue checking against its structure and content.

Working With Associations

That is one way of finding the associations, but you can also use Talking As or Being the Person or Thing – An example can be heard by clicking  Dream Exploration

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Associations – How to Work With Them

Here is an easy way to find ones own associations with a dream and its imagery, a number of different approaches can be used. But there are different types of association – the lanes of association are classed as Association by Contiguity, as when lightning suggests the idea of thunder, and Association by Similarity, as when one person’s features make us think of another person whom he resembles.

Listing The Symbols: Having written down the dream as fully and fluently as you can, note the different objects and characters that appear, and write them as a list in order of appearance.

Example: I was in the High Street of my birth town. I was standing where the path goes from the road into the churchyard. When I was a child this area was quite spacious, and was not taken up with the remembrance gardens. In the dream the area is covered in snow that has melted slightly and frozen again. I scuff the snow with my shoe to make sure there is ice underneath. Then I run and skate over the surface. I continue to skate in lovely curving sweeps over the area.

From the above dream a list would include

1) High Street. 2) Birth town. 3) Area between road and churchyard. 4) Snow. 5) Scuffing the snow. 6) Skating.

In writing the list give yourself space to write down comments. Then beside each entry write down A) Any connections with recent events or experiences. In the dream about my father’s shop mentioned above, the man’s name was Pete, a person I knew. I had met him about two days before the dream in a particular circumstance. So noting such things is important.

B) Any connections with past events, even those from ones childhood. In the dream above, the dreamer learned to skate as a young teenager, and as can be seen from the description of the dream itself, the place connects with childhood of an earlier period.

C) It is particularly important to look for or be aware of any feelings connected with place, person or thing in the dream.

As well as the associations we also need to consider what the actual dream imagery or events add to or comment on any associations we have. As an example of writing up ones dream associations and how they connect with the dream events, the above dream could be written up in the following way.

1) HIGH STREET – My first thoughts about the High Street, or at least the part of it I am standing in during the dream, are masses of childhood memories during the war years in the UK. There were a line of small shops there, and they provided a constant source of interest and pleasure in one way or another – comics, caps, occasional sweets. It was also the place where I crossed the main road to get from the street in which I lived, to the school. In my very earliest times of doing it alone, the crossing had been a point of danger or difficulty. Later in life I helped my own children cross the road there, either for walks or to get to school. So when I imagine standing at that spot I am flooded with feelings and memories. I am aware of the changes that have gone on over the many years I have stood in that place.

In the dream I am standing looking around, taking in the fact everything is frozen. So from what I have said, this part of the dream is about what used to be a difficult point of crossing, of change. It is no longer difficult, and anyway I have made the crossing and am taking in my situation.

2) BIRTH TOWN – This is all the background of family, experience, opinion and culture from which my present life has developed. I am back in an environment I know well and am suited to. I know my way around it. I associate this – or I make the connection – with the fact that I have been living abroad and have recently returned ‘home’, so feel I am amidst the familiar again. But I am in a new environment as far as relationship and work is concerned, and so am faced by great uncertainty.

3) AREA BETWEEN ROAD AND CHURCHYARD. In my childhood this was a safe area, with a very wide pavement. Parents weren’t so watchful here, so there was more freedom and time to play. This area was also used by a yearly fair, or as a place to stand out of the way of passers by. I suppose I feel it is what the dream depicts it as, a place to wait or watch. I often think of this in connection with my life at the moment – that I have to watch for opportunities that might appear, or to see the direction of events and what part I might play in them.

4) SNOW – I have never found snow to be something I resented. Sometimes its falling is an incredibly quiet thing, and the whole world becomes quiet because the traffic and people are slowed or stopped. Snow also covers things. In the dream the snow has melted and frozen again, and this could be dangerous or provide an exciting way of moving and expressing oneself, if one dares. Again this may relate to my present life situation, in that I have been out of work for some time. I feel as if many things in my life have ‘frozen’ – especially in my work area. So I may be feeling intuitively that nevertheless, there is a chance to move expressively. As I child, on that spot puddles would freeze, and I remember breaking the ice and eating it. I believe I broke one of my milk teeth that way.

5) SCUFFING THE SNOW. I am here testing the footing. I often do this even when it has rained. I push my feet along the pavement to find my grip, or discover what the grip is like. So I feel strongly that this is an expression of what I am doing at present. I have not only just returned to my home country, but I am looking for work, and am also am in a new relationship, so I am certainly testing the footing in many areas of my life.

6) SKATING. This felt wonderful in the dream. In fact it always felt good in everyday life when I learned to skate. Thinking about it I feel it is like taking something that is potentially dangerous – slipping and falling over – and turning it into an act of self expression and movement. So this has to do with learning skill in living.

Without in any way trying to interpret the dream, Ben’s notes against the dream images and situations have a certain theme. They mention pleasure and difficulty, danger and the overcoming of it, as well as the testing of ‘footing’. Ben is standing in what he calls a safe area, though in his waking life he says there is quite a lot of uncertainty. The place is also frozen and yet allows him to skate with great enjoyment. Put together these suggest a concern about difficulties which when examined turn out to be manageable. The dream suggests Ben has skills which enable him to deal with what might otherwise have been dangerous or cause for concern. In fact years have passed since that dream and Ben did deal creatively with the uncertainties of his situation of that time.

To work further with association of ideas, Ben could either ask himself certain questions to which he can respond in writing, or he can work with a friend who can ask and listen to his replies. The questions should be based on what is gathered from the notes put down already, and attempt to lead to the consideration of what comment the dream images and drama is making on what is found as everyday associations with the dream. Ben has said that he is in a very uncertain situation regarding work and relationship, even though he is back on ‘home ground’. So in encouraging Ben to consider and talk about this, the listening friend, or Ben himself, would need to ask or be asked, what the dream imagery has in it regarding his uncertainty.

