Parallel Paths...

[Scots_Nomad]

I must confess that up until last week when I happened accross the movie on UK TV - which 'coincidently' happened to be the very day that I chose to start re-editing the manuscript of a book I wrote four years ago - I had never heard of the Celestine Prophesies. I must also confess that as movies go the fictional adventure flick wasn't my cup of tea, however after watching it I knew without any doubt that the movie was at least in part based on someone's real life experiences, as the insights decribed therein so closely echoed the same series of experiences that I had lived through five years ago which had originally led me to write the book I mentioned before. The next time I was on my computer I felt compelled to find out more about the author of the book, and that ultimately led me here. Rather than trying to describe all of the aspects of the movie which were so familiar to me I have instead decided to copy and paste a brief introduction that I wrote some time ago and subsequently used in the foreword to my second book on the subject...

I am a 46 year old qualified Quantity Surveyor from a working class, Irish Catholic family, born and raised in Glasgow, but having spent most of the last sixteen years living and working overseas on power station projects in Malaysia, Borneo, New Zealand, Abu Dhabi, Germany and Vietnam.

Five years ago I was working as an expat commercial/legal professional in Vietnam for a German multi-national engineering company (Siemens) on a multi-billion dollar power station project, however, having become completely disillusioned/ disgusted by the behaviour of my company and our client on that project (BP) in the wake of a fatal accident on the site, myself and one of my close friends decided that we would leave the construction industry behind and instead open a bar together somewhere in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) when our assignments were completed.

After completing our assignments in January 2004 we set about investigating the process and looking around for suitable premises (and taking a bit of a well earned breather!), however after spending most of the first month or so lazing around a swimming pool and twiddling my thumbs most of the time I decided that I would use some of the spare time that I found on my hands seeing if I could write a book.

Having spent most of the previous twelve years working on various power projects throughout the world, and with the experiences of the Vietnam project fresh in my mind, I felt that I had at least a basic skeleton for a story, and I certainly had no shortage of bizarre characters around me both at work and in my personal life in Vietnam to fill a book ten times over, but the one thing that was missing was a 'big ending'.

As I idled my way along with that project - which was always supposed to be little more than a time filling hobby - I began to notice more and more 'coincidences', both in my day-to-day life and in my reflections on my past. At first I just put that down to the fact that I was thinking about 'everything' more than I ever had done before and the fact that I was paying far more attention to what was going on around me than I ever had before, but it didn't take me very long to realise that the 'coincidences' that I was noticing seemed to go WAY beyond anything that could be dismissed so easily - And I say that as a previously 'devote agnostic' with no religious faith, a healthy skepticism of all things 'psychic, and what most people would describe as a 'gifted' scientific/mathematical/logical brain with a genius level IQ!

As the days went on I noticed that rather than diminishing, as I had expected them to once I had decided to set my logical brain on the look out for an explanation for those coincidences, the coincidences seemed to get more and more frequent AND more and more bizarre and extreme. As someone who had studied probability and statistical significance testing I struggled more each day to find any kind of logical explanation for the events which I was almost constantly experiencing with my own eyes and my own ears. Within weeks I had reached the stage where what had started as a curious observation began to worry me quite a bit - Could I possibly be heading down the same road John Nash (The guy played by Russell Crowe in 'A Beautiful Mind'). I longed for the strange phenomena to 'go away and let me get my focus back on opening the bar', but rather than going away, it continued to get worse - crossing over from the bizarrely improbable to the downright impossible!

I couldn't begin to list the number of bizarrely improbable things that happened here, but I will give you a taste of one (of many) impossible things that happened:

At that time I was preparing to pack up my belongings from my 'company provided' house then head back to my home in Scotland for a holiday before returning to Vietnam to pursue the bar idea. One morning I was packing away the CDs from my living room (about two or three hundred), but rather than just packing them into a box as I would normally do when moving house, I had decided to take my time and organise them properly for once. I was taking my time and listening to music whilst deciding how best to organise that part of my CD collection (there were at least another hundred CDs around various parts of my three bedroom, three storey house, but I planned to collect them together later and fit them in to their appropriate places once I had decided how best to organise the ones from the living room). Anyway, before starting on what I expected to be a fairly easy, relaxing and enjoyable task, I decided to make myself a cup of coffee, however as I noticed that I had run out of milk, which meant that I had to nip along to my local shop to buy some more. I was out of my house for only a few minutes, but when I returned I found that ALL of the CDs from all over my house had been gathered together in my livingroom and laid out in a perfectly formed, stunningly geometrical pattern on my floor! The pattern was a six armed spiral shape. The curve of each arm was identical (even though formed out of square boxes which over lapped each other), and each arm of the spiral was identically spaced from its neighbours, however what was particularly striking and impressive was that each arm was also colour coded - one red, one yellow, one green, one blue, one black and one white, with each of those arms looking like a single-coloured spectrum, with the darkest shaded CD covers to the centre gradually fading out to the lighter shaded covers at the tips of the arms!

The pattern was stunning - so intricate and yet so imposing, so mathematical and yet so beautiful, so organic and yet so precisely formed! I would have been extremely proud to have been able to have created such an arrangement myself, but the truth is that even if I had been artistically minded enough to have imagined such a thing in the first place I would guess that it would probably have taken me at least a week to achieve that level of 'perfect accuracy', AND YET 'SOMETHING' HAD BEEN ABLE TO DO ALL OF THAT, INCLUDING COLLECTING ALL OF MY CDS FROM VARIOUS PARTS OF MY HOUSE, WITHIN ONLY A FEW MINUTES!!!

That event really freaked me out quite a bit - I had sort of got used to bizarre and even 'impossible' things happening around me, but this had happened IN MY HOUSE, and whatever had done it was obviously WAY more 'able' than I could even imagine! I suppose that if I believed in 'poltergeists' or things like that, then that would have been my best explanation, but I was still sure that this was something 'mathematical and logical', so I steeled myself to stick around and try to work out what the hell was going on!

The following day, with my spiral shape still intact on the floor (I wasn't going to move it until I could understand it!) I continued with my packing chores, playing some CDs in the background (having carefully selected them from the spiral), but then a CD started to jump. I took it off and played another, but after a while that one also started to jump. "Oh no! Not my CD player too!" I thought, as one of the 'coincidences' that I had been living with was that all kinds of electrical and electronic devices started to selectively go haywire around me!

I chose another CD but that one started skipping too, but then it crossed my mind that maybe I should actually be trying to listening to what words the CDs were playing, as I had noticed that the CDs weren't simply skipping across from beginning to end, but were instead jumping both forward and backward, playing a line from one song, a few words from another, a couple of words from another, and so on. I decided to let the skipping CD play and I tried to make out what (if anything) it/they/whatever was saying, however the frequent changes in tempo, volume and background noise made it impossible for me to keep up with the frequent jumps.

Frustrated at being unable to follow the words that were playing, I shouted out (to no one in particular) "Oh for f***s sake slow down!" - Much to my COMPLETE amazement, the CD slowed down IMMEDIATELY! It slowed way down - far slower even than if you played an old vinyl 45 at 33 rpm. That REALLY freaked me out! Not only were ‘they’ in my house, but they could obviously/apparently both hear me AND understand me!

I thought for a couple of seconds, as I really didn't know what to do next, but then my frustration took over again and I shouted out

"Look! If you want to talk then let's talk, but for f***s sake stop messing around with my head like this!".

The CD stopped playing immediately and a voice from nowhere AND from everywhere around me said, in a very calm, very monotonic voice "OK, let's talk...But it would be easier if you would step outside into your garden."

What happened next is a VERY long story (in fact, I have already written five or six books trying to describe it and would still estimate that I have only got about eighty percent of the story down), but to summarise it VERY briefly, for the next three weeks (before I returned to the UK for my holiday) I had many long, open, informative, two way conversations with 'the intelligence' that contacted me. We discussed how, why, who, and every other question that I could think of asking, and all I can say here is that I got very sensible, logical, scientific answers to every question I could think of asking.

