The Next Step – The End User

I have met several criticisms of my view of dreams, and the fact that I talk of death, extrasensory perception, out of body experiences and reincarnation as facts, criticism such as, “You have to look for yourself as a important person to another person , a important human being to the people and to your surroundings. Your belief is full of ignorance ,what do you think of yourself super human your just a person full of imagination ,you have a wrong idea of human life ,,,you need to read and search for yourself.”

So just to set the scene right I want to describe some of my own personal experiences. 

We are in touch with more than our physical senses

First I want to explain something that I witnessed early in my life, that for me showed a flaw in the argument that the mind, or what one is aware of, is limited to the brain and to what we know through our senses.

One morning my wife Brenda woke and told me she had dreamt about the baby of two of our friends. The friends, who I will call Jane and Bob, were living about 200 miles from us. We knew Jane was pregnant, and about a week or so before the dream we had received a short letter saying their baby, a boy, had been born. We didn’t have a telephone at the time, so the letter was our only means of communication.

In the dream Brenda saw the baby and a voice from behind her told her the child was ill. Its illness, she was given to understand, was serious, and would need to be treated with a drug taken every day of the child’s life. The reason for this illness and the drug use, she was told, was because in a past life the being now born as the baby had committed suicide using a drug.

I didn’t take the dream seriously, thinking it was some sort of personally symbolic dream. But we couldn’t seem to extract any personal meaning for Brenda, so just in case I sent an account of the dream to Jane and Bob. About a week later we had a letter from them saying that the letter and dream had crystallised their already existing anxiety about the baby. It had not been feeding well and was fretful. On taking it to the doctor nothing definite could be found but special tests were made in hospital. From these it was discovered the baby was dying. It lacked an enzyme that was needed to digest calcium. To compensate it was given a drug, which it has had to take every day of its life to make up for the lacking enzyme.

I don’t think there can be any clearer example than that, of the mind having some level of input other that information gathered through the physical senses and therefore what is already known in the brain. I use the example because it is not hearsay. It didn’t happen to somebody else who reported it to me. I witnessed every step of it. Recently I met the baby of that dream again. He is now a man of 35, and still needing the daily drug.

Out of body experience

Years before that I had an amazing experience of my my awareness going beyond my body’s senses. I was in the RAF living in Germany, and one night I had gone to bed early. I must have fallen asleep when suddenly I felt as if I were shooting upwards and experienced a feeling of coming out of pressure and was now free – like a cork out of a bottle. Then I was awake and looking down at my sleeping body and felt terrified (I realised afterwards it was terror that I was dying). Then I remembered reading about experiences such as this and was laughing uncontrollably through the release from terror.

Then I was travelling across the German countryside where I was living, curled up with my knees to my chest, looking down at the countryside beneath me. I noticed as I passed over the rural countryside what looked like radiations emerging from several places; they were a bit like ripples on the surface of water when a stone has been thrown into it. But these ripples were three dimensional, and I wondered it they were emerging from people, perhaps praying.

Then I was over the sea and saw many ships below, but suddenly I was standing in our sitting room at home in London. It was such an astonishing experience I stood in shock looking down at my body, feeling it and trying to understand. My body felt solid and real and I was dressed in outdoor clothes not my 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”.

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

		Then at the same time my dog must have heard me shout because he woke and came rushing to me and was so full of love for me he rushed around where I stood barking and showing his joy. I later heard from my mother saying she had had been alone that night as my father was out, and she had seen the dog get up and bark and jump around behind the settee, where I stood, for no apparent reason.
My dog Vincent in front of the gas fire – 1956

I learned enormous and important lessons from that. I realised that having no physical body the living cannot usually hear us. They need physical sound to know we are present, but yet another part of her knew and responded. So I saw that if she had thought of me and spoken to me I would know, even though she might not be able to hear my reply – unless she was a medium or learned to listen to thoughts. The reason being that in the body most people cannot communicate via thoughts.

Example:  His name was Dan McCampbell, but I had never expected to see him again. After all, he had been killed in Vietnam.

As Dan and I communicated, I realized that we did not speak to each other as we had communicated in our earthly lives. As soon as I thought, “Dan, I recognize you,” it was communicated to him. We were communicating telepathically, which connotes a communication of words between minds by means other than by vocal communication, but such a description falls short of the spiritual communication we were experiencing. We were not only communicating with words; we were communicating with feelings and emotions. As we thought, we also emoted our thoughts. Both thoughts and emotions were being communicated telepathically and spiritually in a manner that far surpassed normal human communication.

