Finding The Way

I was bored. The regular Saturday Spiritualist meeting had not been very illuminating, and the gossip afterwards was certainly not very spiritual. I sat with my cup of tea in the front room of the little terraced house in Wolverhampton, wondering exactly how we were supposed to access ‘altered states of consciousness’ let alone develop psychic abilities. It wasn’t happening for me - perhaps I was too critical, or too young. I was in my early twenties, the other half dozen people in the room considerably older. But something quite incredible was about to happen which dramatically changed my attitudes.

This evening, one member of the group had arrived wearing neck brace and clearly in great discomfort. She was actually a hospital nurse, but none of her colleagues seemed to have been able to alleviate her pain. The higher states of consciousness had been left behind in the back parlour for another week, but I suddenly found myself experiencing a vivid mental picture of placing my hands on her head in a certain way, and I somehow knew that this would help her. I shook my head but it just wouldn’t go away. Even so, I was far too shy to mention it to the others. For one thing, I was the rookie of the group with very little real experience of these things. More importantly, my personal confidence was pretty low since I’d often been subjected to considerable derision from my family - including this very evening as I left home - for my interest in psychic things. But the vision was so insistent that eventually I told the others about it, suggesting that one or two of them who were known as ‘spiritual healers’ might carry it out. They pointedly refused, saying that it was my vision so I had to do it! What did I have to lose, since nobody outside those four walls would ever know about it? So I did what I had ‘seen’, feeling a powerful and peaceful energy flowing through me. Within seconds the lady became very quiet (which was a bonus, since normally she never stopped chattering) and ten minutes later the injury appeared to be cured; she said that the pain had gone, she took off the brace and never wore it again. This was my first experience of healing.

But something far stranger was yet to come.

As I drove home, still feeling quite stunned, I realised that I’d been following the same car for several miles and I noticed its registration number: LUK 853 E. I don’t know why but somehow I read this as a Bible reference: the Gospel of Luke, chapter eight, verse fifty-three, and I felt compelled to look it up when I got home. The passage describes the healing of Jairus’ daughter, whom everyone had believed to be beyond hope; the onlooking crowd had even laughed scornfully at Jesus.

The synchronicity of these events seemed to suggest that the car number had been a genuine ‘omen’ encouraging me in my spiritual search. And there was more...

One year later almost exactly the same situation happened again. In the same Spiritualist group, out of nowhere I began to feel a strong sense of premonition (butterflies in the stomach) and shortly afterwards a neighbour called in unexpectedly, asking for healing. I was persuaded to help and again my ‘efforts’ seemed to be successful.

On the way home later I found myself following a car with registration LUK 946 E which I read as Luke, chapter nine, verses four to six: Jesus commissions his disciples to go out preaching and healing.

I told no-one about these experiences - I was shocked and very self-conscious about it all.

But then the very next day the speaker at the Spiritualist church service I attended chose exactly the same text for her reading.

This was particularly remarkable because Spiritualist speakers are free to choose any reading whatsoever, or none, for their theme and indeed they very rarely choose one from the Bible anyway.

What on earth was going on? Was this Divine Guidance? Or meaningless coincidence? Or was I in fact, er, mad?

As a teacher of mathematics and statistics, I suggest that we should all be well aware of the unimportance of coincidence!

Perhaps we go to a football match and find that each team has a player with the same name, who both score a goal and both later get sent off. Maybe a woman goes to a party and sees another woman wearing an identical dress, and it turns out that they come from the same home town and their husbands do the same job. There are also some famous examples, such as Abraham Lincoln becoming US President in 1860 then being assassinated in the Ford Theatre, while John Kennedy became President in 1960 and was assassinated in a Ford Lincoln car, and so on. These are interesting events to talk about, but they are hardly enlightening and do little for our understanding of life. Coincidence just happens sometimes.

But then there is synchronicity. The sort of events I experienced are literally shocking. Their probability is unimaginable, and they held a personal meaningfulness that directly affected the future course of my life.