During those three weeks we also spent a lot of time while they taught me 'other forms of communication' that we could use when it wasn't convenient to talk so openly including: methods that most people would call 'telepathy'; methods involving 'signs' that I would recognise but that most others would over look; messages sent in dreams, and a whole lot more besides.

Since those events of 2004 I have walked away from a well paid, cushy job and have spent three years of my life and around a quarter of a million dollars of my own savings whilst writing my story for others to read, One thing that no one can accuse me of is being in this for the money or being in it for an easy life, because my life during the past four years has been anything but easy!

Despite any impression you may have from the foregoing I make no claim to be psychic nor to have any kind of paranormal powers or ‘special’ skills. I am just an ordinary guy whose life was changed forever by a series or extraordinary events.

[WolfsEyelash]

Wow, thanks for a facinating read, i'd love to learn more about the books you've been writing.

I'd love to know what you learned and why you think this inteligent energy manifested itself to you? what kind of message do you feel they were trying to convey? If you can touch on that, it would be wonderful.

Love & light

sophia
_________________
"Love knows not it's own depth til the hour of separation"
Namaste *

[Scots_Nomad]

Hi Sophia,

Thanks for your comments. With regard to your questions, I couldn’t possibly tell you what I learned or what message they were ‘trying to convey’ in a post or two here (although I would say that they didn’t ‘try to convey’ anything – when they had something to say they said it, both good and bad, without beating around the bush). As I mentioned in my first post, in the past five years I’ve written more than 3500 pages worth of books trying to do justice to the stuff we spoke about and even that doesn’t cover all of it. We literally spoke about ‘life, the universe and Everything’, but I’m very reluctant to try to summarize any of it in a couple of paragraphs for fear of things being misinterpreted.
I will try to give you some idea of the kind of stuff we talked about in other posts, but for now I’m going to try (by way of an extract from one of my draft manuscripts) to answer your third question about why they chose to manifest themselves/themselves to me, but before I do that I better explain how it was that we came to be speaking to each other in the manner reflected in the extract that follows, and the best way I can do that is with this extract from my first book:-
…

The day that we actually spoke for the first time was the most hilarious experience I have ever had in my life! I can’t wait to tell you some of that story, but it is so long and winding that I couldn't possible sit down to type it out in full nor could I begin to do it justice recounting it in little bits. The depth and the intricately woven logic that they used can't be made that simple, but here is another snippet that may whet your appetite a bit:

"Do you have a sense of humour John?"
"I like to think so."
"Good, because that will make this a lot easier. We can sit here and tell you things about us and you can sit and answer yes or no questions, or we can exchange lists, but pretty soon you will get bored with that. The more we can joke together, the more we will understand your sense of humour and the better we will understand how you think. Don't you agree that you can learn a lot about someone from their sense of humour?"
"Yeah. I think I understand what you mean"
"Don't worry about being original. There is nothing you can come up with that we haven't already heard before, but we can still have a laugh with you. Think of it like this, a father can get a tickle from his child’s humour, even when the child is a baby"
"Don't Call Me Baby! ‘Madison Avenue by the way!"

(We were also playing a simultaneous game of linking song titles into the conversation and being able to name the band - I told you it was complicated)

"Don't you think you are a baby?"
"Hardly!"
"What age are you?"
"42" (actually I was only 41 at the time, but hey, who is counting?)
"You think 42 is old?"
"I think it is older than I want to be!...So how old are you?"
"It wouldn't really mean much to you if we used your numbers to answer that question but we could try to show you if you will close your eyes and allow us to put an image into your head (again)".

I did, and the image that they put into my head initially was a photograph of Ankor Wat in Cambodia which I had taken myself about one year earlier. I opened my eyes and asked,

"Are you telling me that you are as old as Ankor Wat?"
"We haven't finished yet! Close your eyes again!".

Once again I closed my eyes and that time I realised that I was not actually looking at a photograph but rather at a moving image - which I initially thought was on 'fast forward' but then realised that it was actually running 'back in time'! I saw Ankor Wat disappear into overgrown jungle and then I saw it reappear as a brand new building, but the 'video' that I was watching didn't stop there - it 'speeded up'! I watched as Ankor Wat was 'dismantled' and then I watched the jungle become savannah. I saw 'generation after generation' of elephants walk by, and then what appeared to be generation after generation of wooly mammoths stroll past before the savannah too disappeared and became a volcanic fireworks show before dropping into complete blackness.

From then on I saw nothing but blackness, but I could tell that the 'video' was still speeding up by the second because I could feel 'time' was rushing past me like a wind on my face that started as a breeze and ended up 'near gale force'. After a few minutes of watching nothing but blackness I asked,

"Is there anything left to see at the end of this or can I open my eyes yet?"
"Keep watching if you want an answer to that question or you can open your eyes if you are happy with the answer to your last question."

I decided to open my eyes.

"OK! OK! I get your point, and if you are going to put it like that then I guess I am still bit of a wean, so you can call me baby if you want."

(NB: ‘wean’ – pronounced like ‘wayne’ - is a Scottish word meaning baby or child.)

“OK Baby!"
"No! Wait! I didn't mean that literally"
"So what will we call you"
"Hold on, I will think of something"
"What about John Wean?"
"No. I think you'll find that that name's taken"
"What about John The Wean?"
"Naw! That's still to close. How 'bout "Kiddo" - Brooke Benton by the way? No, wait, I don't like that either. Let me think about it some more"
"What language is that you are speaking John?"
"What?"
"What language is that you are speaking John?"

(They had this really annoying habit of repeating EXACTLY what they had just said -but nothing more - whenever I said "What?", and when I say exactly, I mean with every tone exactly the same as before. Just like they were rerunning a tape.)

"No! I mean, how can you ask that when I have been speaking it and you have been answering it for the past ten minutes?"
"What language is that you are speaking John?"

(The annoying habit also applied when my response didn't actually answer the question they had asked! That was really annoying!)

"It's English!!!! What language are you answering in?"

They completely ignored my counter-question and just continued with their line of enquiry,

"It's like English, but we know English and this is not it."
"Aww, I see what you mean! It is English, but I am speaking with a Scottish accent so it will sound different."
"No, it’s not that either. We know Scottish accents, but that is not it."
"It is! I have been living away from Scotland for a while, but this is still a Scottish accent."
"Yes, we can hear the accent, but that is not it. Even when we take the accent out, it is still not English. What other language might it be? What language do you think in?"
"English! I think in English! Maybe I think in English with a Scottish accent, I don't know, but I know that it is English ‘cause that is the only language I speak."
"No, it’s not English."
"It f**king is!"

(We had previously agreed that I should not bother filtering my language to remove swear words.)

"What language did you think in as a child?"
"English!"
"Ok, let's try another way. We have read all of the books in there in your living room. Which of them is written in the language closest to the language you used as a child?"
"Ahhhh! I think I see where you’re going. Let me look ‘cause I can't remember what books are there."

I started to walk toward the window into my living room and at the same time I tried to visualise the pile of books I had by my TV. There were about maybe a dozen or so, but I didn't have to think beyond the one that was on top of the pile. I stopped walking toward the window...

"The Big Yin's book! I mean..."

I was going to clarify that "The Big Yin" was Billy Connolly, and that the book was actually written by his Aussie wife, but I didn't get a chance to utter another sound because a voice I recognised immediately replaced the previous monotone that I had been hearing for ten minutes or so...

"Awwwwwwww Rrrrrrrrrrrri-ite Wee Man! Now wur tawkin’!"
"F**king hell!"

