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.

Surviving Death on Netflix, and elsewhere

Image CC0 from Pixabay by Karin Henseler

 I become clerk for the Quaker Fellowship for Afterlife Studies last September, and many of the things which the fellowship is interested in are encapsulated in a new series on Netflix: Surviving Death.

The series covers near-death experiences, mediumship, signs from the dead, end of life experiences, and reincarnation.  The series doesn't cover the subjects in depth, but gives enough detail to intrigue the casual viewer into wanting to know more. There is a trailer for Surviving Death on youtube here.

It astonishes me that everyone isn't as curious as I am about the way things work.  I don't know if our culture's taboo on death extends to not wanting to know about the afterlife, or if the huge number of horror stories and stories about ghosts and haunting have made people afraid to think about it, but there seems to be a division in society between those who are curious and those who do not wish to be bothered by anything resembling evidence that life extends after death.

For those like me, who have experienced a separation of consciousness and body, it is obvious that life after death is a reality. I am amazed that even people who are interested and open to the possibilities are not aware of the huge amount of material on youtube and elsewhere on the internet which offers more information.  So I thought that in addition to giving the Netflix series a plug for those who haven't seen it, I would post some links to other sources of information. This is a few links for near-death experiences, which is the subject of the first episode of the Netflix series.  I will post subsequent ones for the other subjects dealt with in the programme.

Near-death experiences

There are many many channels on youtube exploring these experiences. One of the best known is the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) channel, which is a non-profit organisation for experiencers and those interested in these experiences.  Many of the famous examples of near-death events have been interviewed or have spoken on the channel. You can find IANDS channel page on youtube here, and if you click on the VIDEOS heading across the page, you will be able to browse their many videos, Anita Moorjani and Eben Alexander among them.

I also like Hamish Miller's near-death experience, on Tim Walter's channel; you may also like to see Hamish talking about his life before and after that near-death experience.

I love these three interviews with Natalie Sudman on Bob Olson's Afterlife tv channel, talking about her book The Application of Impossible Things, written after she was blown up by a bomb in Iraq: here's the first, the "blink" environment; here's the second, the "rest and life review" environment; and here's the third: the "healing environment". Someone who talks about regretting coming back is Peter Pangore, interviewed here by Shaman Oaks.

If you want to look into research about near-death experiences, you can listen to Pim Van Lommel talking about his research

Astral projection or out-of-the-body experiences

I was asked recently what astral projection (AP) meant, and did my best to explain it.  For me, astral projection means allowing your mental or astral body - your consciousness - to leave the body behind.  It can happen spontaneously, it can happen deliberately, or it can be associated with a lucid dream. It is also known as an out-of-body experience (OOBE).

I have had a number of spontaneous OOBEs.  The first was when I was eight, and needed a tooth extracted because of an abcess.  My grandmother arranged for me to have the tooth extracted under gas, but I had had a strange fainting fit a few weeks before, and so, scarily, the dentist was accompanied by a number of dental nurses holding my wrists and ankles to ensure that if I did have any sort of reaction to the gas, I would not interfere with the extraction.

I remember going to a place with a merry-go-round, and very beautiful music, and then being rolled around in a dark warm treacly substance like very soft chewing gum.  I believe that rolling around was me coming back into the body.

On the other occasion I found myself suddenly in the air above the market house in my old town, aware that I was in a space where there were other people and other consciousnesses.  I had what is called a peak experience, feeling that I was part of everything and everything was a part of me, one with God, sending love to all things, including those things which we consider inanimate and lacking in consciousness.  I became aware that God's love extends to everything in the material world and not just the animate things inside it.

I have had a number of lucid dreams where the knowledge that I was dreaming was associated with a shot-out-of-a-cannon effect, and a strange feeling.  Michael Raduga believes that lucid dreaming and astral projection are part of the same thing, and doesn't distinguish between the two.

I have had two lucid dreams in which I was aware of leaving the body and deliberately exploring.  In the first, I found myself above the north sea, seeing the sea below me churning around.  In the second I explored, having left my body in bed in my house, but things were not as they are in the real world, when I went into and out of houses.  Eventually I found myself at the door of a house and knocked on it, and it seemed I was expected.  I was taken upstairs to sit around the bed of a dying person, and it occurred to me that if I were out of the body I should be able to feel the silver cord which people reported coming from the back of my head.

I felt around the back of my head, and there it was, but the thought of my body made me return immediately to it.

I've tried for years to leave my body deliberately, but hadn't succeeded until I watched the three parts of Michael Raduga's tutorial on Youtube, combined with an idea which I read on the astral projection subreddit.  In it someone said that when you are trying to astral project it is helpful to use your imagination to imagine that your head is where your feet are and your feet are where your head is and then to reverse it.  I think of it like loosening a piece of metal, it gradually becomes less solid and then breaks free.

I found myself able to sit up away from my body, although it was entirely different from my spontaneous OOBEs, in that everything felt heavy and my sight was smoky. I moved away from my body and through the bedroom door, which was an unusual experience, when I realised that I couldn't open the door myself.

