Posts Tagged ‘seer’

Super Minds – A Book That Changes Lives

I have recently added a few more short biographies to the book – and hope you enjoy them.

Short biographies of extraordinary men and women. Each biography also includes methods you can use to develop or extend your own physical and mental senses. We are all multi dimensional beings, existing in a physical and apparently solid world of the body. But we also daily experience the subtlety of thoughts, none of which can be held in the hand. Also we know the energy flows of emotion and inspiration, and at thrilling moments, the worlds lying beyond everyday life. The book takes you into these worlds through the lives of these extraordinary people. A young mother wrote – The message of Super Minds is very positive. I wish such a book had been available to me in my youth. It would have made sense of a lot of what I felt at times — especially the inter-connectedness of things and the sense that if we just let ourselves ‘be’ we could touch the sky. The book captures that – and I’m certain that many children and adults alike will respond to it.

Click to see it in Kindle eBook and Paperback format in the UK and in USA and also in Australia – Brazil – Canada – China – France – Germany – India – Italy- Japan- Mexico – Netherlands – Spain – Turkey

You may need to put the name of the book you are interested in.

Chapters Include

Chapter 1 – The Weird and Wonderful Mind

Chapter 2 – The Man Who Remembered Everything

Also – From Black Slave to Genius

Edgar Cayce and the Cosmic Mind

Ramana Maharshi a remarkable guru

Hadad the Rogue Yogi

Eileen Garrett – Psychic

Sai Baba of Shirdi – the man who knew all creatures needs

Schermann – Graphologist Extraordinaire

Jesse’s Journey Through Madness

Padre Pio – Modern Saint

Evelyn’s Dowsing Adventures

Animal Children

Helen Keller – The Sighted Blind

I Died but I Am Alive

Wonders of Your Mind

Readers appreciation:

Hi Tony, I can’t believe I found you again! You just popped into my mind and I thought I’d try and find you and get in touch with you. I’m not sure if you still remember me, it’s Amal, the girl who emailed you about ‘Super Minds’ at age 12. I was telling my younger brother about “the man who remembered everything” then pulled your book off my shelf and told him he should read all the other stories. Can you believe it? I’ve had your book for 15 years! I can’t remember when the last time I spoke to you was- I think I had decided to do a masters degree in Neurosciences, attracted by what the mind could hold and what the brain could do; ever involved in discovering the power of the mind. A lot has changed now. I’m a filmmaker and very happy in my life. How is everything with you?

Take care, My warmest regards – Amal Al-Agroobi

Dream Time

As an experiment while staying with my son at Cambridge he asked me questions to be responded to by spontaneous voice. To me, the responses were so marked I want to record at least one of them.

Spontaneous voice is a process I came across as I was experimenting with allowing the dream process while awake. While dreaming we spontaneously move, speak, eat, have sex, and all these arise while our conscious will is ‘asleep’ or surrendered. Therefore we can say the unconscious itself is speaking when we speak in dreams. When I allowed this while awake the results were often startling, as what was said frequently gave information or viewpoints there were totally new or unknown to me consciously. So the following question and its response about dreaming was not previously thoughts or idea I had consciously entertained.

The first question arose because we had been talking about what it was in humans that led most of us to be unaware of the possible wider life – the unconscious – they live in. This was not the exact question but it was certainly about the relationship between the conscious self and the unconscious.

My son asked me the question and I allowed spontaneous voice to respond to it.

The response was long, and I can only remember the highlights. It started by stating that to understand the question one needed to know that it had to do with information gathering through the senses, and the way we responded or reacted to this. I will try to state it verbatim.

To understand this you need to realise that the brain works in certain ways. It is something like the brain running a computer program, like a set of responses. Or it can be like something flowing – a stream – which creates channels. So our responses to information gathered is that it runs or triggers a program or set of responses. Or the reaction flows in already created channels.

But there is something else. To explain this, to build a view of it I will have to go back to how humans developed, go back a long way in time.