From then on they spoke to me with Billy Connolly's voice! And I don’t just mean they spoke like him or they spoke with his accent, for the rest of that day it was just like I ‘wiz havin a laugh’ with Billy Connolly himself! And at times I laughed so much that I really did nearly piss myself!

[Scots_Nomad]

OK, now that I have explained why we were speaking to each other in Glaswegian slang (sprinkled with swear words!), I can maybe try to answer your question as to why they/it chose to manifest themselves to me…

Obviously that was a question I asked them (more than once). As with many of the questions I would ask, they would give me an answer that seemed like enough of an answer to me at the time, but as with many other answers they gave me, they would return to the subject hours, days or even moths later and tell me or show me something else that helped me understand their answers better. For that reason there are probably half a dozen extracts from my book that I could post which would each answer that question a bit more fully, but I will limit this response to one extract and the following brief summary of part of one of our conversations where I had just asked why they were speaking to me:-

“You spoke to us first, all we did was answer when you shouted out to us.”
”Yeah, but I only shouted out to me after you left me in no doubt that you were there and that you were picking on me!”
“Exactly! You see we send signs to all of your people, not just to you, and we hear your people shout out to us all the time, but the difference was that you shouted out to us at EXACTLY the point when we left you in no doubt we were there. When the rest of your people shout out they are just guessing or hoping – they don’t really expect us to reply, but you did, and you did it based on a logical process of elimination. Sure there had been strange things happening for weeks but there could still have been other explanations for that. If you had shouted out to us then we would have ignored your calls just like we have to ignore all the others, and if you had left it much longer to shout out to us the strange stuff would have stopped and we would have faded back into the shadows again, but you called out to us at exactly the point where we left you with no other explanation and that kind of logical thinking deserved an answer.”

That was a very rough summary of their first answer on the subject but this extract from one of my books recounts another conversation we had a bit later which explains things in a bit more detail:-

….

Anyway, leaving the general context aside for now, at one point my friends explained that they watched ALL of ‘my people’ ALL of the time, and try (as far as they are able to without actually ‘blowing their cover’) to encourage good, social behavior where possible. To use their words, “Good deeds earn signs, and lies break chains. Wee good deeds earn wee signs and big good deeds earn big signs, wee lies break wee chains and big lies break big chains”. They then went on to explain that the ‘signs’ they were talking about were signs that ‘they’ actually existed and were really paying attention to what goes on down here, and the ‘chains’ that they were talking about were chains of memory (which could well explain why lying b*****ds like Bush, Rumpsfeld and Chaney seem to have real difficulty in keeping track of what they did and said yesterday – Even when ‘yesterday’s words’ were captured on film for all to see and hear!).

With regard to the ‘signs’ bit of the chat, I jumped in with something like,

“So why didn’t I get many signs then?”

(Full of ma’self, or what? <!;->),

“You didn’t get many signs???? What the f**k do you think you’ve been bombarded with for the past few weeks then?”,
“Aye OK, I saw them THEN, but if that’s what you mean then I haven’t really been ‘that good’ recently…Or what I actually mean is that I haven’t been any better during the past few weeks than I have been during the rest of my life, so why did the signs start all of a sudden?”
“Firstly Wee Man, as far as we are concerned you have been amazing during those last few weeks – Sure, you haven’t gotten any better in general terms, but then again, you haven’t gotten any worse, so in our ‘relative terms’ you have just been f**king amazing. We could see what you were going through – Obviously we could, coz it was us that was putting you through it! – and none of us could have blamed you if you had started taking some of that out on the people around you. We certainly couldn’t have blamed you if you had decided that other people were just gonna have to look after themselves for a while coz you needed to concentrate on yourself with all that shit going on, but you didn’t do that. Like you just said Wee Man,, despite everything that was going on around you, you didn’t treat other people any better – or any worse – than you did during the rest of your life, and in a way THAT was your downfall, coz every time you blew us away by doing that you just earned yourself more and more, bigger and bigger signs. Can you get that?”
”Aye….I suppose so….F**k! No wonder if felt like a f**king avalanche out there!”
“Now, with regard to your earlier good deeds, you DID get signs for them. At first you got the same kind of wee signs that everyone else gets for their good deeds – nothing that was supposed to blow your mind or anything, just a kind of wee tickle here and there to let you know that we were happy with you. To some of your people a wee tickle every now and again is all they really need to keep them going through their whole life, but we noticed pretty early on that you weren’t really that interested in wee tickles, so we started saving them up for you – Like money in the bank kind of thing, coz we never forget when we owe someone a tickle! – Then every so often we would decide to give you a wee bit of the interest that you had accrued in one ‘lump sum’ – Maybe not something that was hugely valuable in financial terms, but something that was BIG in ‘sign value’. Something so weird that it just ‘had to be’ a sign…..Does that ring any bells with you?”
”Aye, I suppose so, coz some weird shit has happened to me now and again, but how the f**k is something like that supposed to be ‘a reward’, coz all it did was confuse the f**k out of me for a while?”
”And why was that?”
”Coz I had no idea what was going on!....And then ‘nothing’ started going on again, and that just kinda made the strange stuff make even less sense than it ‘never’ did before, so to speak!”
“And why was that?”
”Coz that’s the way it was! It didn’t make sense to me! F**k, it wouldn’t have made any sense to ANYBODY!”
”Do you believe that?”
”What part of it? Wait! You don’t need to answer that coz I meant it ALL!”
“But what if you already believed that we existed?”
”How the f**k could I already have believed you existed?”
”OK, maybe ‘believed’ is not the right word, but what if you had been told that we existed or that you ‘hoped’ that we existed, or something like that?”
”Awwwww! I get it now! Are you talking about the ‘God stuff’ again?”
”Not necessarily ‘God stuff’ – Try to imagine what some other people might have been hoping for proof of – People that were maybe not quite so skeptical about everything as you.”
”Oh aye…Like ghosts of people they’d lost, or life after death….Or even aliens I suppose.”
”Exactly Wee Man! Our signs were never suppose to tell people what we are, just to let them know that there really is more to this universe than they can see everyday. Your people were always free to interpret our signs anyway they wanted to, after all, they had earned them so they became ‘their’ signs.”
“Yeah, OK. I can kind of see that. I can kind of see how stuff like that could be a comfort to some people. I can see how people like ma Da’ could have taken that as some kind of ‘wee wink’ from God, but what about me and people like me? All you would do is confuse the shit out of us!”
”Well firstly, your Da was way beyond the ‘wee wink’ stage, but that’s your Da’s business not yours, and as far as the ‘people like you’ bit is concerned, there really aren’t that many ‘people like you’ among your people – And before you accuse us of kissing your arse again maybe we should point out that we are talking about ‘real skeptical b*****ds that believe in absolutely nothing’ when we say ‘people like you’!”
“Ya cheeky b*****ds!...Or is that actually a compliment?....F**k! I’m not really sure either way!”
”Well you can decide on that later, but all we are saying here is that there aren’t that many ‘people like you’ down there, no matter what they may say in public, and the ones who are don’t usually earn enough good deeds for that to ever create a big problem for us….I suppose that that is another thing we should thank you for Wee Man, coz it’s not too often that any of your people make us flex our imagination the way that you have at times.”

I thought about ‘all of that’ for a while and then sort of shrugged,

“OK. I suppose that that all kind of makes some kind of sense to me….Although the jury is still out with regard to how much of a ‘reward’ all this is! Don’t get me wrong – today has been ‘interesting’, and you really are a funny b*****d…But how f**ked is my life gonna be after all this?”….

[WolfsEyelash]

Hi thank you for elaborating, I appreciate how difficult it must.

So where does this leave you now...is your life better?

What plans for your writing? will you self publish? and when can we have a gander? : )

Love & light

Sophia
_________________
"Love knows not it's own depth til the hour of separation"
Namaste *

[Scots_Nomad]

[quote="WolfsEyelash"]Hi thank you for elaborating, I appreciate how difficult it must be.