Here is a summary of what Ben says –

“When I first arrived back from abroad I felt deeply uncertain about the relationship I had entered into. Every day I was filled with powerful emotions of distress and uncertainty obvious to other people through the way they influenced my behaviour and expression. It was at this time I had the dream. In many ways the dream encapsulates the different aspects of my situation – its slipperiness, the feelings of decision I am making, the way I am testing my footing in the new environment. What I found difficult to accept at the time of the dream was that it showed me confidently stepping out on to the ice and sliding gracefully around in sweeping curves. At the time I didn’t feel that confidence. I still felt I would ‘fall’ if I wasn’t careful and cautious. But as the weeks pass I see I can handle the situation, and many of my fears are inappropriate. I know I have the skill to move, in whatever direction is needed. So in this the dream was showing my emerging strength. In fact that skill or strength is still emerging, so the dream is a great strengthener for me, a great reminder of what I am capable.”

As you work in this way, a growing list of symbols will be dealt with and associations noted. Some symbols will be met again and again, perhaps in different dream settings. You can then look up what was said in past notes, and add a new dimension in connection with the latest dream. You will clarify how you deal with events and your own emotions, sexuality, creativity and potential. Perhaps you will discover how you deny many of your own possibilities, and discover ways of allowing yourself more scope. This will enormously speed up the learning and adapting process you face in your changing situations, relationships, and your movement through the different stages of your life. See: amplification method; peer dream work; Active Imagination; Being the Person or Thing; The Two Powers; A Master Course in Dreams.

What Are We Addicts Of?

What I slowly realised was what occurred as humans experienced self-consciousness; that this was different to anything else on our planet. Animals, like humans, are integral parts of the cycles of change and inter-relatedness. Not being self-conscious, however, they are not aware of their situation, their is-ness, their existence, they just are.

The life of Helen Keller throws an enormous light into what it is to be an animal, and the change to self awareness. Helen was struck dumb and blind at an early age when she had only learnt one word. She lived like an animal without self awareness until the age of eleven. So she grew wild, violent, and without any feeling about her own existence.

Then she was taught by a deaf and dumb teacher and remembered the first word and quickly began the climb to become a human person. So Helen suddenly made the extraordinary leap that we all make at some time, from knowing nothing but feelings, to being able to communicate and think. In describing that moment Helen has said, “Suddenly I felt… a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.” For language is like an amazing computer program that once it is fed into the brain radically changes us from an animal to an animal capable of self awareness, but it needs an upgrade .

In trying to explain to people what it was like to live a life without words and thought, Helen said that although she existed, she didn’t know she existed. There was no pain because there was no ‘Helen’ to feel any pain, only a body with sensations. She existed as a sort of nothingness. See Helen Keller and also WolfBoy

Animals live, they procreate as an expression of their creative natural and cosmic energies. But unconsciously they are part of the wonder of the cosmos. Nothing is their own, not their birth, not the life, not their death. Animals do not  suffer uncertainty about who they are, but live their life as part of nature, Life itself.

But we as evolving humans had lived in this state for millions of years where we never had to make decisions but were directed by our instincts. And being conscious and able to look back upon oneself and ask, “What am I?” – we were suddenly naked of this background of support given by instincts and felt exposed and unprotected.

But we still have the animal feelings of fear, anxiety, panic attacks and so suffer incredible confusion and depression. As humans we began to feel the awfulness, the loneliness, the absence of choice, the compulsiveness of their situation. They no longer had the connection with the Whole and the wonderful deep instinctive wisdom  that animals have, except for some remarkable women and men.

Many religious doctrines stressed this realisation. In Buddhism it is said that we are bound to the wheel of life and death without really knowing our plight.

In Hinduism it is stated as being lost and blinded by Illusion, and so chained to existence because we are blind to who or what we are and what we are doing. In Christianity it is stressed we are sinners and have no real existence if we are not saved. We are sheep – that are led to slaughter and eaten by the Shepherd.

For religions talk about eternal life, but of course they are not talking about our body’s life, but there is such a thing as eternal existence, for a cell doesn’t become old it is immortal, for it keeps dividing and doesn’t die. In dividing it constantly creates copies of itself, but as it gathers new experience, it changes what is copied, so becomes the ‘seed’ for multi-cellular organism. 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 self. This seems to say that our real and eternal self is in the seed our body developed from, and we, our ego our personality and body are ways the eternal life, the cell, can gain new experience, which is all carried in the seed.

Also we believe that ancient self is beyond knowing, but of course 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.

People run from this realisation in any and every direction. But a few men and women worked out the puzzle of human existence and death. They noticed a factor that was not in itself natural (yet it is not unnatural, as in infinite change, everything is possible). The people noticed that humans were, like animals, locked into compulsive instinctual life patterns but without the coping instincts of their fellow animals. So eating, sleeping, sex, self-seeking, were unconscious compulsive drives in which all humanity were immersed; it was found one in four women in the US are taking a prescription drug for mental health.

Most of us are in fact addicts – addicted to eating too much or too little; addicted to sex as the meaning of life; addicted to get more of everything than others, such as money or power; addicted to seeing themselves as powerless – “life’s a bitch, and then you die”; addiction to killing, hurting and maiming others in war and activity. But having self-consciousness, decisions could be made. One could decide not to live out these compulsive patterns, and through being aware if this they gradually climbed out into a new life. See Life’s Little Secrets – Ox Herding

If one actually stopped and simply recognised that we are all a part of Life and so do not need to be victims of our own ‘natural urges’ – something unusual sometimes happened. We are all born victims of circumstance, but we need not remain a victim.