Early life-forms had something like a program from which they responded to their environment in a manner to survive. This was a set of responses. One could also think of it as a limited repertoire, or set of repertoires which enabled the creature to survive. If something was not in its repertoire the organism could not respond. But the system was also an information gathering one, as this linked with survival and survival strategies.

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

It was this potential beyond need which reshaped the body/brain, and was the ground out of which humans could emerge. Creatures could experience much more than they were limited to by their physical environment. (As I write this it leads me to the exciting thought that dreaming, daydreaming, imagination and fantasy, so extends ones range of experience, that one doubles or trebles ones experiential life span, and becomes that much wiser or more experienced.)

With human beings, with the great information they could gather and manipulate in this ‘dreaming’ mode, a strange thing occurred. In the dreaming play or experiment with options, one option was posited which produced a whole new set of experiences and therefore the possibility of a way of gathering new information. Therefore the new option, which was one in which the wider awareness of the organism was shut out to allow a sense of individual existence, was guarded, held onto, isolated from the rest of awareness. It was like a small laboratory was walled off within a much larger structure to isolate the area within the smaller area. The other human creatures who had not themselves developed this new option in the ‘dreaming’ were infected with it by those who had – just as ideas or moods are infectious.

The barrier is very real, and is placed to prevent the disappearance of the isolated sense of self. It had to be isolated, because when this isolated sense of self is exposed to the wider information held by the individual, it doesn’t compute. It is an unreal sense. At least it is only partially true. There is no such thing as isolation or separation within the biological life process. It is rather like having a thousand eyes looking in to many different places and dimensions, and you looked only through one and said that one was the true reality of your perception.

The barrier only goes down when the individual reaches a certain stage of maturity – what we have named enlightenment.

See: Reaction to the unconscious – Levels of Awareness is Waking and Sleeping.

The Collective Unconscious

Some thinkers, like Jung and Sheldrake, see individual human consciousness like an island in a huge ocean in which there are countless other islands. Above the surface of the water – waking self-awareness – there is a sense of separate existence, with definite boundaries where the shore meets the sea. Beneath the surface however, one island is connected to all other islands. The land stretches away under the waves and rises here and there into other islands. So, it is thought, personal awareness, beneath our everyday consciousness, shades off into a connection with a collective unconscious we all share. Through this connection we may be able to arrive at insights into other people otherwise denied to us.

In recent years there has been a lot of research very strongly suggesting that the quantum level of the universe is such a universal memory and consciousness. See Physics – new physics and the mind

Jung describes the collective unconscious as the ‘inherited potentialities of human imagination. It is the all controlling deposit of ancestral experiences from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimal small amount of variation and differentiation. These primordial images are the most ancient, universal, and deep thoughts of mankind.’

However, such ideas have been stated long before Jung and modern psychology. Eastern philosophy has talked of the akasha, the fundamental substance that holds in it memory of all that has happened. In Western occultism levels of awareness have been defined for hundreds of years. At the end of the 19th century Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke wrote about Cosmic Consciousness that was described as having the same universality as the collective unconscious.

A lucid experience describes this very clearly:

Now it seemed as if my awareness went beyond the frontier. This was a very visual experience. I was seeing a vast desert and I knew this represented immense periods of time, perhaps what we call eternity. So it could be called the Desert of Eternity. Here and there in the desert were huge rock formations, a little bit like what one sees in Monument Valley in Arizona. But these rock formations were not plain or slightly coloured rock. Also they were immense. They had the appearance of massive mosaics – brightly coloured mosaics. But the mosaics did not form illustrations or patterns. However, some pieces of the mosaics were larger than others. And each piece might be in itself multicoloured and a sort of miniature pictograph.