Well, I simply do not know if there is actually any purpose to our lives. Personally I just want my life here and now to be as worthwhile as possible because if nothing else this is a way to be at peace. But something very strange and disturbing had entered my experience, and how was I to deal with it?

There is nowadays a plethora of well intentioned gurus prepared to tell us ‘the true meaning of life’ and ‘the nature of the soul’ (and thus, by implication, how we should live); some of this information has even, apparently, come from ‘Ascended Masters Of Wisdom’. There are mediums and near-death experiences and past- life recollections and so on, not to mention ancient mystical teachings. Hmmm, but is there any real evidence?

Well, we should not just dismiss all these things, surely, for many of the accounts are undoubtedly honest, often humbling and frequently mind-boggling. We certainly don’t know everything there is to know about the nature of life. Our knowledge and understanding move on, sometimes hesitantly and sometimes in leaps of inspiration, and yet there is always more... We can see a few thousand stars with the naked eye. With a decent telescope it’s millions. With a deep space telescope, many billions. Yet there is even further to go. We do not understand much about energy and even less about consciousness, for example, and these are fundamental to knowing what a human being is. There are so many phenomena which undoubtedly happen but which we cannot explain, and it will probably always be so. Therefore a certain open- mindedness and humility are a Good Thing.

Equally, however, it is downright silly if not also dangerous to keep a mind so open that it is prepared to swallow whole almost any fashionable, comforting or appealing belief that the latest guru offers, invariably without a shred of down to earth evidence or a critical examination of alternative explanations. Such gullibility robs us of perhaps the most important characteristic of a decent human life, our personal responsibility. We have to make our own minds up, experience life with thoughtfulness and a sense of purpose; yes, of course we must also listen to our teachers (and anyone at any moment can be our teacher), but without suspending our reason. We must be ruthless in distinguishing between what we want to be true and what is.

We wouldn’t buy a television from someone without knowing that it worked. Even less, then, should we buy into a spiritual hilosophy without evidence at some level that it at least helps us to live better lives. 1[1] On the other hand, we don’t have to know how the TV works before we buy it.

Perhaps I was just seeing significance where there was none? Human beings often look for connections in random phenomena (apophenia), or see meaningful images where there are none, such as faces in the clouds (pareidolia).

These are examples of what statisticians call a Type I error, the belief that something significant has occurred when the event is actually by chance. If a fire alarm system fails under test and we replace it because we think it’s faulty, when in fact only a fuse had blown, this is a Type I error and we have lost some money. The opposite tendency to believe that nothing significant has occurred, when actually it has, is called a Type II error. If we don’t replace the system because we think that probably there was just a blown fuse, when actually there was a serious fault, this is a Type II error and we may lose some lives.

One major problem with this is that the very idea of randomness is alien to us - seeking patterns and meaning is a very sensible thing to do, not least for our survival. If we are walking down a dark lane and mistake a shadow ahead for an attacker, at least we are prepared; Type I errors can be preferable to Type II!

Moreover, finding patterns and meanings can lead to creative leaps in our thinking, and we need such creativity in order to discover the underlying ‘laws’ of the universe that are hidden behind apparent chaos. Science is itself a deliberate and rational search for order, but that does not mean it always has to be ‘logical’; its history is full of discoveries made, despite a lack of hard evidence, through creative and intuitive thought, or by sheer accident, and even through dreams (for example, the DNA double helix, the atomic structure of benzene, penicillin, continental drift...)

My experiences were surely more than just coincidence. To deny them entirely could be a Type II error. But to decide if they had any real meaning would require a healthy balance between scepticism and humility, between the need for evidence and the need to admit how little we know. And in any case, there are many different ways of knowing, just as the artist experiences life very differently to the engineer. The key must be whether our experience seems to work for us, to be important for us, in becoming better human beings. In other words, is there any point to it?!