Death-Your Questions Answered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find the Answer Yourself

See Your Body Is a Moving Sea 

You will need about an hour to complete this exercise. The aim of ‘moving sea’ is to continue the development of allowing spontaneous movement. Once you have used the ‘water’ approach as suggested below, there is no need to go through the preparatory stages in future uses. For instance you do not need the yawning and arm lifting. Go straight into exploring the water movements. These can be used over and over with enjoyment and gain.

2 – Remind yourself of the feeling of spontaneous movement by using the ‘arm against the wall’ exercise.

Stand about a foot away from a wall, side on, so your right hand is near to a clear space on the wall.

Lift your right arm sideways, keeping your arm straight, until the back of your hand is against the wall. Because you are near to the wall and your arm is straight you will only manage to lift your arm part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the arm.

Do not press the hand against the wall by leaning, but by keeping the arm straight and trying to complete the lifting motion. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about twenty seconds.

Now move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax and be aware of what happens.

Try the experiment before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards. In fact try it a couple of times with each arm before reading the next paragraph.

1. Extend your awareness of how your body and feelings move spontaneously by simulating yawns and allowing them to develop into stretches or movements. Stand in the middle of your space and close your eyes. Lift your arms from your sides and take your hands high above your head. Do this a few times noticing the difference in feeling with hands high or low.

Pause with hands by your sides. Now hold the idea of taking the hands up high again without consciously attempting the movement. Take your time, and be aware of how your hands and arms want to make the movement. This means watching to see if the sort of feelings that entered into your yawning and arm rising sideways exercises are in operation here. If this includes the rest of your body, or your arms go in another direction than above your head, that is fine.

Stand in your space with eyes closed. Drop unnecessary tensions as you listen to the music. Hold in mind for a moment the idea that you are giving your body space to explore the expression of the quality of water. There is no need to think up what to do. Let your body explore. Trust it to find its own way to expressive movements. Allow yourself about 30 minutes for this.

Let your experience of yawning and listening to how your arms wanted to move be used here. Take time to observe and allow the delicate motivations – magnetic pulls – directing your body to watery movement.

You will find you have resources of imagination you did not suspect. Aspects of water you hadn’t consciously set out to explore will be expressed in your movements. If you are expressing deep still waters, you will actually feel a deep quietness and power. Or if it is the power of rushing rivers, then a feeling of power will surge through your body as you touch your resources of strength and healing. The flowing feelings that arise are actually healing.

As you learn to trust this process and allow it to grow in expression, you will find unexpected themes will arise. Even though you are expressing water, your expression will have in it feelings that are particular to yourself.

While recently leading a group practising inner-directed movement, I was struck again by how creative we all are if given an environment in which we can allow our originality. One woman in the group, exhausted from the demands of her job, experienced deep relaxation out of which enthusiasm and pleasurable energy arose, leading her to dance and bathe in her own joy. A man explored his relationship with love, and saw that he needed to gather to himself the love he received from others to call out his own resources of affection. A woman who worked as a nurse met the painful emotions arising from observing the difficulties of a mentally retarded patient. Her creative movements led her to find a way of accepting the reality of life’s difficulties. The pain cleared and she felt was ready to give a more flowing response to others in difficulty.

As with the woman mentioned above who found new enthusiasm in the midst of tiredness, you will find your creative movements deal with and heal personal situations. I believe this is because the self regulating or problem solving process that underlies dreams surfaces during inner-directed movement.

See the whole book – Death-Your Questions Answered – Dreaming about Death: Insight Into The Beyond: Amazon.co.uk: Crisp, Tony: 9798692508713: Books

An enlarged version of this has been published as an eBook and paperback – click on the image – 

Dreams Are Much More Than You Can Expect

This morning at about 3am I was woken by an amazing dream, probably one of the most amazing dreams of my life. It started while I was asleep. I was in a spare piece of ground which was on the corner of a road I lived in after the war. It had been a house but when I knew it was flattened and slightly overgrown. There were stairs leading down to what must have been a basement. But I, with indeterminate sex, was sitting in the middle of this place with several others in the area. It was somewhat private as my memory is that it had a twelve foot wooden fence around it. It was the corner of Woburn Walk and Burton Street.

I began to understand what was happening and realised that I had entered a new level of inner life ability enabling me to be able to work with people in need at a distance and in the inner world. At least that is what I felt to be true. So to test this I tuned into Joe Campbell, and immediately saw that he had given birth to a better or new version of himself, and he needed to take care and nourish it.

I was sitting with a great book in my lap, and I knew or was informed in some way that the book was special as only a few were available, and I had the book through an amazing sequence of coincidences. In fact the book had been promised to a man for his birthday, but had given up his right to it when he found out I had requested it or sought it.

At first I didn’t know much about the book, but was constantly informed by an immediate intuition what I should do with the book. I had it open to a page and I was told that I could go in any direction, so I took one of the sentences in the book and said it – I want that. And now as a woman I admitted to myself that I wanted to have sex with a very attractive young man who was looking at me. I had only just thought this when the young man, seeing my interest in the book, came over and we started talking. Subsequently we did have sex.

And that was my introduction to the power of the book. At this point I began to wake and a very distinct voice spoke to me telling me that I could follow the directions or suggestions in the book, or choose to strike out in any new direction by making a decision to do so. Or if I was uncertain then I could stick my index fingernail into the edge of the closed pages and open the book at random page. He told me that this might be difficult because the book had not been used and it needed effort to pull the book open to each new page; not that I had any awareness of it.