So where does this leave you now...is your life better?

What plans for your writing? will you self publish? and when can we have a gander? : )

Love & light

Sophia[/quote]

Hi again Sophia,

Again you ask some questions that seem quite simple and straight forward and yet which are difficult to answer properly in a single post. For example:

‘So where does that leave you now…is your life better?’ :- To answer your question in one way, at the time when all the weirdness started it was almost certainly the time when I felt most happy with how my life was and where it was heading. I was in a place I loved to live (Vietnam), living in a real nice house, I had loads of great friends about me and a wonderful social life, I had plenty of cash in my bank account and was really looking forward to the challenge of opening up a bar in Saigon with my real close friend as a business partner. Those plans to open a bar were however scuppered largely, if not totally, because of the events that I started to describe in the above posts, and whilst remained friends with all those around me and stayed on in Vietnam for another three years while I drafted the manuscripts of my books, my experiences did create an unavoidable ‘distance’ between myself and my friends as there was so much of my life that I couldn’t explain to them nor hope for them to truly understand. After my three years of writing I realised that there was no prospect for me to find a publisher there, and I couldn’t simply go on writing and living off my savings without any form of income, so I was forced to put all my belongings into storage in Saigon and returned to Scotland where I hoped to find a literary agent and ultimately a publisher for my books. I returned to Glasgow about two years ago however I soon discovered that getting into the publishing business is not as easy as I thought it would be – for one thing, even though Glasgow is a fairly large city, the biggest in Scotland, there is not a single literary agent based there, as the whole publishing industry in the UK is centred in and around London. Whilst there are certainly agents and publishers that will consider book proposals submitted by mail, how can I possibly summarise my book in one paragraph or one page as they require, and how can I submit a specimen chapter or two when no one ‘chapter’ could hope to give any kind of real understanding of my story? So basically, I have spent most of the last two years just passing time and treading water back in Scotland, where the weather is killing me almost as much as the boredom!
The contrast between how my life is now compared to how it was five years ago before all this ‘stuff’ started couldn’t be more stark, however, in spite of ALL that, if I was given the chance to rewind the clock five years in order that I could pursue the path that my life was previously on I would chose not to take it, because the fact is that regardless of my current situation I could never chose ignorance over knowledge.

To answer that same question in a way more relevant to this forum I could use an example from the Celestine Prophesies movie (which I am assuming you have seen):- In my opening post I mentioned that many of the ‘insights’ from the movie were very familiar to me, and one of them was the bit in the movie where the main character ‘tunes in’ to the energy of the universe/world and he can then see the forest and scenery around him ‘glow’ – I have experienced that! Actually, the film doesn’t really do justice to what I actually saw, but maybe it was as close as you could get to representing what I experienced in a movie. The first time it happened I had been in my house, and my ‘new friends’ were demonstrating some of the things they could do, and as was usually the case, my lesson proved to be a bit of a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows for me. One minute they would totally blow my mind, and then they would push me too far to the point that I either got hurt or got very pissed off, and then they would show me what the lesson was actually leading up to and blow my mind once more, and so on. Can’t really go into the detail of that days lesson as it would take too long to explain, but it ended up with the inside of my house looking like a bomb-site (this at a time when I was trying to pack all my belongings up and hand the house back to the landlord), which really pissed me off. Then they told me to switch off certain lights and switch on some others, and all of a sudden my bomb-site of my house was transformed into a sparkling colourful wonderland, with all the things that seemed to have been scattered around haphazardly proving to have been placed in exactly the right place to reflect light onto another scattered item which in turn bounced that onto another and so on and so on. The effect was so amazing and so clever that even when my friends suggested that I go out to my garden I just didn’t want to go as I wanted to stay and admire their handiwork a bit more. After a bit of persuasion I did go out to my garden, and what I saw just took my breathe away.
It was night time, but some of the switches that my friend had told me to flick when I was in the house had obviously switched on some lights in the garden (until that point I hadn’t realised that the lights could be controlled from inside the house). The swimming pool lights and pump were on, and even though the swimming pool always looked good when lit up at night, that night the water just seemed so much bluer than ever before, and the ripples that the pump caused on the water sent that light dancing around other parts of the garden where it mixed and mingled with the lights that were coming from inside the house from the first stage of their light-show, and all those lights reflected and refracted on various objects which had obviously been precisely/haphazardly placed earlier. There must have been some rainfall earlier, because all the plants and flowers and palm trees in my garden glistened and twinkled in the lights that danced around the garden, but even that couldn’t really explain what I was seeing, as the plants and flowers and trees didn’t seem to be just reflecting the light, but actually emitting it!
The whole scene was breathtaking. I was dumbstruck and just wandered around the garden with my mouth wide open in awe. I wanted to touch everything (in fact I wanted to hug everything coz it was so beautiful, but I only actually hugged a few things!). I stumbled around my garden in complete amazement – My garden was always tidy and well cared for (by my gardener/pool guy) but it had never looked like that before and in fact I really had never seen anything that even approached how beautiful my garden was that night! I can’t remember if I was actually reduced to tears, but I was reduced to the point where I could only say “Thank you!” over and over again – albeit that most of the time no sound actually left my mouth and I was left to just mouth the words silently.
I could have stayed there staring at that garden forever – or actually, I can’t honestly say that as by that time my friends lessons had already begun to give me some idea of how long ‘forever’ really is, however I could certainly have stayed there for a very, very long time without feeling even the slightest bit bored. Hopefully this description together with the representation shown in the CP movie can give you some kind of understanding of what I felt that night, although to be honest I don’t think any words or pictures could really do it justice. The fact is that right there and then I really couldn’t imagine how anything could be more amazing (I was completely wrong again, as my friends than managed to find a way to take even that ‘enrapturing’ experience to yet a higher level again, which goes beyond anything shown in the movie and that I won’t even try to describe herein).
So to get back to answering your question now – Just to have experienced what I saw and felt in my garden that night was worth a whole lot of hassle, frustration, pain and boredom, so in a way I could say that my life is better now for having experienced that. On the other hand however there is a saying that you can’t miss what you’ve never had, and there is also the fact that after seeing just how beautiful this world could/can be it is so much harder and more painful to see it the way it is. The thing is that I KNOW that I will end up in a world ‘like my garden that night’ at some point. If I were to find out tomorrow that I had some terminal illness I could live with it (so to speak), however I can also wait a while longer so long as I feel there is a point to hanging around – and right now I haven’t completely given up hope for that!

I Hope ‘all that’ answers your first question enough for now. Will come back to you on the other queries in your post later.

Cheers,
JB

[WolfsEyelash]

Good morning,

Thanks again for taking so much time to speak to me and satisfy my curiousity, i do hope it doesn't feel like the spanish inquisition

I have watched the movie just recently and read the first three books some years ago, and i can relate to a lot of what you are saying, which I guess, is why i find your experience so facinating.

Some of what you say does cause concern...but who am i to judge. When you mentioned that you were pushed too far which caused you to get hurt....is worrying, i pray you know in your heart who/what exactly you have been dealing with. Do you?

I take it your "friends" have done what they set out to do and have left you alone now? or perhaps there is still some contact.
Look forward to hearing more.

Take care of planet You
Love & light to all

sophia
_________________
"Love knows not it's own depth til the hour of separation"
Namaste *

[Scots_Nomad]

Hi Sophia,

Don’t worry, there’s no need for concern. I was actually a bit concerned after I made that that post that some of my comments may be taken in the wrong way. My ‘learning process’ was full of many ups and downs, as my friends pushed me to every limit I could possibly imagine (and a few others beside) and though I picked up a few bumps and bruises along the way I certainly didn’t mean to overplay any physical pain I felt. Here’s another extract that maybe illustrates some of those ups and downs a wee bit better:

‘…
Anyway, that’s all just background info for now, but basically they said that they were ‘preparing me’ because they wanted me to come and visit them ‘at their place’ – Which they tried to ‘describe’ as being like a parallel universe, albeit that a description like that doesn’t tell you much if you have ABSOLUTELY no idea what to expect in a parallel universe!

