Book fairies and other messages from spirit

I missed the Edgar Cayce thought for the day on Sunday, which is sent out by the Association for Research and Enlightenment each day, using a quotation from the thousands of readings which Edgar Cayce did during his life. It was: "While individual experiences are personal, or rather individual, these give that NECESSARY experience that will enlighten and enliven the abilities of others; for each soul needs only that awakening to be able to create in the physical all necessary for that soul's development through any period."

This speaks to something I have been wondering about. I have had a few experiences which psychologists might call anomalous or anomalistic, and actually I didn't share them for a very long time, because I worried about people thinking that I had lost my mind. Finding the Quaker Fellowship for Afterlife Studies (QFAS) was a great relief, because even if I don't resonate with everyone's experience, I know that the people in the fellowship will listen with an open mind and heart to what I have to say. 

I do not expect anyone to accept my experiences as true or even relevant to them, but I have the feeling that sometimes information finds the right people at the right time. Many of my friends in QFAS have the same experience of book fairies that I have. Someone decides to get rid of the very book I want to read, or a book which contains the answer to a question I have been thinking about. Sometimes I have been sent the right person, or the right video, or the right email that tells me exactly what I need to know to take me on the next step of my path. Sometimes, I've had a book for ages but haven't got around to reading it and will open it just when the information in it tells me something I needed or wanted to know.

A lot of Quakers worry that talking about what they believe is somehow going to influence or divert someone from their own true path, but I think that part of being on a spiritual path is to recognise whether something "speaks to your condition" as old Quakers used to say - and still do. I believe that we have to learn to know whether something is right for us, and one of the things which drew me to Quakers in the first place was their acceptance that Quakers might be a stepping stone on someone's path but not necessarily their final destination. People's needs change, what they believe may change.

One aspect of being on a spiritual path is openness to the idea that we are all at different stages, and we may even get different things from the same book or the same information at different times. I must have read Natalie Sudman's book The Application of Impossible Things about nine or ten times by now, and although it is a slim volume, I always find something new, something different in it. The book hasn't changed, and so I am driven to the conclusion that I change, and pay attention to different things depending on the progress I have made since the last time I read it.

Speaking to a group of friends about mystical experiences, I started to feel guilty, maybe I should have been talking about this for years, and could have helped others along on their journey. But then, if spirit is working the way I think it is, maybe now is always the perfect time to begin.