At this point the man who was instructing me became very real to me although an invisible presence. I started to think and visualise what I would like to do. I saw myself walking up to a stranger and asking them if I could talk with them for a while, explaining that it was because of an unusual dream I had experienced. But then I realised the power of the book and thought I would like others to be able to use it.

After I had made that decision the man now told me – I was now a man – that he would give me the book. It seemed necessary and he asked me to hold my hands ready and he put it in my hands, explaining that this was The Book of Life – my life or whoever used the book. He intimated that it was not an external book but in giving it me it had become conscious and I had been in possession of the book, that in my own mind could be also called The Book of Decisions. And at some point I was told that if I approached a person or an opportunity and they were not interested or said no, then I should not pester them or keep trying but walk away – unless there is a very different approach that worked.

Then all sort of wonderful things happened, although I cannot recall the sequence of them. For instance he said that I had made a choice of my partner, Ros. And the quality of our love that had survived things that many other relationships would have been shipwrecked by anger and bitterness was a source of great creativeness.

Now I was experiencing the life of past dwelling places. I have a sense of the beauty of the individual I became aware of. Then suddenly I identified with her and spoke as her. I am a woman. How beautiful I am. I am a woman who lived. I am a woman – living in – Austria. I am a woman who was killed by people – how do people do such things? I was killed when I was raped.

And I feel love for this being that was once an expression of my spirit. I tell her I love her. “I love you ancient form from which I have grown. I give you life now here in this time. I honour you. Do I need to know who you are fully?”

There followed an understanding of a pain that I have carried for many years just under and left of my heart. I have had many chest x-rays and medical examinations over the years for various reasons, and none of them have shown or found a physical problem in that area. So, I have seen it as some form of psychosomatic pain. In this experience I understood that I had been stabbed to death after being raped. And this pain was what I carried from that time, but it exists because I as that woman I swore I would never forget that love and sex could be a murderous weapon as well as an expression of the human spirit. The woman told me it was the pain she had as she died. She said several times, “I swore I would never forget.” I still have that pain.

Then slowly the voice no longer seemed to be an external voice but was a part of my being, a sort of higher awareness. I was directed to ask myself where I had got the book in the first place, and saw myself back in that spare ground standing on the steps down to a basement, running away from my friend Eddie. He had a small chrome plated revolver with at least one live round in it and was pointing it directly at my face. I cannot remember being terribly afraid, but I did feel awful with him pointing a gun at me. And it was then I made a decision – that I wasn’t aware of at the time – that I would never taunt anyone like that. And that decision was a shaping influence in my life. (The business with the revolver actually happened, though I had forgotten until asked the question).

From that a whole sequence of decisions was seen. I saw how I made a decision to stay with my first wife when another woman came offering to be my partner – and then again when I was asked by S. if I wanted to go with her as her partner. I decided I couldn’t leave my children. It was a hard learned lesson. And yet when I walked out on my family with Brenda years later I did it easily – but faced years of terrible guilt. So, the lesson that was learnt was to meet the consequences of the choices, and in meeting the awful pain instead of running away, it always leads to some level of an enlightening experience. Running away presses one deeper into pain that is hidden and can lead to illness.

As I was experiencing an overview of my life I could see that who I was had been shaped by the choices I made.

I saw that after that we could live anywhere we chose in a beautiful location with plenty of room. And then came the question I had on my mind for ages – can I ever escape from being trapped in the discipline of working every day to answer all the emails. I was shown the misery I had caused many people in the past, sometimes over lifetimes, and I was assured that the work I am doing is a recompense, a burning out of that darkness, and when it is finished it will again be a new day dawning.

Oh yes – another question on my mind was who am I – what is behind me or my actions. How this came about was that the voice was clear in me – my own inner voice but with much authority and conviction. I had struggled with this question for days, and the voice said to me, “Are you ready to see this?” I answered yes and was told to now wait and watch. And there it was – the darkness, the void that is everything and yet is nothing. And it was explained that I had known it since I was a teenager, and had never fully accepted it – or at least never really understood its place in life. I had always felt it was a far distant thing, not an ever present daily experience. Yet now I could look back on my life, and I realised that we became what we are by our choices. Our choices make real a potential that was previously hidden within the darkness. That is a great secret. A secret I had realised many years ago and are still trying to live.

See https://dreamhawk.com/…/a-lighthearted-look-at-my-teens/ – https://dreamhawk.com/drea…/shapeshifter-or-shape-shifter/

Did I Become An Alien?

I can’t explain what I experienced because it was a very powerful physical thing caused by a breathing technique that led one to faint and pass out for about twenty seconds. At that time in my early twenties – I am now 83 – I worked in a large photographic business near Leicester Square in London. I was in charge of a darkroom in the basement dealing with printing from films, many years before today’s digital equipment. We needed special lighting with filters so only light that didn’t make the photographic paper unusable. So we had two lights with slightly yellow filters with low wattage bulbs.

It was a period of my life full of unusual and interesting people and experiences. Working in darkrooms we talked endlessly to each other and really exchanged what we were about. Women often say men never really share their feelings – maybe they never met men who worked closely with each other out of the range of bosses or women’s sight.

Not only conversation but doing the craziest things like using a breathing technique that causes you pass out. I remember there were four of us involved in that experiment. The other three men used the technique and passed out, but I tried it three times with no effect. On the fourth attempt I really went for the breathing. One of my work mates stood behind me to catch me if I fell. The fourth time it was different; I distinctly heard a low whining sound like a jet engine just starting. But the sound rose higher as an engine does as the revs increase, and when it got fit to take off I entered completely different worlds – for during the faint I experienced living four different lives at once. None of my other mates had experienced anything like this.