Their first preparatory step was to ‘loosen me up’. Literally! That started off very simply when they got me to relax and roll my neck to loosen up, which just involved me sitting on my sofa listening to MTV and letting my head roll from side to side in a kind of a figure of eight motion, although the figure of eight shape kind of ‘rotated’ a bit. When I started my neck was really stiff (after my ‘tumbles’ in the garden a few nights earlier), so after about fifteen minutes or so their ‘treatment’ did seem to be making me feel good, like a self-performed neck massage, but even when I felt I was loosened up and ready to stop they kept telling me to stick with it and keep doing what I was doing. I continued even though my neck was beginning to get sore and I was getting really tired (I hadn’t slept for days at the time), but all the time they kept urging me to keep going.

After maybe another half an hour or maybe even an hour I actually began to feel dizzy and sick because of the motion, but when I pointed that out to them they just said “Go with it.” so I kept on going, feeling more and more sick. Another ten minutes later I told them that I was feeling even sicker, but once again they just said “Go with it!”. Another ten minutes and I really felt that I was gonna puke – I told them so, and they said, “Well for f**k sake go with it, coz we don’t want you throwing up in here!”. I started to say something like “What? So you KNEW that this was actually gonna make me throw up?”, but before I could finish the sentence I had to break off and make a run for the toilet!

I got as far as the door to the toilet before I could hold it in no longer. The toilet bowl was still at least six feet away and I was actually looking (longingly) towards it, wishing that I had set off a few seconds earlier, when I just had to ‘let rip’. I was both surprised and amazed to see that my puke came out as ‘projectile vomit’ – I had heard of the phenomenon before but had never actually seen it – and was even more surprised and amazed as I watched the entire stream of vomit arc through the air and hit the toilet bowl dead centre without a single drop of it dropping on the toilet floor! (Quite an impressive party trick if I could do it ‘on demand’! <!;->). The first burst of vomit came to an end but I could feel there was more to come so I continued towards the toilet bowl, collapsed to my knees and then spent the next ten to fifteen minutes ‘spewing my stomach inside out’ to the point where it really began to hurt.

When I regained my composure sufficiently I washed my mouth and brushed my teeth and then marched back into the livingroom to demand an explanation (i.e. “WHAT THE F**K?????” <!;->). My friends said ‘Sorry Wee man, but we had to do that coz you’ve got bacteria and viruses and shit in your stomach that we no longer have in ‘our place’ so we had to make sure that we got all of them out before we could bring you here’. I argued that they should have at least have had the decency of warning me about that in advance, but they just said ‘Think about it Wee man! Even if you would still have agreed to go through with it, would it have made anything any better or easier if you actually knew that that kind of thing was coming?’ – I couldn’t really argue with them on that point, but I still wasn’t too happy about ‘everything’!

As another part of my ‘travel preparations’ they said they had to sweat all of the ‘shit’ out of my skin/pores. Again that was NOT a pleasant experience for me – I won’t go into many details here, but at one point they had me in my bedroom (where the air conditioner had mysteriously stopped working and where all of my windows had mysteriously sealed themselves ‘tight shut’) doing what felt like some strange kind of yoga. I was lying on my bed and twisting my body into all kinds of strange contortions, half expecting to be ‘pulled through’ to a parallel universe at any second! (Ha! They actually had me trying to copy the movements on Kylie Minogue’s video for a song called ‘Like Chocolate’ which was on my TV at the time, except they were slowing it down and stopping the video to make sure that I was following every move! It was nuts! <!;->).

At one point I was absolutely drenched in sweat and it was running down into my eyes and stinging them, so I said “Enough! I need a drink of water or something and I need to go wash my face!”. They said “No! Keep going, we’re getting there”, but I just said “F**k you! I’m going to wash my face!”. I got up and staggered into my en-suite bathroom squinting through my stinging sweat-filled eyes. I leant over the wash hand basin and turned on the cold water tap…..but all that came out was a gush of deep red BLOOD!

That made me jump back from the basin and as I did I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror – All the ‘sweat’ that I could feel running down my face was just as blood red as the stuff that was pouring out of the tap! I had blood streaming from my nose, from my gums, from below my hairline as well as from almost every pore on my face - and even from my eyes!! It was HORRIFIC looking, but I was so pissed off with everything at the time that the only emotion that I really felt was anger – LOTS OF IT!!! I looked up to the ceiling and shouted out at the top of my voice “Will you c**ts stop f**king around with me here!!!”. I heard them say “OK, sorry! Maybe that was a bit much at just the wrong time.”.

I looked at the mirror again and my face was how I should have expected it to be, i.e. drenched in sweat. When I looked down at the basin there was only cool, clear water flowing from the tap, so I spent the next five minutes or so washing my face with it and using my cupped hands to pour it over my hair.

When I had cooled down enough (emotionally and thermo-dynamically) I grabbed a towel and dried myself off as I left the bathroom. I said to my friends (who were certainly not too high up on my Christmas card list at that point!),

“So what the f**k was that shit about?”,
“We were just showing you that we could do ‘that sort of thing’ if we wanted to.”
”Big f**king deal!”

(Pause)

“So….Weren’t you scared?”
”Scared? Naw, I was way too angry to be scared!”

(Longer pause)

“It’s nice to have a clear conscience, eh Wee Man?”
”Eh?”
”Well, just think how absolutely terrified ANY of your people would have been to have seen something like that in a mirror.”
”So what’s that got to do with a clear conscience?”
”Well, think about it! Do you think that you could possibly have looked at that without feeling scared unless you were ABSOLUTELY sure that we had no possible reason to be holding any kind of grudge against you?”

I thought for a while,

“Mmmmm. Maybe you’re right…..Why the f**k was I not even a wee bit concerned when I saw that?”

…”

From day one my friends had said they wanted my to know and to understand Everything, but there is a limit to what you can teach anyone with words alone. The ‘crash course’ I went through tested me beyond ever limit imaginable and certainly included some unpleasant experiences – even some things that I wouldn’t wish on any other human, but over all the pluses way outweighed the minuses. At times I almost hated them for doing what they were doing to me – some of their demonstrations of what they could do with ‘time’ were particular low-lights (e.g. I have experienced a ‘Groundhog Day’ and can assure you that the Dan Akroyd movie does nothing to reflect the nightmare of real thing, but even that was nothing compared to the morning that I saw time just stop!), but with hindsight I can understand why all of it was necessary. My friends demonstrated to me just how much they could control Everything, but it was as much a demonstration of their restraint as a demonstration of their power.
The future will not be full of sweetness and light for everyone – for those who make the cut the future will be rosier than I could possibly have imagined before my experiences began but for those who don’t there will be a hell – not a hell of fire and brimstone but a far worse, far more unimaginable hell of their own making. To really understand that I had to have at least a taste of just how good or how bad my friends could make things, as words really couldn’t begin to describe either end of that spectrum.

[WolfsEyelash]

quite speechless... curious even
_________________
"Love knows not it's own depth til the hour of separation"
Namaste *

[Scots_Nomad]

Hi again Sophia, and thanks again for your interest and attention.