Other great lessons I learned that day was that according to popular teachings about out of the body experiences (OBE), I should have been connected by a ‘silver cord’ to my physical body. Also it was said that the extended body was a copy of the physical. My projected body was in fact different, with different clothes, and in fact was an extension of how I thought of myself. In other words I was in a world of thoughts, and could in fact have been any shape.

I earned that my consciousness or mind can exist apart from my body. Most people believe that their body is THEM, and so when the body dies they believe they too die. But i experienced that is not so. See What Happens When I Die?

Another interesting thing is the sudden shift from travelling across countryside and sea to being at home in London. Again I see this as a manifestation of our thinking. I thought I had to travel to get somewhere. I fact there was not need to. I see the silver cord phenomena as another extension of belief – that we cannot exist without the body. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/out-of-body-experiences/ 

 An Unusual No Body Projection

Such an event occurred to my first wife Brenda and I, and involved our daughter Helen. At the time of the event we lived in a two-bedroom house in Amersham, Bucks, in the UK. We had three children at that time, Mark, Helen and Neal; their ages were between eight and four. As we only had two bedrooms the children all slept in one room. The door to this was opposite our own bedroom door at the top of a long flight of thirteen stairs. For some reason, the children had started waking at about two or three o-clock in the morning, and playing as if it were time to get up. Half asleep, Brenda would go into their room, tell them off for waking so early, get them back into bed, and return to bed herself.

On the night of the event we had slept soundly, but Brenda and I were woken by the sound of the children’s door handle turning, then the sound of bumping footsteps going down the stairs. As we listened we both had the same thought – ‘Oh no, it’s the children awake again.’ The children had never been downstairs before though. But Brenda, thinking dark thoughts of having once more to get up in the middle of the night, went out to investigate. I heard her switch the stairs light on, go down the stairs, switch the sitting room light on, and I followed her via the sounds of her movement as she looked in the kitchen and even toilet – we didn’t have a bathroom. Then up she came again and opened the children’s door – strange because we had assumed it had been opened. When she came back into our room she looked puzzled and a little scared. ‘They’re all asleep and in bed’ she said.

We talked over the mystery for some time trying to understand just how we had heard the door handle rattle then footsteps going down the stairs, yet the door wasn’t open. Also, the door handles on our doors were too high for the children to reach without standing on a chair. There was a stool in the children’s bedroom they used for that, yet it wasn’t even near the door when Brenda opened it.

Having no answer to the puzzle we stopped talking and settled to wait for sleep again. But suddenly a noise came from the children’s bedroom. It sounded like the stool being dragged and then the door handle turning again but the door not opening. ‘You go this time’ Brenda said, obviously disturbed.

I opened our door quickly just in time to see the opposite door handle turn again. Still the door didn’t open. I reached across, turned the handle and slowly opened the door. It stopped as something was blocking it. Just then Helen’s small face peered around the door – high because she was standing on the stool. Puzzled by what had happened, I was careful what I said to her. ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

Unperturbed she replied, ‘I want to go to the toilet.’ The toilet was downstairs, through the sitting room, and through the kitchen.

Now I had a clue so asked, ‘Did you go downstairs before?’

‘Yes’ she said, ‘but mummy sent me back to bed!’.

The inexplicable might show us what really is real

I had certainly heard the descending footsteps, but I had also heard Brenda open the door to the children’s bedroom, along with Brenda’s own witness, so I knew Helen had not physically descended the stairs. Nevertheless, two of us had heard the door open and the footsteps. Helen also claimed she had been down, but Brenda had sent her back. So there was synchronicity between three people’s experience, but no physical evidence of the descent. Therefore, had Helen dreamt the incident? If so, how did we hear the door handle turning and the footsteps descending? Was this positive paranoia? I don’t think so. And I don’t think it was a non-causal event, or chance collection of incidents either. What I do believe is that our present psychological theories of consciousness and mind are inadequate to explain such events. My own best explanation is that consciousness is not something that is separated and individual. Through our body senses and language we define an area of our own personal experience that we call self. Through the perspective of this ‘self’ we are aware of having a distinct personality with unique experiences and memory. This personal self is rather like a highlighted area within a three dimensional, or multidimensional, field. This is what I have previously called the ocean of sentience, or ocean of mind. Our personal awareness colours the water with individual memories and experience. Our body brain helps us to tune into what is individually ours within the ocean of sentience, just as a radio tunes into particular signals within the huge range of radio waves acting on its aerial. However, if we explore the depths of our personal awareness, delve into what we call the unconscious, we find that our personal self begins to shade into a universal consciousness. The waters of self and the waters of the ocean are not separated. This universal consciousness is what Jung called the collective unconscious. Other cultures have given it other names – the ocean of Brahm for instance in Hinduism. Within Buddhism there is also the phrase, ‘the dewdrop slips into the shining sea’. This illustrates the individual becoming aware of melting the boundaries of their personal awareness, and becoming aware of the ocean of sentience within which they exist. 

