Mind Matters Most - Chapter ThirteenA

MMM Thirteen

Nothing real is threatened

Everything we observe, be it in what we call the ‘real’ world, the tangible world of materiality, or the worlds created in our imagination, fall within the ambit of our central theme that: Mind Matters Most.  After all, it is in our willful mind that we ‘make up our mind’ as to the truth or otherwise of a concept or idea.  However, it has been stated in the book, A Course of Miracles, that “Nothing real can be threatened.  Nothing unreal exists.  Herein lies the peace of God.”  We know that what we observe in the material world can be threatened.  Nothing and no thing lasts.  All is temporary.  Even the universe as we know it had a beginning and will come to an end.   Yet here is this statement…and herein lies the peace of God.  My contention throughout this book is that we, as Observers, Witnesses, that which Experiences both the so-called ‘real’ world and the worlds of imagination, are gods �" or at least a fragment or lesser part of the All Being. We are gods!   But don’t get too carried away.  We are also men and women and our identification with our bodies, personal minds and emotions predominates �" and probably will for the majority of us for a long period of chronological time yet.   However, after having come this far in this book, you might be just starting to realize that these are not the real you.

 But let us delve into one more aspect of mind…

Ghosts and Apparitions

A book of this type would not be complete unless it mentioned some of the phenomena common to so many human beings: the paranormal.   I’m talking here of ghosts, apparitions, precognition, mental telepathy and things which are often regarded either as not-believable or utter nonsense by so many.  Once again, I will tell you of my own experiences.  It is up to you, the reader, to decide whether I’m making these up, or whether I am telling you the truth �" my truth.

My initial experience of something quite unusual occurred when, as a little boy of around nine, I found myself in a state somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.  It seemed quite surreal.  I knew I wasn’t dreaming.  There, standing up towards the window, and about five feet from where I lay, was a plump old woman in a black dress or shawl.  She was facing somewhat profile on to me and appeared to be looking out of the window.   Only the top three-quarters or so of her was discernible.  This woman was dressed in Victorian garb, lots of lace, and wearing one of those broad-brimmed bonnets of the period.  Her arm was raised, a finger pointed.  She was pointing through the window towards something outside of the house.

I didn’t give much thought to this and dropped off into a sound sleep.   In the morning, at breakfast my sister, Ada, four years my senior, piped up with, “Did you see the woman in black last night?”  Taken aback, I told her I had.  “I saw her…I was wondering if anyone else had,” said Ada.   So it appears both of us had seen the old lady even though my sister slept in a room next door.   Had Ada been seeing this specter through a wall?    How could we both see her?

 Ada was later to tell me that a young lad in the house towards which the woman in black had been pointing had died of pneumonia during the night.   My sister then went on to explain that the woman in black was said to appear on a night someone was dying.   She was a sort of omen. As it was, I put the incident out of my mind and such an experience has never occurred since.  However, I have heard others mention it since that time.

Mental Telepathy?

In 1951, at fourteen years of age, I was sitting in a movie theatre watching a comedy film, in which comedy team; Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were starring.  The movie was about Africa.   It was a hilarious, featuring, among other things, an enormous gorilla of King Kong proportions.   The whole theatre was in an uproar of laughter.  I, too, was laughing when…suddenly I stopped.  It was if something had in that instant taken away both my laughter and concentration upon the screen.   I immediately felt a great uneasiness.   I tried to look at the screen again but just couldn’t.    My focus upon the story was gone.  Something wordless was urging me to “Go home.”   I got up and walked out through the fire-escape door into the open air.  

I made my way to the bus stop and rode home.   I could not shake this feeling that something wasn’t quite right.  Alighting at the bus stop nearest my home, I hurried along a side road then into the street in which I lived.   Straight away I noticed an ambulance and a police car parked outside and a small group of neighbors hanging around out front.  Nobody spoke to me.  I went inside to find more people, with my mother lying down on a couch looking shocked.   I was later to learn that at about the time I’d felt something bad had happened in the movie theatre, my elder brother, Tippy, had committed suicide in our home.   He had killed himself by hanging himself in a wardrobe.  

I’ll go a little further into this story here.   I had no idea, not the slightest inkling; my elder brother was a troubled young man.  He was only seventeen.  In retrospect, of course, and as an adult I can see that now.  But it remains clear in my mind that something drew me home that day.   Moreover, I will mention something else which came out of this experience �" another witnessing of an event also perceived by my sister, Ada.

Second time we both saw the same thing

It happened that my elder brother, Tippy had a habit of sticking his head around a doorway for a quick look and then pulling it back in.   He would appear then, disappear, so to speak.   A week or so after my brother’s death I would occasionally catch myself seeing him, that is, his ghost, poking a head around a doorway for a quick look much as he had done in life.   I put this down to   imagination until after two or three days of this, Ada said to me.  “Have you seen Tippy sticking his head around the kitchen door?   I’ve seen him several times now.”

