Spiritual Consciousness

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OOBE - Out of the Body Experience

I discovered way back in the 70s that out-of-the-body experiences, also known as OOBEs or astral projection, were more common than I had believed. And this is what had convinced me that my first OOBE experience was a lot more than just a vivid dream.

My wife and I were entertainers and were working nightclubs around Yorkshire in England. One night we arrived back at our accommodation in the early hours of the morning and I felt too tired to unload the equipment from our car, so I just threw a blanket over it and locked the vehicle. 

In bed, during the night, I found myself floating above our bed. I could see my wife’s shape beneath the blankets, but next to her my body appeared to leave its impression in the bed but was completely invisible to me. My first thought was one of panic, that I was dead. But that seemed to disappear because a peculiar logic said I could not see my body therefore could not be dead, and I felt I had a body; one that could float on air! 

I started to drift like a ship cut free from its moorings, but I could not stop it. I braced myself for impact as I neared the window, but I just floated right through it, and found myself outside in the street watching two men forcing open the tailgate of my car with a crowbar and taking the smaller cases out of it. I tried to shout, but no sound came out at all. The men ran down the road and up into an alley. The sheer horror of what I was witnessing seemed to prevent me from following them and the more I tried, the more rooted to the spot I felt.

I then thought, that this was a dream and the next thing I know was that I was waking up in my bed and felt as if a strong electrical current was passing through my body from head to foot. As I awoke, I thought to myself, what an awful dream and drifted back to sleep.

The following morning however, the “dream” came true. My wife and I stood in a state of shock as we looked at the tailgate of our car that had been bent and the lock broken. Two cases were missing containing our microphones and cables that would take at least week’s wages to replace.

This whole OOBE experience freaked me out. Although I had put it down to a dream, it had not been an ordinary dream. I had been able to rationalise in the dream, and even tell myself it was a just a dream as the events unfolded, but there was another unmistakable element, I felt I was in a body, not just an ordinary body, but a body that could pass through solid objects – a body that vibrated.  It had also seemed that I was not only moving around by the power of thought, but that I had prevented myself from following those thieves because of my disbelief at what they had had the gall to do.

Intending to find out more of this OOBE phenomenon, a few days later, my investigation took me to a bookstore and I made straight for the occult section. In those days, such books were regarded as either occult or witchcraft and not really taken that seriously in the UK. I found a book by Robert A Munroe called Journeys Out of the Body, and many of his OOBE experiences explained a lot about what had happened to me and helped to stop me from feeling so…. well, weird. I had always scoffed at such things before, but in retrospect, in a very Zen-like way, the theft of our expensive equipment had taught me a priceless lesson, which has also helped me understand why great spiritual masters have always taught the value of forgiveness.

Since that day, I have had many OOBEs, but they always seem to be involuntary, no matter how hard I try to make it happen. But perhaps, as a Zen practitioner, my mind has formed a belief that if you try search for enlightenment, you prevent yourself from realising it. That paradox is, that if you don’t seek truth, you won’t find it, and if you form a belief about at truth, you prevent it from happening. You need to become what is known in Zen circles as centred and detached.

Further Reading UK

Further Reading USA

Technorati Tags: astral projection, oobe, out of the body experience

Psychometry

Psychometry is the art of getting impressions from an object simply by holding it. Some psychometrists just hold it in the hand, and some hold it to their foreheads. The practitioner will then start to share what impressions he/she is getting from the object and sometimes they can be extremely accurate.

In the past I have experimented with psyschometry and on the first occasion, I surprised myself with the accuracy of what I was saying. The strange thing was that I didn’t really feel anything at all, and thought I was just fantasizing.

We were having dinner with a couple of friends, husband and wife. And they were asking me about my hypnotherapy and how it worked. The wife asked how I thought psychometry worked. I replied that it was all in the imagination, a response which she didn’t seem to like very much and she told me that a friend of hers was very accurate when doing it, and it was a lot more than her imagination.

I just replied, that without imagination, it wouldn’t work anyway, because literally imagination means nothing more than “image making”. And the images that we make in psychometry could be very accurate. I went on toe tell here that hypnosis is possible because of imagination and I get my clients to use their imagination in order to enter a hypnotic trance.