Distance is no barrier

Here is an interesting one that occurred while I was at work. I was working with a friend, John, who owned a hotel. I was mending something for him on a flat roof of his private house. Meanwhile he had driven away back to the hotel. About twenty minutes after he had gone I heard him shout my name with great urgency. In fact he called me twice. I was puzzled and thought he must have returned without me noticing. As the tone of voice carried urgency I climbed off the roof and went in search of him. Moments later the telephone rang in his house. It was John, still at the hotel. He had just turned the water on for the first time after a spell of cold weather, and bad pipe bursts were apparent all over the hotel. He had rushed to the phone to call me for help because i did the plumbing there. In some way I had ‘heard’ him call before he reached the telephone.

The hotel was about a mile away on the other side of the town. There was obviously no way I could have heard his voice with my physical ears. So whatever signal John’s anguished desire for my presence created, my mind had turned it into what appeared to be his actual voice calling me. That was understandable to me, while the subtle energies generated by John’s anguish, although obviously apprehended by some part of my mind, were not sensible to me. That John had not actually spoken my name until he reached the telephone is an important detail. Through it we gain some clarity of how this subtle side of our mind works. It was not a sound that I had in some way psychically heard at a distance. It was a powerful emotion and a desire to contact me in John that my mind sensed and presented as the actual sound of my name being called.

  A Breakthrough

One last experience I would like to describe. In 1953, when I was sixteen, and already deeply interested in the possibilities of the human mind, I took a course in deep relaxation. I practiced every day for three months, tensing my muscles, relaxing them, then passing my awareness over and over my body, dropping the feeling of tension. After three months I was quite proficient. One evening, after coming home from dining out with friends, I went to bed thinking I would not do my usual practice, but in the end decided to practice even though it was late. After going over my body several times I suddenly lost my right arm. I had no sensation of it other than space, hugeness. Then I lost my left arm, and – my whole body. It was like falling through a trap-door into the stars. I had no sense of having a body. Thoughts had ceased, except for a murmur apparently a thousand miles away. Yet in blackness, in immensity, in absence of thought I existed vitally as bodiless awareness. We think that we are our body because we have no other experience of our existence. So we identify with our body and so are terrified of dying – which in a sense is what we do every time we go to sleep and leave our sense of a body behind.

After that day I could repeat the experience almost any time I sat down and used the relaxation technique. I felt at the time, and still believe it correct, that I had fallen asleep yet remained awake. Waking, critical awareness, had been taken through the magic doors of sleep into a universe it seldom ever sees – deep dreamless sleep. I realised that as we enter sleep all our sense are switched off and we are fundamentally bodiless awareness. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/levels-of-awareness-in-waking-and-dreaming/

I realise that what I describe must seem like a strange and even imaginary world to many people – except that it isn’t – the man taking the drug every day is a fact. But many people do not give three months of their life in everyday practice at the age of 16 to break through the barriers of our physical senses.

But there is a huge misunderstading about what we are. Most people are certain they are their body fulll stop. But wait, you are only aware of having a body because of consciosuness. Without conasciousness you have no body; in fact the whole world and everything you have experienced in it has only been real becase of your consciousness. Obviously peoople argue that consciousness exists because we have a body and brain and only existvin a three dimension world, but that does not explain my explain my and others  experience of waking in a world of no body and immense awareness. See OBE

But the wonder of it is that most of us believe we are male or female because of our body. But fundamentally we are just the wonder of awareness and can be anything we like – obviously it takes an age to change our body, but we can be free of all the strange thoughts and the tension between the sexes. We are dual beings.

  Being Human

As the seventies merged into the eighties I went through some years of constant pain, on top of the pain of depression I was usually in.  I had tried everything to find a way out of that pain, psychotherapy, LSD sessions to explore its source, but nowhere could I find any relief.  Then I had a dream in which I was walking along on the flat roof of a university building, and in my right hand I was carrying the head of a man stripped of flesh, and in my left hand a bag containing the dismembered body of that man.  As I looked from the roof I saw a man draw up in a car park below and I threw the head to fall near him.  He picked it up thinking it was plastic, but then dropped it in horror.