Unfortunately I only remember two of the lives in any detail. The first one is described as, “I was in a room filled with people, but not crowded. It was a circular room with windows all the way round, and there were about thirty or forty people in the room sitting casually at tables eating. People came and went, and there was the impression that everyone knew each other. Neither did anybody appear old. Mature, yes, but there was no age as we see it and no huge overweight. There was something different about the colours too. The room itself glowed bright with colour, not artificially applied, but as if its very materials, maybe wood, were colourful and brilliantly lit. The people’s clothes were also of attractive hues, none of them appeared formally dressed. Neither did any of their garments seem to be quite the same style as any other person’s in the room. It was obviously a place where one could eat and drink, but many came just to meet others. Yet in no way could it com­pare with a meeting place such as we usually know; for the in­formality went far deeper than the clothes. Possibly, in our terms one could call it naturalness. These people were natural in a way that was true. There was no effort to be a particular type. Nor, as has happened so often in society where groups of people decide not to conform to type, and the effort itself produced another type. These people were themselves, in a way beyond any effort. Each face was frank and open, yet completely individual. Their meetings and partings happened spontaneously, and as relaxed as themselves.

‘This was largely because there was no money in this world. I realised also that there was no marriage here, although children were conceived and born as usual. But it is not easy to adequately describe their equivalent of marriage. For here there was no insecurity, no sense of possession, no personal self-seeking for satis­faction or grasping for methods to prove oneself. These people were free. Their marriage reflected their freedom and their ability to love freely, which is not the same as so called free love. Here a couple came together because of deep links of common purpose, understanding, and sympathetic relationship. They might or might not live together; it did not matter to them. For how could it matter when there was no attempt to own each other? In our society we cover up our real feelings by social codes and fears of inferiority; or else destroy ourselves through doubt, worry and insecurity. Neither was physical sex the aim of the relationship. It was an event that occurred if and when all their feelings were right and matched. Their sensitivity to the demands of circumstance, relationship of mind, emotions and body ruled out promiscuity. Although again, there were no rules of marriage, written or unwritten, spoken or unspoken, to keep two people together or sexually faithful. For these people were indeed not faithful to one another as our vows would have us be, nor yet were they adulterous as we are. For I as the person experiencing it was not moved by the same fears or passions, grasping or self centeredness.

‘It must be added that there was, of course, no fear of not being provided for, because money did not exist and there was no crime so no police force. Crimes often appear when people are severely impoverished. Neither was there a government, or armies. People worked, or did not work, as they pleased and because they loved what they did for there were no big bosses who held wages low and people had to work to survive. So, each in this way did what best expressed their energy and interest at any time.

On our planet Earth this would be called chaos, but for these people it worked because of their inherent understanding and lack of personal avarice. Nor was there any forced education. A child inherited culture through widening ex­perience of life. There were those who enjoyed teaching, and all their energy was devoted to its study and practice. So there was plenty of opportunity to learn, not only in youth, but at any time in life. It was not a rigid system, however. Their culture was a blend of the technical, the artistic and philosophical or religious. It was a blend that had not been imposed by outer rules, cults or com­mercial powers, but developed naturally as a flowering of their own inner traits.’

The last life I remember was apparently on another planet, I had passed-out yet clearly remember being on a different world. It was night and the sky was full of obvious worlds much bigger than stars, about the size of small coins or smaller and the worlds were different colors too. I was being chased by people and ran along outside buildings on my left. It wasn’t a road  for it wasn’t paved and had no traffic at all on it for I was alone. But the reflected light from the many worlds gave enough illumination to see.

I entered a building that was shaped in some way like a beehive, for it had many entrances with openings like hexagonal holes but big enough to pass through. I hid there but was suddenly awake again, but I awoke as the man on the planet. And as I recovered from the faint I saw electric lights for the first time and felt afraid because I had woken as a different me. But fairly quickly the program that was me switched on again and the fear disappeared.

But then I was vomiting because it had upset some part of my brain. It took about four days for me to recover from feeling like I wanted to vomit whenever something move across my field of vision. So going down into the underground train system to get home, and seeing the train pull in was terrible. Over the years it has got better, but home movies were still a strong stimulus, because they constantly shifted the view point quickly, which led me to feeling I was going to vomit for many years.

A Dream That Changed My Life

This occurred on October 6^th 2011

This morning at about 3am I was woken by an amazing dream, probably one of the most amazing dreams of my life. It started while I was asleep. I was in a spare piece of ground which was on the corner of a road I lived in after the war. It had been a house but when I knew it was flattened and slightly overgrown. There were stairs leading down to what must have been a basement. But I, with indeterminate sex, was sitting in the middle of this place with several others in the area. It was somewhat private as my memory is that it had a twelve foot wooden fence around it.

I was sitting with a great book in my lap, and I knew or was informed in some way that the book was special as only a few were available, and I had the book through an amazing sequence of coincidences. In fact the book had been promised to a man for his birthday, but had given up his right to it when he found out I had requested it or sought it.

At first I didn’t know much about the book, but was constantly informed by an immediate intuition what I should do with the book. I had it open to a page and I was told that I could go in any direction, so I took one of the sentences in the book and said it – I want that. And now as a woman I admitted to myself that I wanted to have sex with a very attractive young man who was looking at me. I had only just thought this when the young man, seeing my interest in the book, came over and we started talking. Subsequently we did have sex.

And that was my introduction to the  power of the book. At this point I began to wake and a very distinct voice spoke to me telling me that I could follow the directions or suggestions in the book, or choose to strike out in any new direction by making a decision to do so. Or if I was uncertain then I could stick my index fingernail into the edge of the closed pages and open the book at random page. He told me that this might be difficult because the book had not been used and it needed effort to pull the book open to each new page; not that I had any awareness of it.