She gave me her wristwatch and asked me to do some psychometry with it. As I held the watch in my hand, in my imagination I could see a small dog sat on the couch between her and her husband. Then I saw a tropical island with the impression that is was Tahiti. They both smiled and the wife said, that when they were courting on her parents couch, the family dog would often squeeze in between them as if he were acting as some sort of chaperone. The husband was looking somewhat amazed and he told me that he had always wanted to go to Tahiti since a small boy, but had never really told anybody, so how could I have known that?

Some people may say that I already knew these things in the depths of my subconscious, but had forgotten, but these friends were fairly new friends and we had never talked about pet dogs or Tahiti.  Some may say I was simply mind-reading and my response to that would be… “Maybe I was mind-reading, does it matter?”  I was seeing things that had not been revealed to my physical senses. Mind-reading, psychometry, clairvoyance or whatever one would want to call it, had proved itself to me. And I believe that personal experience is the only form of proof. If someone tells you that psychometry exists, it is not as real as it would be if you were to experience the ability for yourself.

Since that first time, I have proved to myself may time that we all have these abilities… When I have asked friends to try it out with me, and whether they have expressed skepticism or not, they have scored high hits, much higher than chance or guesswork.

There are several schools of thought on why psychometry happens form Jung’s Collective Consciousness to the Akashic Records. As a Zen practitioner, during zazen (Zen meditation), I have experienced many different forms of psychic phenomenon. Zen masters call this “makyo”, which translated means “diabolic penomenon” or “devil mind” that is blocking the path to enlightenment that is beyond thinking. In Zen practice, it is said that all makyo needs to be transcended if we are to realize true enlightenment, and not pursued.

I don’t exactly pursue this sixth sense, it is just something that happens from time to time with or without holding an object - without holding an object is labeled clairvoyance. While it continues to occur, I imagine I will continue to be fascinated by it, until the day I can just see it as nothing out of the ordinary, at which point I will consider I have transcended it. Maybe.

Please feel free to leave a response or share your experiences… 

Further Reading (UK Link)

Furhter Reading (USA Link)

Technorati Tags: makyo, meditation, mind reading, psychometry, zazen, zen

Channelling

I have been thinking about chanelling recently and I have to admit that I have never experienced another being or presence communictating to me from a higher plane of spiritual consciousness or existence. So I have difficulty in acceptance the beings from another plane that is not part of myself.

Suddenly during my meditation, it occurred to me that I was already chanelling anyway. These blog posts for example, come from my zazen (meditation). Some I feel are mediocre and some I feel are so profound and hardly seem to be my words or thoughts at all.

I then began to think of my music. When I play piano, I play a lot of improvisations and although I will follow a music copy, I add more notes than are written and sometimes leave some out. Often when I am playing, it seems as if my fingers are just pressing the notes all by themselves and some of the musical phrases seem unknown to my mind. So that too in my opinion is a form of channelling.

But according to my Zen philosophy, I am not channelling anything from a separate being as in reality, there is no separation. We are all really one.

Please feel free to leave your thoughts…

Technorati Tags: channelling, spiritual consciousness, zazen, zen meditation

Healing: A Matter of Response-Ability

Recognition of how we are responding to our universe is a powerful key to healing. All to often, when we for instance, feel emotional about something we see in a movie, or some item of news, we tend to externalise these feelings and “feel sorry” for the character we are learning about.  But in reality we are missing the point. The characters we are learning about, are usually unknown to us, and in the case of a most movies, they are fiction. So that means our reactions are coming from ourselves, we are identifying with a “loss” of our own. The movie or news item, is an opportunity for us to heal that particular identification, and if it is being shrugged off and suppressed again, it will stay with us until we are willing to deal with it and a healing can take place.

As Gregg Braden puts it in his book, *The Divine Matrix, “ancient traditions suggest that the ‘experience’ loop of life continues for as long as it takes us to find our greatest healing.”

We seem to defend against surprisingly, nothing. More surprisingly is the vulnerability we feel when we manage for a split second, to drop our defences. What do we think is going to happen in our life if we were to permit ourselves to become defenceless? Do we have hidden fears about experiencing a higher spiritual consciousness? If so, what is so scary about it?

*USA Link

The Healing Qualities of Music

Dr Alfred Tomatis (1920-2001), a French physician said “the ear is designed to energise the brain and body and is not just for hearing!” He claimed that many forms of stress and mental disturbances occurred when the central grey nuclei cells in the brain had become low on electrical charge and they were not recharged by the body’s metabolism, but by sound.