As I looked at these massive formations I understood that they had been carved or created through events in the passage of time. Each mosaic, each part of the overall mosaic, had been formed by enormous creative acts, or by long-standing actions. So these latter were like ideograms or archetypes. So, for instance, mother creatures have cared for, fought for, died for their young. This pattern of behaviour has been so enormously potent and perhaps we can use the word successful, that it has created, shaped aspects of eternity. It has left its pattern, its artwork, on time itself. Thus eternity honours that pattern by giving it a place in the very structure of itself. No one being created such a mosaic in the formations. Such a mosaic was large and had in it the essence of all the lives that formed it.

So the rock formations and the mosaics on them represented influences that will flow into the future. They were sources of power or influence that shaped the phenomenal world. They were the body under the coat so to speak. See Archetypes – Links to

This explains some forms of intuition, as one person’s mind is said to connect to all others beneath the surface in the unconscious. In this way, questions or inquiry about a particular person will draw information pertaining to them from the enormous collective unconscious. In fact Einstein said that “Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust – we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper”. So our individual consciousness is rather an outcrop of a huge and ancient collective consciousness.

Edgar Cayce discovered in his adulthood, that he could put himself at will into the state of mind in which he could tap this unconscious reservoir of knowledge. Because he could diagnose people’s illness without examining them, his work was supported by doctors. Investigators of psychology and philosophy also sought him, and he dictated 14 million words while in this state of wider awareness. His findings suggest that we all have this ability to tap the wealth of unconscious information – truly a collective unconscious – but few of us can bring it to waking awareness. His biography, There is a River, and Seer Out of Season, are astonishing and inspiring books to read. See: Edgar Cayce.

We see this markedly in animals that are largely instinctive. Birds have no present memory of how to fly or build a nest, yet when the time comes they draw on something that enables them to express the collective experience of their species.

I am a Child of the Universe

If this connection is a fundamental part of everybody’s life, the waters of self and the waters of the ocean are not separated. Jung called this universal consciousness 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’. Australian Aborigines call it The Dreamtime.

The image of the dewdrop slipping into the ocean 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.

When we first begin to ‘hear the voice of God’ again – i.e. feel the immense power of the collective unconscious, the foundation of our awareness – we are often afraid, even terrified, as the story of Adam and Eve depicts. The fear arises because whether we admit it or not, we feel we might be swallowed up, be lost in the immensity. Basically it is a fear of death. See What Happens When I Die?

 Reaching the shore of consciousness

Looking back at the psychological history of humanity, at their emergence of identity out of an animal level of awareness, all consciousness was originally merged, as it were, in a great ocean or pool. At that point no creature had crawled out of that pool. Nothing had arrived at self-awareness. No sense of separateness or identity had emerged. Then out of that ocean onto the shore of self-awareness, perhaps for moments only at first, a daring creature crawled and said – ‘I am’. Doing so they left a mark – footprints, two stones rolled together, scratches on a rock, a cave painting. And those creatures still in the ocean looked out upon others and wondered, until a spark was struck in them too. Perhaps struggling for a closer view they emerged and gasping also exclaimed – I am – and added another rock.

So the ocean is the world of sleep, babyhood, life of the nameless herd, consciousness immersed completely in the streams of instinct, reproduction, eating, sleeping and the senses, the collective unconsciousness. But the shore is the pathway of consciousness, the spoken word, art, drama, music, education and questioning enquiry. We all take this path if today we can say ‘I am’! We too, in our infancy, emerged from the collective consciousness. We too were gained a soul, an identity, when we were given a name and speech. You too stepped out of the great waters of life – and will meet them again at death. See Programmed 

As already quoted, Jung describes this as the ‘inherited potentialities of human imagination. It is the all controlling deposit of ancestral experiences from untold millions of years, the echo of prehistoric world events to which each century adds an infinitesimal small amount of variation and differentiation. These primordial images are the most ancient, universal, and deep thoughts of mankind.’

What this means in practical terms is that through our dreams, or through any of the ways people access this immense reservoir of human experience, we can find patterns of behaviour – archetypes – and whole memories of people who have lived through and found solutions to the problems we face, or defined the understanding we are seeking. Also, Cayce found actual details of medicines and techniques that had been used successfully in the past and were part of the memory within the collective unconscious.