In an earlier post you asked what I had learned. Without going into specifics I would say that I learned that there really is a logical reason for Everything – not just a logical explanation but also a logical purpose. I learned that ‘Life’ is a team game, with set rules, an objective, a scoring system, an ‘umpire cum scorekeepers’ and a limited duration, designed as much to test us as a species as it is to test us all as individuals. That is not to say that we will all either win or lose as a single group – there will be a team who will win and a whole load of losers who won’t make the grade (Although to avoid confusion I must stress that when I talk about teams I am not talking about religions – Religious belief has as little relevance to the game as race, gender, nationality, wealth, sexual persuasion or shoe size!). Whether you are in the winning team or not will be determined by one factor alone, and that is ‘taking all things into account, is the world a better or a worse place with you in it?’. At the end of the day that is what it will all come down to. No one expects anyone to be perfect, an overall score of 51 out of 100 is all the is required to get through to the next round where the game moves on to a whole new level. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And yet according to my friends not much more than 20% of us are on the right side of that dividing line at the moment (or maybe I should say not much more than 20% of adults are on the right side of the line, ‘cause children are allowed leeway to learn, however that would take us into a discussion on what constitutes ‘an adult’, which is not simply a matter of age.).

You also asked if you could get the chance to read the books I had written. A week ago I would have told anyone who asked that where they could download a copy of my draft manuscripts for free (although I made no effort to publicise or advertise it, a while ago I uploaded them all onto the web as, having gone to all the effort of having written them, I didn’t want my work to be lost on my computer if anything had happened to me), however as I mentioned in my very first post I have recently started to re-edit my first book and now, for the reasons given below, I would rather have people wait to see the more polished version.

After the events I have started to describe in my previous mails happened to me in 2004 I kept the whole thing to myself for some time. I did want my family and friends to understand what I had been through but there was just too much to the story to sit down and explain to anyone (especially over the telephone, as it would have to have been for most of them), and even if I could have done that I would then have had to repeat the same thing over and over again to lots of different people, so I realised pretty early that I was going to have to write a book. Before I could think about writing a book I had to find myself somewhere to live (my previous house was provided by the company I used to work for), get myself settled and get the whole thing straight in my own head. Exactly a year after the events had started I felt settled enough to write, but by then I realised that the whole story was way too big to fit in one book so I would have to cut the story down to some bare essentials to start with. That meant I had to decide where to start, what to put in, what to leave out and how to find an appropriate place to finish, but there just seemed to be so much of it that was too important to leave out, and so much that needed to be explained in detail before some of the big points could be understood. I felt ready to start writing but I just couldn’t think what I should write.

Then one day I received an email from a friend in Scotland who I hadn’t seen for about a year and that gave me an idea. I would use my friend as a sounding board, start telling the story to him, see what points he queried and then answer them and hopefully in due course I could at least come up with a framework for my book by maybe cutting and pasting the ‘story parts’ of my emails to him, shuffling them around into the most suitable order and then filling in the links as necessary. It seemed like a good idea so that’s what I did and our email exchange continued for a couple of months, and at the same time I also involved some other friends in the same kind of process so as to speed things along a bit and gain a variety of opinions/queries to respond to. For a while it seemed like my plan was coming along nicely, but then I began to realised that even the ‘friendly banter’ parts of the emails I was exchanging with my mates which were never intended to be in my book were becoming a key part of the story.

Just to give one example (out of many) of what I mean by that, at one point in August 2005 I happened to hear that a category one hurricane called Katrina was over Florida. In the email I wrote to my friend that day I told him to watch out for Katrina as I thought she was going to become a big news story and I then went on to discuss the comments that he had made in response to the last bit of the story I had sent him. By the time I wrote to him again Katrina was gathering strength so I started that day’s mail by telling my mate that I believed Katrina would become a cat 5 hurricane and would possibly even become the biggest storm to hit the US coast. At the time the authorities thought the storm was heading for Baton Rouge but I told my friend it would make landfall at Biloxi and then flood New Orleans, not from the sea but from the landward side. A few days later Katrina did exactly as I had predicted but I knew there was more to come. On the day that Katrina flooded New Orleans I told my mate that I believed that Hurricane Rita (which at the time was not guaranteed to happen and which would not actually exist for another four weeks or so!) would do exactly the same thing to New Orleans.

Before then I had been telling my mate how one year earlier I had known that there was going to be a tsunami in SE Asia at some point in the relative future and trying to describe how I felt on the days after it had happened, (feeling somehow responsible because I had believed that ‘my friends’ would only have told me about it if there was something I could have done to warn the world what was on the way), but it is one thing to claim that you had known about a forthcoming natural disaster after the event and something else altogether to be able to actually prove it. My emails about Katrina and Rita gave me that proof. That’s when I had the idea that rather than using my email exchanges to work out a skeleton for a book I would instead continue to explain my story to my mate but then compile the book entirely from original emails which would not only prove what I had said but also prove when I had said it. From that point on I took control of the direction of our email exchanges and I guided it towards a suitable point in the story where I could end my first book. I copied and pasted all of my mails into an MS word file (complete with the original email time-stamps), carried out a much needed spell-check (during which I only allowed myself to alter any obviously bad grammar that happened to catch my eye), and ‘Hey presto!’, I had a book.

I knew that if I took my time and worked on what I had already done I could produce a much shorter, better written and more ‘reader friendly’ version, but at that point I felt that, as there was still so much more of my overall story that I had yet to get down on paper, what I had already done would be ‘good enough for now’ and that my time would be better spent continuing to recount the rest of my story rather than polishing the little bit of it that I had already told.

Over the next two years I built up a whole series of books in the same way (albeit that I took long breaks away from my PC in between as I really don’t enjoy sitting alone for hour after hour, day after day typing out a story that I already know the details of), and by the time I had finished all that off I was totally sick of writing and decided I would only go back to re-edit my original drafts if I had a reason to believe that my work would be published. It was never my ambition to be an author and my books weren’t written as a money-making exercise. The world needed to hear my story far more than I needed them to read my books and as far as I was concerned I had already spent enough time and effort putting my story in writing for the world to read. It was someone else’s turn to make the next move…

That was how I felt right up until last week, however, out of the blue boredom got the better of me and I finally decided that it was time for me to go back and start the ‘polishing process’ of my first book. That was the actually first time that I had tried reading it myself, and that was when I realised just how ‘jumpy’ and hard to follow the first part of my first book is. That is why I would now prefer to re-draft that first bit (when I had no intention or thought that my emails could become a book) before I let anyone else try to read my story. Not sure how long it will take me to get to the point where I am happy to let anyone read my work but as soon as I do I will let you know.

[WolfsEyelash]

ok thank you...thank you for sharing so much

goodnight & godbless
_________________
"Love knows not it's own depth til the hour of separation"
Namaste *

[Scots_Nomad]

In my last post I tried to explain why it became important for me to be able to prove not just what I said but also when I said it. In that post I used the examples of my ‘predictions’ about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita but I also said that there were many other examples and I’ve decided to share a few more of them to illustrate the broad range of the conversations I had with ‘my friends’ starting back in 2004:

This first example is of a specialist scientific nature so to understand its relevance you should read begin by reading this article which appeared on the BBC world news web-site on 22nd August 2008:

[i]"Black hole star mystery 'solved'

Astronomers have shed light on how stars can form around a massive black hole, defying conventional wisdom.
Scientists have long puzzled over how stars develop in so extreme conditions.
Molecular clouds - the normal birth places of stars - would be ripped apart by the immense gravity, a team explains in Science magazine. But the researchers say that stars can form from elliptical discs - the relics of giant gas clouds torn apart by encounters with black holes.
They made the discovery after developing computer simulations of giant gas clouds being sucked into black holes like water spiraling down a plughole.
"These simulations show that young stars can form in the neighbourhood of supermassive black holes as long as there is a reasonable supply of massive clouds of gas from further out in the galaxy," said co-author Ian Bonnell from St Andrews University , UK . …
The simulations, performed on a supercomputer - and taking over a year of computing time - followed the evolution of two separate giant gas clouds up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, as they fell towards the supermassive black hole.
The simulations show how the clouds are pulled apart by the immense gravitational pull of the black hole. The disrupted clouds form into spiral patterns as they orbit the black hole; the spiral patterns remove motion energy from gas that passes close to the black hole and transfers it to gas that passes further out. This allows part of the cloud to be captured by the black hole while the rest escapes."[/i]

That ‘discovery’ may have come as news to the BBC, to the scientists at St. Andrew’s University and even to the scientific community as a whole, however I would now invite you to read this extract from an email I sent to Professor Steven Hawking more than three years before that BBC news story appeared which shows that the discovery was no news to me:

[i]Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 10:45:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: "John Byrne" john_b_nomad.@yahoo.com
Subject: Life, The Universe and Everything- URGENT
To: S.W.Hawking@damtp.cam.ac.uk

Hello,

Exactly one year ago today 'a friend' asked me to "...explain to them that that is how information escapes". (I was watching on TV at the time, but he was referring to the way I was sub-consciously holding/twisting a spiral shaped 'popsicle' which I was eating.) .