As a therapist, who was also once a professional musician, I can fully understand what Dr. Tomatis was saying. I can feel irritated, bored or depressed, but when I sit down at my piano and begin to play, within minutes I can alter my mood with type of music I choose to play.

As a Zen practitioner, I aim to feel whatever I am feeling in its totality, but sometimes my conditioning creates blocks as my mind may subconsciously flash back to my childhood, to such phrases as “buck up now!”, “pull yourself together”. If I play the appropriate music, I can “dig out” my true feelings and exorcise them.

Technorati Tags: mood change, play music

Blessing

Gregg Braden states in his book The Divine Matrix, “When we bless the people or things that have hurt us, we’re temporarily suspending the cycle of pain. Whether this suspension last for a nan-second or an entire day, makes no difference. Whatever the period of time, during the blessing a doorway opens for us to begin our healing and move on with life”.

I can fully agree with that statement, but what exactly do we do when we bless others?

Is blessing something that either happens or does not?  When we say to somebody, “I bless you” if we just pay it lip service, we may not have not really blessed them, we have just said “I bless you” as an automatic response to their kindness. Maybe they have done something for us that we feel very grateful for and it would be more appropriate to feel gratitude.

I feel blessing someone is first of all demonstrated by an act of communication. In religion, benediction is regarded as a blessing, and the literal meaning of the word, Benediction is “speaking good”. So I would say that after saying sincerely “I bless you to a person”, we would also need to feel a sort of love and affection for that person.  We would need to get an experience of the love and admiration for the person we have blessed.

With blessing we are talking about something that is abstract and difficult to explain with words, but I firmly believe that we know when we have blessed somebody and when we have not blessed somebody.

Please feel free to share your feelings.

Further Reading:
The Divine Matrix (UK)
The Divine Matrix (USA)

Technorati Tags: blessed, blessing

Just For A While

Just for a while, focus on the inhalation and the exhalation, for the following of the breaths, will focus your mind in the present moment. If you can do it, remember to be conscious of your breathing in this way throughout the day. I think you can do it if you will it.  This is about extending our meditation into every-day living. Even if you are sceptical about the efficacy of the practice, it costs nothing to do it, and the gains may be priceless terms of spiritual consciousness.

In these turbulent times, if we can all spend just 10 minutes of each day, closing our eyes and focusing on love, compassion and joy for all that live on our planet, together we can create a miracle, by altering our mood and the moods of those around us. If, just as an experiment to see what difference we can make, we could focus intently on words like, “I bless the world” I am sure something positive would manifest in the greater field of human spiritual consciousness.

As much as it may appear to be so, the basic function of the world is no different now from what it has ever been. It is the confidence of mankind of what’s going on in our environment that changes.  In Zen, a meditator, takes on the work of transforming all beings. It has also been noted that group meditation and prayer can have a transforming effect on each participant and to whom the prayer or meditation is directed towards.

Just for a while, we can change the way ALL perceive the world. So why stop? Why not make it a way of life, and not… just for a while? This is true Spiritual Consciousness.

Technorati Tags: breathing, consciousness, meditation

Dreams & Psychic Dreams

Dream interpretation has been a big part of my work for many years and what seemed to be more and more evident was that dreams seem to be multi-functional. That is, many of them seemed to have a prophetic intonation and would also reveal something about the dreamer’s hidden character.

As a therapist, I have never subscribed to one single school of thought when it comes to dreams, but tend to look over all available research. There is no doubt about it that dreams can be extremely valuable in the field of human-potential development.

One very interesting function of dreaming was the way it could be interpreted if the dreamer, when reviewing a dream in his/her waking state, was to take each element of the dream (this could be a person, an object, building or a landscape) and visualise him/herself becoming that element and communicating as if he/she was that element.

For instance from a client’s notes… “I am a tree, but I [as a tree] am a little wilted and in need of some care and attention. I want somebody to come along and support me because my hair (branches and leaves) has become so entangled and confused”. This person went on to recognise her confusion because she felt that family and friends were “getting into her hair” with too many demands. She could (and did) rectify this situation by considering that what was necessary was to stop allowing others to manipulate her so much.