In trying to present this to sceptical colleagues and intellectuals and scientists of his time, Jung tried to explain his observation of a strata of being in which individual minds have their collective origin in a genetic way. This seems unlikely, and Rupert Sheldrake sees it as a mental phenomena. Dr Maurice Bucke called it Cosmic Consciousness. J. B. Priestley saw it as ‘the flame of life’ which synthesised the experience of all living things and held within itself the essentials of all lives. If we think of it as a vast collective memory of all that has existed, then we can say the life of Edgar Cayce exhibited a working relationship with it.

Such a collective level of mind would explain many things, such as telepathy, so called out of body experiences, life after death, which have always been puzzling because it is difficult to explain them using presently known beliefs. Mostly this difficulty has been because our language and the concepts arising from it insist of a duality of mind and body. However, researches into the nature of fundamental particles – quantum – show us that such divisions do not exist, except in our limited sensory view of the world.

For more information See: Quantum Physics; Levels of Awareness – Levels of the Brain – Consciousness – The Brain Mind Split;  Cayce, Edgar; archetype of the self; religion and dreams; sea; Dimensions of Human Experience

William Blake – Psychologist

Blake may shock us sometimes with what he says, but at all times his sight is from what he can clearly see in human nature.

One of the interesting statements made by modern psychology, is that the past actually is a living principle in each individual. In fact, it is stated in some textbooks that the great men and women of the past live on within us. Dr. G. R. Heyer, in his book ‘Organism of the Mind’ says “We all have a psychological ancestry as well as a physical one. In us Germans, Goethe still lives on, not alone superficially, in our conscious memory, but in our more hidden thoughts, our imagery, our behaviour, and our feelings, as a mental ‘gene’. The same is true of all the great, of all the immortals, as far back as Jesus Christ and further.”

If this is true, then it must be of value to study the lives of such men to see what there is of them in us. William Blake, poet, artist, philosopher, mystic, and as I hope to show – psychologist – being so near to us in ways of birth, historical distance and background, must be of particular importance. It is hoped that this is enough excuse for us to indulge ourselves a little in this man’s inner life. The enjoyment that one can thereby obtain from a study of Blake’s thought, is heightened also by his subtlety and very great humanity.

Probably some of his most obvious psychological expressions are made in ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. We read for instance the statements, “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” and “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” When we realise that such verses were published in 1790, long before the advent of modern psychiatry, we cannot help but respect this man’s insight into human nature. The very title of this work, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, is also an expression of Blake’s philosophy. He maintained that there was no lower nature in man in the sense of being inferior or evil. For him, Heaven was a Poetic or creative genius in man, or what today would be called the superconscious. Hell was man’s body and all the energies of movement, emotions and delight that it generated. He mocked the conventional outlook of the churches of his day over this, for Hell to him was a necessary and delightful aspect of man’s nature when rightly seen. He writes “I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of genius, which to Angels look like torment and insanity.” He felt that one must find some sort of harmonious relationship with what is called the highest and lowest in man. A’-though he would not admit that there was any true differentiation between them, rather that they were merely different aspects of the same creative process. “Man has no body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul, discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” In fact he says that without contraries or opposites there is no progression.

Blake felt that within man was the source of all wisdom, power and love. He expressed time and time again how men should at all times attempt to release the tremendous inner potentials that are his birthright Because of his yearnings to achieve this in himself and in society, he became the enemy of the established church. This does not mean that he saw anti-Christian – a man who wrote Jerusalem could not be that. He saw in the dogmas of the church the chains that prevented men from expressing the real and natural life within them. He attempted to explain to the society of his day that “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound, or outward circumference of Energy.” As we have found, dogma, or too much reason, literally does ‘bound’ this inner life and prevent its expression. Rather bitterly, through such feelings, he says that “Prisons are built with stones of law; brothels with bricks of Religion.” Certainly the foolish repression of natural energies may in many lives lead eventually to an unhealthy or destructive expression of these same forces.