"Explain to WHO that WHAT is how WHAT information escapes from WHERE?" I asked, totally confused by their statement.
"Just remember the answer for now, you will understand better when you hear the question."
"What question?"
"You will know it when you hear it."

A day or two later I was relaxing in my garden in Saigon (I am Scottish but have lived in Asia for much of the past twelve years), laying on my sun-lounger and watching spirals of smoke drifting upwards from my cigarette. I noticed how the vortices of smoke of differing densities which escaped from either end of the cigarette twisted around each other, with one vortex apparently exerting a strangle hold on the other, when I had a moment of inspiration,

"THAT'S what you meant when you were talking about information escaping, isn't it?"

My friend confirmed that I was right, so I continued with my hunch,

"It's something to do with black holes or something like that, isn't it?"
"How did you work that out?" they asked,
"I don’t know really, but I recognised that what I was looking at was basically an animated version of the ‘still shot’ I was looking at when you first mentioned it, and black holes were the only thing I could imagine with a shape that complicated."
"Well you're right. It is about black holes."
"So what information are you talking about? I still have absolutely no idea what you mean by that."
"You will understand when you hear the question."
"Hear it from who?"
"You will recognise it when you hear it, and then you will be able to explain."

Around two weeks later, in late July last year, I was in the executive breakfast room of the Shangri La hotel in Kuala Lumpur, watching CNN on TV when I heard the question to which I had the answer. The news report I was watching was the one where you conceded the bet you had with a friend over whether or not information can escape from a black hole. The ‘question’ wasn't worded like a question however, instead the report showed yourself announcing to the world that ever since the release of ‘A Brief History of Time’ you had had a friendly wager with an American colleague who disagreed with your assertion in that book that it was not possible for information to escape from black holes under any circumstances, and that you now conceded that you had lost that bet as you now accepted that it was possible for information to escape from a black hole. I noted however that you did not explain whether you had found a 'new answer', and now understood how it was possible for information to escape, or whether you had merely found a flaw in your previous logic, therefore maybe what I heard was a question after all. If so, then I probably have the answer you are looking for. If you haven’t worked it out from what I have said already then there is a third piece to that jigsaw which I am keeping to myself for the time being but which I would be happy to share with you if you wish.

No doubt (unless you mistakenly dismiss this mail as some kind of hoax) you must be wondering who I am and, more importantly perhaps, who my friends are and how they knew two weeks in advance that I would be hearing your ‘question’ in Kuala Lumpur. The answer to those questions is far more important that how information escapes from a black hole, however it is not something that I could get into in this email. I would be happy to discuss any of the above with you further if you wish…

Cheers for now,
JB[/i]

(Don't be confused by the use of the term 'information' rather than 'stardust', it's the same process. 'Information' is the word Steven Hawking uses/used to describe any trace - matter, heat, light, radiation, dust etc - that could provide any information on the source of the stuff coming out of the black hole).

[Scots_Nomad]

The next couple of examples relate to the two major factors which led to the current ongoing global financial crisis, i.e. $100 per barrel oil + falling value of US$ which started toppling the dominoes which would lead to chaos in the global banking system;

Extract 1

[i]Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 00:49:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: "John Bxxxx" <john_b_nomad.@yahoo.com> View Contact Details To: gerryxxx@xxxxxx.co.uk

Hi Gerry,

You don't by any chance still have a copy of the text I sent you a (maybe two or three months ago) about 'a snake eating itself', a metaphor (harking back to my first conversations with ‘my friends’ last year) which I used for the effect that a falling dollar and a spiraling oil price would have? I know that I sent the text a day or two before I found (and photographed) two 'twin' snakes dead in my garden - one having choked to death trying to swallow the other one which was exactly the same size and species - but I can’t recall the exact date.

I noted on the news today that the dollar hit a two month low on the same day that the oil price hit an all time high of $65.30, and it jogged my memory of that text. As a matter of interest, I would like to check exactly how much the oil price has risen since then. If I remember correctly, the oil price had just hit an all time high of around $40, (and at that time people couldn't believe it could stay that high!). Strange that it probably took around thirty two years for the oil price to go from an all time high of $15 to an all time high of $40, and yet it took only ten weeks or so to make the next $25 jump.

People may think that $65.30 is high, and that it can't stay that high for ever - they are right but they are wrong. It won't stay 'that' high for much longer, but it will bounce much higher. It won't take too long for it to make the next $35 jump to take it over $100.

Remind me when you heard it first! [/i]
(NB: Elsewhere in the book I predicted that this would happen during the presidency of G.W. Bush)

Extract 2

[i]Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 09:45:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: "John Bxxxx" <john_b_nomad.@yahoo.com> View Contact Details
To: member@saverio.wanadoo.co.uk

Oi Siv,

…My mates (and me) f**king hate banks - I loathe them…, especially after the way my bank (Lloyds TSB!) have f**ked things up and f**ked me around so many times in the past twelve months, but the way I feel about my bank is NOTHING to the way that my mates feel about banks in general.

My mates made sure that I have plenty of evidence to shame and humiliate my bank (all the documentation I could ask for, three hours of video taped phone calls, hundreds of wasted hours, thousands of dollars lost, and loads of evidence of lying, spineless, stupid, useless bastards at their end of the line! …), but I am sure that whatever I do to Lloyds TSB is nothing compared to some of the things that my mates have in mind for the banking world in general. My mates absolutely detest the banks - 'Worse kind of lying, cheating, scheming money lenders on the face of the Earth!', as my friends put it! - Look out for lots of leaked secrets from that general direction!

But anyway, that is stuff to look forward to in the future,….[/i]

[Scots_Nomad]

Today I received an email from someone who has kept in touch with me since reading about my story/experiences on the web-site of a society for psychical research as he wanted to know what I thought of an article he’d read in some newspaper in Japan about 2012. My reply to him tied into part of my story which I explained above, and as it has been kind of quiet here recently (and as I spent quite a while typing my response to him) I’ve decided to post most of my reply here as it may mean something to some of you and others may just find some of it interesting:

“…I know that a lot of people seem to be expecting big things to happen in 2012, with quite a few believing that the world is gonna end – many of them because the old Mayan calendar actually used to count downwards rather than upwards and 2012 is the year that it would have reached zero, and others because there is apparently gonna be some kind of very rare alignment of the planets that year where most if not all of the planets in the solar system will line up with each other (around my 50th birthday if I remember right) – but I can assure you that my friends never mentioned anything special about 2012 to me. Don’t know if it should come as any kind of comfort to anyone, given what the prediction was, but the only ‘prediction’ that my friends actually put a date on was in 2025, so I am certainly not expecting the world to end in 2012. In fact the only 2012 warning I would give you or anyone is DO NOT GO TO SEE THE MOVIE “2012”! I saw it on DVD last year and it’s gotta be one of the worst movies I have ever seen!

There was only one bit of the article that you referred me to that I found a bit interesting, even though (or perhaps because) it would probably mean absolutely nothing to anyone else, and that was the bit where it said:

“…At one point during our interview he plunged into prayer, quietly chanting, with hands circulating as if to form a ball — or a world.”