Personally, I had a dream that was vivid and most people would say a past-life experience…

One night, I awakened with a tremendous pain in the back of my neck and head and was aware that I had been dreaming about something violent, but couldn’t quite remember what. I just focused on my breathing and went into a meditative state. Suddenly I became aware I was on a battlefield and was lying on my side. There were streams of blood running down the side of me on the ground. In front of me was a dead horse that I knew was mine. As I observed this, I felt incredible emotion well up and tears ran down my face. The pain increased and I became aware that an axe severing the back of my neck had mortally wounded me. The next thing was an overwhelming feeling of anger as this was not ethical. In battle it is the duty of a soldier to ensure his enemy is dead, not leave him mortally wounded in this way. At the time of my dream, I was not aware of this battle etiquette, but learned later from a friend of mine that it did indeed exist. Suddenly as the emotion released, all the pain went with it, and I was left feeling elated and somehow released.

So was this dream of a past life? I don’t know, and I would say that it doesn’t matter. I got these horrendous images and emotion was attached to them. Where my mind got them from is irrelevant, because the past is an illusion anyway. It is gone. The fact is, that these multi-sensory dream images were locked away in my mind with a lot of pain and angst attached to them and because I had decided to start taking notes of my dreams, they came to the surface of my consciousness and I was released from the buried effects of a trauma.

Please feel free on this blog, to share any dreams, whatever they may be.

Technorati Tags: dreams, past life

Hypnosis, Meditation and Extra Sensory Perception.

When it comes to psychic phenomenon like clairvoyance, ESP, remote viewing and such the like, I would say that I am not a disbeliever, but I like to have hard evidence that such phenomenon cannot be put down to mere chance or coincidence. I think I have proved this to myself over the years.

What I have discovered is that the mind’s latent abilities are greatly enhanced by the state of hypnosis. Many years ago, I was with a hypnotised client who kept telling me he kept seeing this image of a sailing yacht. My ears immediately pricked up because whilst I had been talking to him I had been doodling and the very thing I had doodled was a sailing yacht. To rule out coincidence, I changed my sketching to that of a stick-man and when I asked him what he could see, he replied, “man”. The same thing happened with the drawing of a house followed by a horse – all 100% accurate. He was mind-reading!

After his session with me, I showed him my doodles and explained what had happened whilst he had been in a state of hypnosis and asked him if he would come back to investigate these abilities. He agreed.

On his subsequent visit, whilst we could not get the 100% success rate to repeat itself, it was still near 60% too great to claim it was mere guess-work. The hits he was getting I noticed, were coming almost as soon as I thought of what to draw next, so it wasn’t what I was actually drawing on the paper, but what I was thinking in my mind - this consolodated my conclusiong that he was mind reading. And hypnosis was definitely enhancing this ability as he couldn’t reproduce similar result unless I took him through the hypnotic induction. 

So what is hypnosis?

Many people equate the condition with sleep, but it has nothing to do with sleep. A hypnotized subject is not asleep, or dreaming or on “cloud nine”. He is simply in a state of mental calmness and experiences a heightened state of awareness, rather than a lower state, as he would if he were asleep.

I have induced hypnosis in clients for over 30 years and never once has anybody not known what has happened to them, in fact, some of the less-sensitive clients have not even thought they were hypnotized, but the results of the session invariably proved otherwise. However, hypnosis is not used to brainwash or control the client in any way. Whilst I wouldn’t say that this is impossible, it would be extremely difficult, as a hypnotized client subject cannot be made to do anything against his will.

I would say that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis and what can be achieved with a hypnotherapist, can be achieved without a hypnotherapist. A hypnotherapist only acts as a guide, who instructs his subject how to use his mind and imagination to enter the trance like state to get the desired changes he wants in his life. Whilst it may take a little practice, the state of hypnosis can be achieved alone, and is no different to a meditative trance.

Another fear that some people have is that they will not be able to “wake up” from a hypnotic trance. But this is not true. The very worst thing that would happen is that the subject would be so relaxed in hypnosis that he would drift off into a normal sleep and wake up naturally later on, no different to what he would experience when waking after a good night’s sleep.

After the experiments I have made with my clients with ESP, I have often tried this myself to a high degree of success, using my meditation, which is no different to self-hypnosis being a heightened state of awareness.

Experiments with meditators in the East has proven time and time again, that the way that their brain-waves behave in their meditation is exactly the same as that of a person in a state of hypnosis.

To learn more about meditation, please click to follow this link, and if you have questions or comments, please feel free to leave them here.

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