Well, what could I say except yes, I had.   So here again we have a case of two people who, without collusion or suggestion, witnessed a series paranormal events for a second time in their lives.   Could we both have been deceiving ourselves?   No one else had seen anything. Or if they had, they’d kept quiet about it.

What are these strange phenomena?   We know we have five senses and that a major one is our eyesight.  Is it possible we can, at times, pick up a different spectrum in which a newly deceased person is now in - a world between worlds, so to speak?   We’re aware that there are people who can see halos and auras around people.  We’re also told that some very gifted individuals can actually ‘see dead people.’   It is all very strange.  But whatever it is, it is witnessed by us and in our minds - so Mind Matters Most.

Astral body viewing

Another strange incident happened to me in the 1960s.   I woke up early one morning.  It must have been a minute of two prior 5-00 am.  I had the alarm set for five o’clock because I had to be out at Sydney Airport where I worked by 6-30am, a forty minutes drive away.    It was then that I noticed that rather than lying down in bed with my head on the pillow, I was propped up with my head against the headboard.   It occurred to me in a hazy-lazy sort of way that this was unusual.  Why was I sitting propped up like this?   Why wasn’t I lying down, head on my pillow?

It was then that I noticed �" my head was swiveled slightly to the right �"  my wife, Rita, who slept on my right hand side, was also sitting up with her upper body resting against the headboard.   “How strange?” went the thought in my mind.   And it was at this moment that I noticed something very unusual �" startling unusual!

I could see right through my wife.   In fact there was two of her.   The solid, opaque, flesh body of my darling was lying down in bed, her head on the pillow.  But coming from, or protruding from her upper parts, her shoulders and head was this second Rita.  And this second Rita was a translucent, bluish-grayish person who I could see right through!   Yes, I could see right through her to the headboard behind.   This was X-ray vision!

As I comprehended this, startled by what I was seeing, the alarm clock went off with a loud clang under the bed.   In that instant both my heart and my body seemed to give a gigantic jump.   In a fraction of a second I was no longer leaning against the headboard.  I was back lying down.   Now I had my head on the pillow.  

I looked to my right, this time deliberately turning my head.  Rita was no longer sitting up propped against the headboard.  The apparition, or whatever it had been, was gone and my wife was back lying fully in bed, her head on the pillow.   I remember all of this clearly to this day.  And it was from around this time that I began to think that we do have astral bodies which somehow or other become out-of-phase with the physical when we go to sleep.   And maybe this is what sleep is, a movement to put the mind-body somewhat out of phase with the physical.

I won’t go on to talk about astral travel here, for I don’t recall experiencing such to the point I can deal with it clearly.  However, I do recall some instances of flying �" in my dreams? �" over the steep valleys and deans of Lancashire.  Was that astral travel, or simply dreaming?   Still, I am told that some people have experienced astral travel, and that there have even been books written on the subject.  Certainly this and these other experiences written about here have changed my beliefs.

Precognition

In the early 1970s I had a pre-cognitive experience.  Once again, it occurred in that state between total sleep and not quite awake.   I saw a vision �" two visions actually.   Both were scenes.  Both were shown to me in colors not normal to such scenes.  I thought of infa-red photography where colors are different to real life.  The first incident was of me looking down from a high point over a huge expanse of water.  I could see an irregular shaped, low-lying island some miles off.  Behind that, a larger island with a conical peak, and even further out, a long, faint strip of headland which curved in from the right just visible on the horizon.   The scene was clear, unmistakable.  It was a picture of islands and perhaps a narrow peninsular afar off.

The second part of the vision was entirely different.  It comprised of a narrow, country road curving away around the left hand edge of a waterway.   There were a row of medium height trees on the left hand side paralleling the curvature of the road.  They were of a species I’d never seen before.   On the right was water abutting a narrow crescent of beach and a sheltered estuary or bay.  The feeling was it was some sort of inlet from the sea.

Some months later I quit my job in Sydney and moved my wife, children and myself to Auckland, New Zealand to live.  We were settled only two months in the suburb of  Westmere and were looking for further rental accommodation.   The lease on our first home was for only three months and we wanted to secure a place with a longer lease.   We advertised our desire in a newspaper and, lo, received a telephone call from a woman who told us she and her husband were planning to travel to Australia on a two-year working holiday.   Yes, they’d be renting their house in the interim.  Would we like to come up and see them?   Maybe we like the place so much we’d rent it from them?