That actually reminded me of something that was fairly integral to my first contact chats – I was sure I had written about it in one of my books but I have been unable to locate it so I will have to describe the circumstances briefly, but before I go into that specific bit I’ll attach this related extract from my 2007 book ‘Destiny’s Dilemma’:

(Note: The extract which I attached here was the same extract that I posted above on 22nd August 2009 – the 8th post on this thread, so I haven’t bothered including it again here)

The above extract from your newspaper article reminded me of a part of my experience that fitted in just before that extract from my book….

I was - as was very often the case – chatting to my friends while sitting watching music videos on MTV on one of the days at the beginning of my first contact chats, my body was battered and bruised and scraped and stiff with every joint aching (the last couple of days leading up to first contact were literally a real bumpy ride!), when they said to me,

“We want you to imagine that you are holding an invisible ball in your hands and we want you to run your hands around the surface of it, can you do that?”

I was sitting forward with my elbows resting on my thighs and with my hands positioned as if they were holding a sphere about the size of a football between my knees, rotating my wrists so it was like I was sliding my hands over the surface of the ball.

“Yeah, I can do that.”
“Can you actually feel the ball?”

I hadn’t actually thought about it until they asked, but I realised that it did feel as though I actually had a ball between my hands – there wasn’t any weight to it whatsoever, but it did feel as if my hands were really running over the surface of a solid, smooth, rigid ‘hard plastic’ sphere…And no one was more surprised about that than me!

“Hey!! Yeah! I can actually feel it!!!”
“And what size is it?”
“Well, it’s about this size just now (I raised my hands up as if I was holding the ball in front of my face), but I suppose if I moved my hands closer together it would be smaller.”
“Do you think so?”
“Eh?”

I was surprised by their last question as it seemed obvious to me that that would be the case, but even before I could move my hands closer together to prove it to them they said,

“Why don’t you try that?”

I tried to move my hands closer together as if I were holding a smaller ball but they just wouldn’t move – well actually they did move as if I were still sliding them around the surface of the ball, but they wouldn’t move any closer to each other. I was really surprised by that and instinctively I sat up in my sofa, and as I did so my hands automatically moved further apart. I began to say,

“Hey! What the f*ck?”

But only got as far as “Hey, what the…” before I interrupted myself with yet another exclamation of surprise, so what I ended up saying was,

“Hey! What the….HEY!!! What the f*ck!...There’s another one!”

As I said above, when I sat back I had automatically moved my hands apart as my elbows slid around to my sides, however my hands were still positioned as if they were holding an invisible ball, and much to my surprise I could feel another, bigger ball – this second one about the size of a beach-ball!

Once again I rotated my wrists so that my hands slid across the surface of this new beach-ball sized sphere, with my wrists rotating clockwise and then anti-clockwise so that my hands ‘slid’ from a position with my right hand at the top when the left was underneath and then vice versa, and while I was doing that all I could think of saying was,

“What the f*ck?”

(Although in truth I wasn’t actually ‘thinking’ of saying anything, the words were just slipping out!)

At one point I stopped, with my hands positioned exactly opposite each other at the sides of the beach ball, and decided to check if ‘the invisible football’ was still there. I tried to move my hands directly towards each other but once again they just wouldn’t move any closer to each other (just as if a completely weightless but invisible hard plastic, unyielding beach ball was stopping them),

“What the f*ck???”

Again I started rotating my wrists so I could slide my hands over the surface of the beach ball, but this time I kept trying to press my hands towards each other, and much to my surprise my hands did slide closer to each other so that I once again found the invisible football sized ball!

After running my hands backward and forward (or actually clockwise and anticlockwise) around the ‘football’ a few times I decided to see if I could use the ‘sliding and pressing’ movement to move my hands even closer together – I could!...And I ‘found’ another invisible ball about six inches in diameter (maybe about the size of a ball-cock in a toilet cistern…or any other six inch diameter spherical thing I suppose! ).

I sat there for minutes in complete silence, twisting/rotating my hands (actually I think of it as a kind of yin/yang movement, with both hands moving in time in equal and opposite sliding curves, but I’m not really sure if that will mean much to anyone else) from ball-cock to football, football to beach-ball, and back again, but no matter how many times I tried I just couldn’t get my hands any closer together than ‘ball-cock sized’ – any closer than that and my hands would have touched, but there seemed to be some kind of invisible energy which kept them apart, kind of like when you try to force two magnets together like-pole to like-pole.

Eventually I got a bit frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t get my hands any closer together than six inches so I consciously sat more upright, broke off from my ‘holding a ball pose’ and shook both my hands rigorously at the wrist before suddenly clasping my hands together (successfully!).

My friends spoke for the first time in ‘ages’,

“What are you doing?”
“I just wanted to make sure that I could still actually get my hands together.”
”Why?”
“Why?...Who knows, maybe one of these days I might want to give you a round of applause for something so I wanted to make sure I could…Just in case! Boom-boom!”
“OK, so now you know you can, so pick your balls up again.”
”Will they still be there?”
“You tell us.”

I leant forward and put my hands back into the ball-holding position and found the three invisible balls again immediately,

“Wow, this is amazing!”
“OK, you sit there and play with your balls and we’ll show you some more videos.”

(And I have no doubt at all that that double-entendre was completely intentional!)

From that point onwards I just sat ‘playing with my balls’ just about all the time when I was sitting on my sofa watching TV. In the beginning they would remind me/tell me to do it, but pretty soon it just became ‘natural’ to do it – the movement was actually relaxing and it flexed and loosened up my wrists, elbows and shoulders all at the same time. For a while I think it became almost automatic for me to do it – many times when I was deep in thought about something or other (which was pretty often during those early days and weeks) I would find myself subconsciously ‘playing with my balls’. In the extract from my story above, even though I didn’t mention it in the excerpt I was ‘playing with my balls’ at the same time that I was rotating my neck in figure of eight shapes.

As I mentioned in the last paragraph, that ‘ball games’ exercise became natural and automatic to me whenever I found myself deep in thought – I never do any active/conscious ‘meditation’, but I suppose that might be kind of like the same thing in a way. It became a relaxation habit to me which I continued with for weeks and months and possibly even years – I can’t remember when I stopped it but it was certainly long after the first contact chats ended. I didn’t ever make any conscious decision to stop it, it just kind of faded away – possibly I stopped doing it when I left Vietnam and came back to Scotland and a whole new set of circumstances three years ago – but as I have been writing about those early days here I have found myself going through those same motions that I learned back in those very early days, and guess what!...I still found the invisible balls exactly where they used to be (or should that be ‘exactly where they used NOT to be’?), and I can still feel that ‘magnetic repulsion’ between my hands whenever I move them too close to each other, albeit that the repulsive force is far more subtle than it was when my friends first showed me that…’trick’ (?)


So, does that mean anything to anyone?...If not, I hope some of you at least found it a bit interesting.

[susanmtns]

After a relationship in which I was involved completed last Spring I was struggling to figure out why I allowed it to go on for so long. It was draining!

Then I wondered if I would meet anyone who would have their act together enough to have the basic skills for relationship. As a writer, I write often about what I see, feel or think.

Suddenly this past September when I was working on a document, a huge red heart appeared on an e-mail over the page in which I was writing. There was NO return e-mail. It blew me away! With this heart, came the following message:

" sweetie, love will come your way only when you surrender yourself to fun and frolic."

Not only did this happen, the fellow with whom I ended this relationship (due to emotional unavailability issues he has), his e-mail contact list popped up. We have both gone on to see other people and haven't talked since spring.

Several things like this have happened despite the fact I see no possibility that this fellow and I have a chance together in the future. But, I am open to whatever Spirit provides. I am always open to growth, his and mind.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts about this.