I was running dream groups at the time, and in one of them toward the end of the weekend some of the group offered to listen while I explored the dream.  I explored it much as I did the seed, opening to what arose within.  Quickly I felt the depth of the dream.  The man was myself.  I had torn myself apart trying to deal with the constant pain.  I had even put before other people the awful situation I was in, and they had pulled back.

But the greatest impact came as I went deeper into the dream.  I realised with absolute certainty that there was no way out of my situation.  It was quite terrible to realise I was forever trapped. But at the same time I realised that love was like breathing. I couldn’t, didn’t want to, stop loving either my children or my wife. As long as I could, I would suffer the pain the conflict produced.

The realisation that there was no escape had a profound effect on me.  My whole inner being collapsed.  I had completely given up.  There was no more point in making any effort.  Then everything went quiet.  Even my breathing slowed down, until, breakthrough.

Everything fell away and I entered a new relationship with myself that lasted for three days.  I recognised it as what is often called enlightenment or liberation.  During those three days I experience total freedom from pain, total freedom in regard to every choice I could make, and I existed all the time in NOW.

Of course it disappeared after the three days.  But I had seen clearly what was creating the pain, and what liberation consisted of.  I, like most of us, had created a world, inside and out, made up of habitual responses to events, painful emotional reactions to relationship and situations.  These responses were like buttons that were pressed again and again by events and circumstances.  When pressed they would play the same feelings over and over again, as many times as the button was pressed. See Conditioned Reflexes

Some of my buttons were to do with the culture in which I had been raised, a culture full of ideas about guilt, right and wrong, success and failure.  In leaving my children to go with my wife I had been guilty of all of those.  I was guilty of being a bad father.  I was a failure in my first marriage.  I was wrong to do what I had done.  I was being torn apart by all those feelings of guilt and wrongness.

But the experience had shown me that I was not actually those feelings.  My real being was a sort of strange emptiness which was open to everything but held on to nothing.  I was not even really a man or woman, or even the body. So, I just got down on my hands and knees, as it were, and started building the life I knew I could have.  It was quite hard work, but I have moved a long way into that freedom.  Freedom to love, freedom to be loved, freedom to be with or without someone, to be alone, freedom to not tear myself apart with guilt, with feelings of failure; freedom from patterns of response that could play for ever if I kept pressing the buttons. See The female in the male

Virtual Reality of Waking Lucid Dreaming

During my life I developed the ability that I see as a form of Virtual Reality. Not the type using technical equipment but an amazing mental ability. I see it as an ability that is latent in us, and produces amazingly rich emotional and mental experience too. Where does so much inspiration and healing arise from? My feeling is that we are all much bigger that we are usually aware of.

“An example of this happened while I was in Los Angeles in a friend’s hotel room. I was busy writing and suddenly I was in the state I call Virtual Reality or Waking Lucid Dreaming. What first happened was that I was suddenly shot into a state where I had lost awareness of the room and yet I was still awake. In this state I had a very distinct image, along with a feeling, of a small bird fluttering close my head all in darkness.

What was incredibly clear and real was the way its wings were fluttering. I could really see and feel that they were not simply waving up-and-down but vibrating at great speed. The bird kept fluttering near me, and I realised it was trying to attract my attention so I would follow it. So, in fact I did and it led me into a condition of great darkness. I could see or hear nothing. But the bird led on and I trusted it and we came to what was recognisably a dark cave from which were slowly emerging hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. I understood as I saw this that an enormous number of people throughout the world were now emerging from a dark place. I realised that there was the need for many workers to meet them and help them to learn to live life within the light. I realised also that I and Dakota are two of the workers engaged in this.”

In trying to understand this I realised that many ‘pathways’ to one’s core left the participant in symbolic understanding of their experiences. The above is typical of that. Like any dream it is all symbolical and should not be understood by seeing the symbols as if they were mystical. That is the wonder and real mystery of such communications, for such are communications and are summaries of ones experience giving new information.

Taking the first symbol of darkness as a basic life experience and not as the mystical darkness of the soul, it suggests that I have not been able to see something clearly because I am in the ‘dark’; as a life condition I am unaware of where I am going. The small bird fluttering suggests that something has caught my attention, something I cannot really see but can feel, it is my intuitive sense. I have trusted it in the past and so trust it to lead me.