I am inexperienced and don't know much about it from first-hand experience, but it is something which convinces me that it is possible for the consciousness or spirit to exist beyond the human body.  If you can separate while alive, why couldn't that spirit continue beyond bodily death?

I am also convinced that the personality and character can be influenced by the brain but isn't created by it.  I think I need more experimental data to understand this properly, but I am having difficulty in repeating the experience! I have joined Michael Raduga's Elijah Project to see if I can become more expert at AP. There are also a lot of videos on youtube to help - one which is mentioned over and over on the AP subreddit is 

Rupert Sheldrake's TED talk: ideas worth suppressing?

I find an email from Rupert Sheldrake in my inbox, telling me that his TED talk has been removed from the TED London website - although it is still available here - because two scientists have objected to the promotion of the ideas contained within it, it seems.

It always amazes me when scientists wish to eliminate something which doesn't fit within their paradigm of science when there are some simple questions which science cannot answer. If the universe is infinite, what does that mean in terms of what is beyond and beyond and beyond? If the universe is finite, then what is around it? And around that? and around that?

The rise of modern theoretical physics means that very few people in our reality will be able to test out the hypotheses that are put out by perfectly scientific people, or even to understand them. For most lay people the idea that a particle has a chance of being in four places at once is so outside our common experience as to be completely illogical.

Our concept of what science is, in terms of testing hypotheses with scientific method, complete breaks down when observation or non-observation may change the outcome of the experiment... and yet these two scientists, named in Sheldrake's email as Jerry Coyne and P.Z. Myers are *so* afraid of Sheldrake's ideas, that they have demanded that the video which challenges the dogma of science should be removed.

The fabric of the TED talk which has been removed, is a challenge to the idea of science as a religion, as a substitute for religion, in which a rigid view of what science is and can be is imposed by scientists who control the realm of the possible and probable and refuse to allow any enquiry outside those realms. It is manifestly demonstrated that this view is true, from the very action of its opponents.

TED should be ashamed of themselves. Not only are they priced way outside the realm of most ordinary people's pockets (and thus exclusive and elitist) but they respond to pressure by caving, instead of maintain free speech and the opportunity to listen to an alternative point of view. I thought better of them.

Carlos Diaz UFO contactee film

New film about the experience of Carlos Diaz, UFO contactee, using text to voice and illustrations. It's an interesting story.


The message about the oneness of all is one which is at the heart of most of our religions and spirituality, but one which humanity as a whole has not learned yet. The message which we should be listening to is... to love our neighbours as ourselves. If we did this, we would be unable to produce the sorts of damage that we have wrought on the planet. We are mostly living as though we are living on a planet of infinite resources, with infinite capacity to withstand our abuses. When we do not honour the life of the planet, we kill ourselves, and when we kill each other we prove that we haven't learned to love our neighbours.

It's a simple childlike message, but one which fails to penetrate the bubble we all wear, which is a preoccupation with getting as much as we can of whatever is available. We need to find a way forward which doesn't mean crushing other people in order to achieve our aims... and it's only when we understand the importance of that, that humanity will be ready to progress to the next stage.

Time travellers

BoingBoing carries a video from Jamie D. Grant, a magician, which purports to show a time traveller.  I don't usually like to put spoilers in my blog, and the video is only a couple of minutes long.  You can see it here....

OK... a guy who has a modern look appears in an old photograph. It's a bit like the video of the old lady apparently using a mobile phone... you see what you think you see only with the perspective of your time and place. I've embedded this version only because I think it is the original, but the guy does witter on a bit - the actual film starts around two minutes 39 seconds.



The Hakan Nordkvist case is more intriguing on first viewing. It's a hoax... how can it not be? Apparently a stupid retirement company thought a viral hoax might encourage young people to plan for their retirement. Once again, the "proof" isn't proof at all.



The most persuasive argument against time travel is simply that we do not have people from the 31st century arriving as tourists to screw up the future in some mind-bendingly confusing way. I'm assuming anyone capable of developing a time-travelling machine will be a geek who's watched enough Star Trek to know it never turns out well anyway.

Dying birds falling into the sea

Robin photograph from Wikimedia Commons CC attribution Pierre Selim

If I hadn't caught the end of the six o'clock news on BBC Radio 4 tonight, I would not have heard about the latest example of bird death to hit the UK.  There was a short report at the end of the news of birds plunging into the sea off the coast.  These are garden birds at the end of their migratory journey to our country, who are arriving exhausted, so exhausted that they cannot avoid drowning in the sea a short distance from the coast.

There's very little detail online.  It always amazes me that this sort of story attracts so little attention.  The Independent has a couple of paragraphs at the end of an article about the change in weather this week:

"The bad weather is also affecting wildlife. Thousands of migrating birds have been dying before reaching England this week because of an appalling combination of fog and winds around the coast, according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

"Some fishermen have told the charity of the deaths of many exhausted and disorientated "garden" birds plunging into the sea around their vessels, a spokesman said."

The assumption seems to be that the colder weather and fog are to blame, but the scenes described on Radio 4, where they also talked to fishermen who saw birds dropping into the sea around them, seemed more apocalyptic than that sounds. I'm keeping an eye on the subject, but it is hard to summarize when virtually no detail is reported.