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