At this point the man who was instructing me became very real to me although an invisible presence. I started to think and visualise what I would like to do. I saw myself walking up to a stranger and asking them if I could talk with them for a while, explaining that it was because of an unusual dream I had experienced. But then I realised the power of the book and thought I would like others to be able to use it.

After I had made that decision the man now told me – I was now a man – that he would give me the book. It seemed necessary and he asked me to hold my hands ready and he put it in my hands, explaining that this was The Book of Life – my life or whoever used the book. He intimated that it was not an external book but in giving it me  it had become conscious and I had been in  possession of the book, that in my  own mind could be also called The Book of Decisions. And at some point I was told that if I approached a person or an opportunity and they were not interested or said no, then I should not pester them or keep trying but walk away – unless there is a very different approach that worked.

Then all sort of wonderful things happened, although I cannot recall the sequence of them. For instance he said that I had made a choice of my partner, Ros. And the quality of our love that had survived things that many other relationships would have been shipwrecked by anger and bitterness, was a source of great creativeness.

Then slowly his voice no longer seemed to an external voice but was a part of my being, a sort of higher awareness. I was directed to ask myself where I had got the book in the first place, and saw myself back in that spare ground standing on the steps down to a basement, running away from my friend Eddie. He had a small chrome plated revolver with at least one live round in it and was pointing it directly at my face. I cannot remember being terribly afraid, but I did feel awful with him pointing a gun at me. And it was then I made a decision – that I wasn’t aware of at the time – that I would never taunt anyone like that. And that decision was a shaping  influence in my life. (The business with the revolver actually happened, though I had forgotten until asked the question).

From that a whole sequence of decisions was seen. I saw how I made a decision to stay with my first wife Brenda when another woman came offering to be my partner – and then again when I was asked by S. if I wanted to go with her as her partner. I decided I couldn’t leave my children. It was a hard learned lesson. And yet when I walked  out on my family with Brenda years later I did it easily – but faced years of terrible guilt. So, the lesson that was learnt was to meet the consequences of the choices, and in meeting the awful pain instead of running away, it always leads to some level of an enlightening experience. Running away presses one deeper into pain that is hidden and can lead to illness.

As I was experiencing an overview of my life I could see that who I was had been shaped by the choices I made.

I had a distinct feeling that if I presented the book to  others it would bring in a new chapter of my life, with a lot more contact and opportunity. It felt a real dawning after a long night of my  life. In fact it felt like culmination of my life.

I saw that after that we could  live anywhere we chose in a beautiful location with plenty of room. And then came the question I had on my mind for ages – can I ever escape from being trapped in the discipline of working every day to answer all the emails. I was shown the misery I had caused many people in the past, sometimes over lifetimes, and I was assured that the work I am doing is a recompense, a burning out  of that darkness, and when it is finished it will again be a new day dawning.

Oh yes – another question on my mind was who am I – what is behind me or my actions. How this came about was that the voice was clear in me – my own inner voice but with much authority and conviction. I had struggled with this question for days, and the voice said to me, “Are you ready to see this?” I answered yes and was told to now wait and watch. And there it was – the darkness, the void that is everything and yet is nothing, a darkness and nothingness most people  run terrified of. And it was explained that I had known it since I was a teenager, and had never fully accepted it – or at least never really understood its place in life. I had always felt it was a far distant thing, not an ever present daily experience. Yet now I could look back on my life, and I realised that we became what we are by our choices. Our choices materialise a potential that is within the darkness. That is a great secret. A secret I had realised many years ago and are still trying to live.

See The New Dream Dictionary – Everything About Dreams

The Mountain Of Love

Lately I seem to be lucid and clear in my dreams – this one especially.

I was hurrying toward somewhere or something, about half way there a young attractive woman caught hold of me and kissed me passionately on the lips – I responded. She said I had her email address because I asked if we would meet again. I had asked because of the mention on my website where I said, “But I would love to find a woman companion who understands me and me her.”

When I arrived wherever it was I was hurrying to I remembered the times I had met LOVE. The first time was in March 1969. Many other times also, but a huge meeting was when I was shown, “The impulse that flashed out of that great Creative Impulse that we know as the Big Bang, and realised it was Love. It flashed through the universe permeating its every particle, in a way that we cannot yet perceive, but which is like a touch upon the pulsating chaotic movements of particles and lives.

We are the seeds of that love. We are seeds of Life. And in our small portion of the universe, we face a particular lesson through the shortness of our bodily lives. We face death. Yet that is the greatest of things.

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

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

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

For that is the heart of everything, the very act of love out of which our lives have been formed and, “If we discover the secret of that, we discover our Creator and eternal nature.”

I believe the first time I was personally aware of Loves ability to transform was in 1967 – I was going through a fairly cynical phase, and in a dream my wife Brenda told me she had met a great spiritual man. I said such people were fictional characters, but went to see for myself anyway. The man worked opposite where I lived in London, in a small printing factory on the corner of Duke Street – the factory is still there. Apparently the man used to come out onto a raised loading bay at lunch time and talk with the few people who gathered to listen to him. So I waited in the street around the loading bay with the others. Then there was a whisper that HE was coming down the stairs from the first floor of the factory. As I caught sight of him I didn’t think much of him. He was medium height, about late twenties or early thirties, slim but not skinny, perhaps athletic build. He had sandy, slightly red hair, going prematurely bald.