It leads me to see thousands finding their way to the light which seems difficult for many. It is again, not the mystical light that others rush to, but the ability to have a clear understanding of what are the possibilities of living, the difficulties people face and some means of dealing with the many facets of human existence.

  The Paradox

The strange paradox is that Tony is still so ordinary and human, with all that entails – sex, hunger, longing, love, success, failure. But within that human being is a spirit that moves more easily in and around such human experiences.

What sometimes puzzles me is how to communicate that to others. Different if I were some sort of enlightened hero. Then I could simply stand up and be recognised. Instead, what I find is that in my ordinary humanness I am able to love a little more fully, fail a little more easily, succeed with less pomp, and enjoy being in the arms and body of those who love me. Oh yes, and the wonder of being in my tiny garden.

Enlightenment is something that never ends in that we continually grow. Permanent enlightenment? Well, I believe there is music, Music and MUSIC.

To be permanently calm is to be permanently calm. Enlightenment, as the Tibetan Buddhists teach, is an evolving thing, for there is no beginning and no end to that mystery. See Jesse Watkins Enlightenment

 A Recent One

As we drew level with the tomb in the cellar of the grand house an enormous change occurred in me.  Suddenly I became a woman.  It was not imagination.  I was now completely experiencing myself as a woman whose tomb we had approached.  As such I was torn by an immense pain of loss.  As my complete identification deepened my body curled up with the pain as I was torn by wretched crying.  Suzanne who I was working with told me my voice changed as I cried out again and again for release from the pain of losing all my children, my husband, even my parents.  My hands were clawing my legs in an effort to tear them open and express the misery, and I was screaming that I could not bear to live any longer with such pain.  I cried out to God to take me, for there was nothing left for me to live for.  “Why?  Why did this happen to me?  Why has everything I loved been taken from me?”

There was no response to these awful cries and tearing sobs.  But slowly a shift began.  It seemed to me as an observer witnessing this awful pain, that by entering this place the spirit of that woman had woken in me.  But as she had died in such unresolved agony of loss, that is what was met when she awoke.  But gradually she realised she was alive again in a new way.  She began to recognise that I was holding her within me.  Because I was not frightened of pain and emotions, the misery could play itself out in me.  And because my understanding of what was happening flowed into her awareness, she slowly saw and felt her loss in a different way.  In fact we were both realising she was experiencing resurrection, and that in turn meant there was no final death as believed by many.  Therefore there was no loss as she had originally felt it.

At this point something truly incredible occurred.  She and I both realised she was one of my past dwelling places.  But for her the viewpoint was slightly different; for she saw me as a continuation of a life that she had failed to be a part of because of the awful pain of loss. It had kept her from flowing into what was her future as my life.

From my perspective she was one of the past dwelling places the spirit that was at the core of my present personality had lived in and as.  She was not one of my past lives, because the personality that I am was unique and had not lived that woman’s life.

What Shaun had explained about the gradual loss of his personality, and its absorption into something more inclusive and connected with all life, illustrates this.  If we give the name of spirit to what Shaun was absorbed into, and if we see that spirit dips into aspects of itself in the life of the body, and develops a unique personality, then we begin to grasp the relationship between the woman and myself.

Perhaps a clumsy analogy of this is to say an artist might paint many pictures.  Each picture is unique.  The artist learns from the work and difficulties in creating each picture, and can use what is learned in the next painting.  But the next painting is not the reincarnation of the previous.  The only link is through the artist.

Because I was gradually becoming aware of the spirit that had given me life, I was meeting the previous personalities, the previous life experiences and lessons my personality was shaped out of.  The woman was a previous dwelling place of my spirit.  To know her was to know more of my spirit and its eternal odyssey.

In knowing me the woman’s grief melted away, for in our meeting we both realised we gained existence out of an eternal spirit flowing into our lives.  I could feel the change in her as she knew she was part of ongoing life here in the present, and the children and family she thought dead were also part of that river of lives.

It was a wonderful thing to witness and experience her resurrection.  I could feel that she was a part of myself I had not known, a part of my potential I had not claimed.  But the greatest feeling was of wonder that her life of the past could be resurrected into the present and given a new being, a new body, a new heaven and earth.  This is a very moving thing to remember.

Looking back at this I feel that the term previous dwelling place really fits what I experienced.  The woman’s personality and life events were where the spirit that lies behind my life had dwelt at one time.  Remembering it meant that I was realising the continuum of experience that had, over ages, led to my present personal existence.

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

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