Jung writes in his works that one should allow fantasies to arise in the mind, and that if we would seek to understand life we must enter into it. Blake has again apprehended such findings. He believed that “If the fool would persist In his folly he would become wise.” and “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” Being also something of a scientist or experimenter with life itself, he felt that provided one was indeed seeking the truth, “The Road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” One should not judge this statement too quickly. Blake was not a licentious man, nor had he been. But he did allow his nature wider bounds of expression than most men of his day. His excess was one of the soul, which he refused to shackle with the limiting conventions of his time. His attitude was to experiment with life, accept nothing until you know, “Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.” The past is dead, follow the path of the present. The past is in us and expresses through us, but such forces are generative bringing about ever new forms, not the – dead laws of the Pharisees. “I must create a System, – or be enslaved by another Man’s; I will not Reason or Compare, my business is to Create” he writes.

One might even imagine Blake saying “Can man ever be perfect? Is the idea of perfection itself not relative to our desires-, our viewpoint and our function?” But he says the same thing in his usual synthesised manner when he states “Mutual Forgiveness of each vice, such are the gates of Paradise.” Later, in a Meditation on Jesus he writes, “Now hear how He (Jesus) has given his sanction to the law of the ten commandments. Did He not mock at the Sabbath, and so mock the Sabbath’s God; murder those who were murdered because of Him; turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery; steal the labour of others to support Him; bear false witness when He omitted making a defence before Pilate; covet when He prayed for His disciples, and when He bade them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue ”

Again upon this point, Blake can be greatly misunderstood. In these sentences he seems to be attempting to show that set moral codes are only a working guide. When he says Jesus acted ‘upon impulse we have Blake’s ideal of the Poetic Genius expressing again. To react to circumstances and environment according to the prompting of our higher consciousness, and not from reasoning upon the Law.

In Jesus and the Pharisees we can see a psychological drama taking place if we interpret it according to Blake’s key. In Jesus we have the higher consciousness at work, reacting and expressing according to its universal scope. The Pharisees are the reasoning mind, always questioning, but lacking contact and power over the creative life giving forces in the universe. Reason also cannot surpass itself as does intuition, for it depends upon already revealed law and cannot enter the unknown.

Reason, because of its limitations cannot understand what Jesus symbolises; and because this higher consciousness urges us at times to do what may seem to be against our reason, the reason in us may even sacrifice this divine aspect of ourselves.

One can see in this use of symbolism another aspect of Blake’s understanding of man’s inner nature. In modern psychology it is explained that people, objects and places are used in dreams as symbols of inner conditions or realisations. Blake used this principle a great deal in his poetic expression. This is especially noticeable in his ‘Jerusalem’. For him the towns and hamlets he knew were symbolical of various shades of feeling and life.

Symbolical also was the sexual act and the intercourse between men and women. Unlike his contemporaries, he could not see that the human nature was a snare keeping men from the divine. He felt that “Whatsoever lives is holy”, and as passion lived in him and nature, it must have its place in things. It is the steam that drives the engine of creation when rightly used, and Blake would not indulge himself in the practices of the ascetics. Passion became for him the fiery sap rising in the tree, which when united with the ‘breath of life’, the radiant energies of the Sun, becomes something vitally alive, responsive and creative.

What then shall we think of this man? Shall we think of him as a genius? Was he one in whom intellect was so acute as to enable him to foreshadow the outcome of our present psychiatric knowledge? Or should we think of him as he may have thought of himself-as one who had contacted the Poetic Genius in himself, and like all those before or since who, having found the fountain of living water, was able to con-found the reason of their times. In his own words “What is now proved was once imagined.” Blake then was surely the embodied imagination of England’s Eighteenth Century, expressing in print, in art and in life. If we can find something of this man alive in ourselves, then it is a happy moment for us. If besides finding it we can allow it to flourish and bloom, then we may say as he did:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold -Bring me my arrows of desire; Bring me my spear; O clouds, unfold! Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land.