He was not a flamboyant man at all, but very quiet and unassuming. He stood on the loading bay and began to talk about the spiritual life. It was very simple, and I thought to myself that I had heard or read it all before in the spiritual classics and the New Testament, and he was simply repeating it. He didn’t speak for long though and he came down to meet us all. About five of us afterwards walked slowly along the street with him talking. In those days there was no traffic rushing past. Near the end of the street, before it joined Euston Road, he stopped and slowly looked at the people to my right who followed him . They seemed to go through a change. Then he turned his eyes on me. Suddenly I was pierced through with the most intense love I had ever felt. He knew me through and through, every part of my life, and he bathed me in love. I fell forward into his arms, crying, and he held me for a while then gently parted. I knew I had met love.

Over the years in other dreams or experiences, he/she, in different guises, taught me and slowly transformed me.

Today I experienced and saw, with humility, Loves wonder, and was shown the Mountain of Love.

I wasn’t trying to search for what I found, but I started to remember the times I had experienced these previous times of knowing Love. I know today it is often called ‘making love’ but what they really mean is actually having sex. Yet these times of meeting Love had no sense or experience of having sex.

At times I have had great meetings with Love. At one time I was blessed by an experience of the Great Creator starting our Universe in the Big Bang. Strangely enough it was mirrored in the experience of Rodrigo, from Mexico, who wrote, “I just read your description of the Big Bang.  I basically experienced in a dream what you describe in your “archetype of the Big Bang article”. What I also remember in my thoughts was: It has a LOT, if not everything to do, with love, as you also say. Just not passion or lust, something way beyond that.

Having been reminded of these amazing memories I was suddenly experiencing a vision of The Mountain of Love. It was humbling because I was between two other in the lowest outer circle of other men and women in the mountain with my arms stretched out to hold the hands of those beside me.

I could see I was at the foot of an immense Mountain of women and men which was solid with people. Nobody was crushed under this incredibly high peak for we were like cells in the body in which none are hurt. But at the peak I could see only one person stood, the very essence of Love. Nobody lasted long at that peak for they have been transformed as they rose in the mountain and then they attain a very different life, maybe as an angel or a god, I don’t know, and so they disappear from the peak; most likely they developed beyond present human understanding.

I was also led to know that anyone can join hands with others at that lowest outer level of Love. If you join you must not try to try to radiate or meditate love because that is simple you trying. If you join you must remain empty of trying and let the Mountain slowly transform you. Gradually you enter deep in the mountain and you are cleansed.

A view of this given me years ago –

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 it 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 their 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?”

What is the Point of Life?

It was 20 minutes to one. I got up and walked down to meet my wife. As I walked I felt all that energy flowing out of me as the experience of being clear from the things that recently had prevented me from writing or getting on with life. I felt myself to be a predator, but a good feeling, and I didn’t have to kill. As I reached the bottom of the hill the old hassle about the final destination of mankind arose again. Every so often I stood still and explored this. It was like looking right along each corridor of life and seeing there was no final destination. Each one only pointed to exactly where we are – a happening that includes being an animal, a struggling human, an expression of cosmic events. If we did evolve consciousness or body, there is no set good place to end up. There is only existence just as it is now – a life poised between the opposites. There is more to this that I find difficult to explain in words.

But perhaps that is we are constantly not seeing what we are, a very strange mixture. So strange people go to extremes viewpoints in their fruitless attempt to deal with what life is. One such viewpoint is that life and living it are a heap of shit, massively painful, that life’s a bitch and then we die, so why not kill ourselves now? We see this lived out day by day by many young people and also those who achieved fame who have taken in the view that their life is painful and meaningless, and an accident in a world that doesn’t give a f**k about them; so they end it.

Another view is that some strange masculine creature called God is in charge of everything so we can continue living with hope. But even some of these people ask the stupid question, “Why does God allow such terrible things?” That is like standing before an erupting volcano as massive amount of lava is approaching their house and they are crying, “Why are you doing this to me?”

It is strange that God is quoted as saying, “God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Stranger still that the image of god was male and female – so why was the female side of God edited?

As for, “Why are you doing this to me?” Perhaps it is because they have missed the point that there is only existence just as it is now – a life fixed between the opposites. Yes we are all the time living and facing Chaos and Order – Because the two face and meet each other we have the action of Creation. With just Order one’s life would be stuck in the sort of life like robots who only can do just what their programming allows. That is the sort of life people want who ask, “Why does God allow such terrible things?”

Unfortunately for them, human life is stuck between Chaos and Order . But there is more. Recently a man sent me the image of a pile of shit in response to the things I write about, I suppose thinking it would upset me. How could it upset me when I see that we are also living a life poised between the opposites of Creation and Decay – so I told him he and I are a heap of shit, for we have a good load of it in our lower intestine, because without it we would not be able to carry on living. we have to include the power of decay to continue to live – but we also have the power of creation. It is missing this wonder of our existence between huge opposite’s that causes us to constantly miss this amazing life truth that defeats many people. For people believe that only one is right, so the opposite must be wrong.

Take darkness and light – the media is full of this huge mistake, seeing darkness is evil and light as the sign of goodness. It is when the two meet that the wonder of colour and form appear. If you were just light you would be lost in the light without any shadow, colour and form, so you wouldn’t know you exist for you only are aware of being because you are a compound of darkness and light.

The same applies to goodness and evil. The great women and men of our times have all gone beyond the limits of the good to create the new. As individuals we are interfaced between the huge forces of biological drives and social expectations, but we can seldom satisfy both. What we inwardly desire may be socially frowned upon, what is socially expected of us may spark no real interest internally. Of course one need to keep the balance between the opposites we face.

So the way of resolution for many people is through creativity, the unity of the opposites or through innovative actions such as seen in the lives of people like The Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones were at the forefront of the British Invasion of bands that became popular in the United States in 1964 and were identified with the youthful and rebellious counterculture of the 1960s. Rooted in blues and early rock and roll the band started out playing covers but found more success with their own material songs such as I Can t Get No Satisfaction and Paint It Black.