Well, of course we would.  We drove over the Auckland Harbour Bridge and up to what are called the ‘Bay’ suburbs:  Murrays Bay, Mirangi Bay, and Browns Bay, et cetera.  We turned off the main road into a quieter street, then immediately off  this into a little cul-de-sac.   The cul-de-sac had only three houses in it.   The address we were seeking was to the left.   It was just one older-style house on a huge plot of land overlooking the sea.   As we drove into the garden a scene opened up before us.   It sort of took my breath away.   Wow!  And yes, it was the scene I’d seen in my dream or apparition a good three or four months earlier �" well before I’d even thought about moving to Auckland, New Zealand.    The islands below, the Coromandel Peninsular afar off, the jagged looking island in the foreground, Mount Rangitoto further out �" it was all there.   The first segment of my pre-cognition had come true.

But was it really pre-cognition?

I’d read about reports of pre-cognition and was as cynical as most.   “This could be some sort of over-lapse of the mind.   My subconscious picked it up before my conscious mind.   It’s an illusion.”  Popular Psychology at most universities in those days was Professor Skinner’s Behaviorism.   Para-psychology was considered ‘beyond the pale,’ in many learning institutions in the early 1970s.   The fact that profession Professor J. B. Rhine of Duke University, in the USA,  had  been into it since 1929 made no difference in the ‘antipodes.’  So was this a precognitive dream?  It seemed like it.  But was it?   What about the second part of the dream?  What about the drive around the edge of the water on the narrow road with the strange trees on the left?   Did this place exist?

More importantly: Would I ever see it?

Well, over the months we went on many drives around Auckland and even down to the Bay of Plenty, Mount Maunganui-Tauranga area and up as far north as one can go in New Zealand �" Cape Reinga.    Never saw the missing scene.    Then one day my trade union ran a lottery and I won third prize:  a week’s holiday in holiday accommodation, the cost heavily subsidized by my trade union.   Of course, whoever won first prize picked the Bay of Island.  Whoever, got second chose the holiday area at Tauranga.   I could pick any of two or three places remaining.   I chose Picton on the South Island.   We’d never been to the South Island.

Definitely not an over lapse of the mind

Yes!   It was on an afternoon drive from Picton to Havelock that I discovered or found the second part of my precognitive dream.   It was unmistakable.   The second part of the dream had come around a year after part one.   No, this was no overlap of the mind.  I’d been looking out for it.   This was a precognitive dream which had come true.

If these things only happened to me then what I say here might be suspect.   But my own darling wife, Rita, who is not the least bit interested in the paranormal and lays no claim to being psychic, revealed to me that she had seen the ghost of her mother �" top half of body, face smiling reassuringly at her -  about a week after her mother had died in 1984.   Then, more recently, the ghost of her elder sister some days after she died.    Rita even claims that she felt the presence, as a physical touch of fur, and heard paws thudding on the floor of one of her beloved cats some weeks after it had died.  We both loved our pets dearly but Rita has an especially affinity with them.   Did a cat come back to reassure her it was still alive and well in its new home?

 

 

Paranormal experiences are common

I could write of the several experiences where I was told by others of such strange things.  Like the time one of my former bosses was riding his bicycle to work to Dubbo Aeradio.  This was way back in the 1950s.   He was hundreds of miles away from his wife who was in Sydney’s Crown Street Maternity Hospital having a baby.   My boss was very worried for her because she wasn’t in good health and he feared she might die.  It was then he saw a vision of a doctor’s head and shoulders floating in front of him as he cycled along.  The vision comprised just the head and shoulders of a doctor wearing a surgical gown, cap and face mask.   The doctor’s eyes were smiling. It was a reassuring smile.  A couple of days later my boss says he got compassionate leave to fly down to Sydney.   On arriving at his wife’s ward, he happened to pass the operating theatre.  Out through the door burst a man clad in surgical gown, cap and face mask.   The doctor and his eyes met.   The doctor smiled.  It was the same doctor he’d seen in his vision.

In the late 1990’s I used to speak to groups about the sort of subject matter we’re dealing with here.  It wasn’t easy to get audience members to divulge their own experiences of the supernatural before so many people, but once one took the courage others quickly followed.   I was told more than once of ‘out of body experiences’ by women who almost died on the operating table and then recovered.  I was told by war widows who knew the exact moment their beloved husband had been killed in action and had yet to receive the official notification of his death by War Office telegram.   The stories came thick and fast once one could get them over the initial feelings of self-consciousness.

Today, even Ivy League psychologists are beginning to accept that our conscious mind represents just the minutest fraction of what we really are.    My own view is that we really are immortal souls experiencing ourselves in an earthly dimension.  The more I press into this subject of Mind Matter Most, the more I am convinced that this is the case.     We are the Observer, the Witness, that which Experiences and our bodies, minds, and their attendant emotions are vehicles or elements largely, if not entirely, of our own creation.   Each of us is like a point of light on a star of infinite proportions. Each point sees itself as separate when, in actuality, it is simply part of an Infinite Light.   In essence, we are all one.