To find that creative balance we need to remember that we are the latest expressions of the HUGE creative process – The Big Bang. We tend to think of ourselves as local creatures and think that our mothers and fathers were our local beginning. But our planet and bodies are made of star material. Our mother did not create us in her womb for no human person could work and create from a cell the amazing changes and intricate processes that are necessary to form a human baby. It is LIFE – whatever that mystery is – that formed you.

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

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

Finding this very ancient self, hidden as it is by all your personal thinking and opinions, you find you are free from all the painful emotions, suicidal urges and personal hurts. To explore it see Opening to Life – https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/

So my summary is that we are part of an amazing cosmic process. When we take an overall look, a simple view is that it is all about procreation – to form or create seeds that are sowed on our earth, but it is often not producing human babies, but the creative products that are the fruit of human lives. Humans are like any plant life, as such it has challenges for we are constantly at he centre of so many opposites – negative and positive energy, matter and anti matter, sleep and waking, male and female, pain and pleasure, light and darkness, life and death, and death and resurrection, war and peace, matter and anti-matter, negative and positive, the void and bodily existence.

To be whole we need to accept and meet these opposites. As human seeds we continue despite failures if we dare to face challenges. What can we become? Well it seems we have freedom of choice, for we have not been made as robots and there is no fixed direction – so it seems obvious to me that we can become murders, saints, perverts and real lovers, parents of children and our own creativity, we can become suicides or pathfinders, space people and explorers of other worlds – including the depths of space and the immensity of ourselves, for we can become the wonderful creators like That which formed us.

The Beginning of it All – Genesis

We were led to believe that Genesis was a fantasy and fairy tale dreamt up to make people have a fantastic view of God. But science has only recently managed to say exactly what Genesis told us thousand of years ago

Let me explain so you too can see it for yourself. God created the Earth so we were told, but first it says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

The name “Elohim” is one of the many different names, each with a clearly defined meaning, which are applied in the Bible to “God” considered under various aspects. But Hebrew was a misunderstood language and translators did not understand that each letter of the Hebrew language had very definite meanings as Alpha and Omega does in Greek. But when looked at in this light Elohim does not translate as God but gods.

So it can be said that “Elohim” as “He – the – gods,” or “the Unity of gods,” or “the Activities of the Eternal One,” i.e., God expressing and revealing Himself outwardly in creative activity. For the creative forces that created the universe were unknowable. Exactly as science says about the Creation in it theory of the Big Bang. For it says that an unknowable Something created an explosion and the Natural Forces that arose from this explosion worked toward making the universe now possible.

That was the first thing, but the second was, “darkness was on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of the gods – the natural forces moved – upon the receptive forces – I changed that to try to give it its original meaning.

Therefore, at the risk of making many mistakes, I will give a free rendering.

That which moved not and remains always unknowable expressed out of itself seven creative forces. There was conceived within the one purpose of these the plan and a living spiritual plan of the whole cosmos. From beginning to end, all existed as divine realities in this conception. But, it was not yet made real in time, space and motion. But the creative energies began to bring into being the forces and archetypes that would be the body upon which the physical universe would later hang.

The basic receptive substance of the universe was in darkness, chaotic and unmoulded, as yet without form. All the elements of existence were in chaos and unknown. But the creative forces extended into the unformed. Beyond time and space the divine energies caused a great symphony of vibratory energy to express. The Word, which through its patterns of vibrations would be the pattern of creation.”

Science states that after the creative explosions the universe was in darkness for 300,000 years. Then,  “Electrons combine with protons and neutrons to form atoms, mostly hydrogen and helium. Light can finally shine.” Let There Be Light.

“And the forces of nature worked to create light so Let there be light, and there was light’.

“And on the seventh day the gods ended their work which had been made; and the rested on the seventh day from all their work which they had made.”

A day is translated as a period of time, and science points out that it took it took seven great periods pf  change to reach the situation we know know.

Here are uncovered all the ridiculous myths we have been taught, such as the demeaning of women in the Bible, and the fact that Adam is not a single person.

Hebrew, an ancient language, that is quite different to English. This becomes obvious when we remember that the Greek letters alpha, and omega, mean ‘beginning’ and ‘end’. We still say ‘alpha and ‘omega’ to mean the beginning and the end of something, but perhaps without knowing that in a similar way, all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet have a meaning quite by themselves.

Just as the Greek – Alpha – means “the beginning” so does the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet Aleph mean primal creation, for it is the inaudible out-breathing preparatory to making a sound and only made audible by the vowel pointing that underlies it. Daleth as a letter means multiplication, becoming many, and Mem is the sign of unlimited plurality. If we put these together, we discover something interesting. ADM – Adam.

Symbolism of Adam and Eve

Here, staring us in the face, is the possibility that the word Adam is not singular. It is not referring to an individual. It says – the first creative cause multiplying and becoming many. If anything, it is referring to a force or process in nature, certainly not some physical forebear. Yet for generations this is what we have been led into believing. But let us take the story from the beginning and see the wonderful wisdom it unfolds. It would take too much space to do this word by word as has been done with the word Adam, so I will only give a synthesis of this deeper translation, with occasional notes. To make this understandable without too many notes, I will have to enlarge on the actual words used. For instance, a general translation of the first verse of Genesis is. “Firstly, Elohim created the heavens and the earth”.

ADAM as the forebears of humanity is both female and male. Here it is all explained, along with description of our status as fallen angels who are learning how to rise again through many lives. also the influence of heavenly bodies on our fate and fortunes.

Read it here – The Secret Bible