As you might imagine, from the time of my Bible signs I started deliberately noting what seemed to be significant omens: not just car registrations but also important coincidences such as perhaps hearing a particular song at an appropriate moment or seeing an apposite slogan or name just as I was thinking of some relevant issue... Of course, one could get quite neurotic about this sort of thing: not every car number, song or slogan can contain a ‘message’. I certainly found that it is all too easy to become obsessive about such experiences, especially when life is troublesome and one needs some tlc. One also needs some self-discipline (although, on the other hand, total scepticism must logically block one’s awareness of such events! Nothing can be seen with eyes closed). I decided that only those omens that occurred at special moments or in especially strange circumstances may prove of value. Even so, for a long time, these events didn’t make a lot of difference in my life. Until later, when they became much more frequent, regular and powerful. At that point, they started to turn into some kind of ‘evidence’...That is one reason for this book being written.

Another reason is to try to show that, by our approach to these things, we can actually change our behaviour and grow spiritually.

So now I’d better put my cards on the table. This is a love story. What I mean is not that it is an account of my love for one particular woman, but of my learning about human love through several relationships. There are those who believe that we come to this life with a pre-ordained or even perhaps personally planned purpose, a set of lessons which our soul needs to experience in order to approach ‘enlightenment’. Earthly life is a huge school where we undergo one course after another, one examination after another, until we have exhausted either our bodies or our capacity to learn. Whatever the truth of this, surely we all recognise if we are honest with ourselves that there are definite things we should try to learn if we want to be more at peace with ourselves and others. This, then, is our purpose. I believe that mine is to learn about love.

As a school teacher, I have often invited students to suggest alternative approaches to dealing with a new mathematical problem which they have encountered. The first suggestion is invariably to ignore it and do something else! Many of us do just that quite successfully for long periods in our lives even when we recognise that there is a problem to deal with. But fortunately both life and the mathematics syllabus have a way of presenting us with this same issue again sooner or later. Suppose, then, that we have decided to address it. A sensible idea is to try and relate it to similar problems we have encountered before and to adopt familiar methods. There can be two snags here, the first being that we must have sound knowledge of the facts and methods that we came across earlier. Students of life, no less than students of school mathematics, are notorious for failing to learn as we go along, for making the same mistakes we made before and having to retake our tests.

But even the most conscientious student who has revised continuously and practised thoroughly will inevitably meet the second and crucial snag: sometimes the problem facing us will require knowledge or methods that we simply haven’t come across before, and we have to start over with learning something entirely new. This can be incredibly daunting. I have the utmost admiration for those who enter upon such unfamiliar territory with excitement and curious anticipation; it demonstrates a rare strength of character to walk into the unknown and risk failure, knowing that much of one’s previous learning will be useless. Sooner or later, this challenge comes to us all.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The first and perhaps most difficult step of all is to identify the problem! I realised quite early in my life that the greatest challenges for me were about security - partly material (anxiety about money and home comfort) but mostly emotional (a need for loyal and loving relationships). I’m sure it’s just the same for very many other people. But we all have our own individual circumstances, our unique genes and environment, which determine our challenges and our individual ways of meeting (or avoiding) them.

I was particularly sensitive to emotional pain, to rejection and the abuse of trust, and especially in relationships with women. I never managed to develop a ‘thick skin’, nor the sunny philosophical disposition I so admired in others who seemed able to take emotional knocks in their stride. The pain of several pretty extreme experiences was felt deeply. Does any of this sound familiar?

Oddly enough, I didn’t become mistrustful but managed to develop an attitude to life that actively sought out new challenges and experiences, for example by changing my career path and by travelling. I became self-reliant and was seen as outwardly confident. I knew ‘how things should be done’ and I organised things excellently. People thought I was competent and strong. But what had happened, of course, was that inner defensive walls had been built, and limits set as to how much I was able to give and to receive.

This is a huge weakness, a strategy for avoiding the problem!

Gradually I realised that I was failing. I was growing and learning, but only in my head. The inner barriers were being pushed back but rarely broken down, and if one set of walls fell over, others were being hastily erected. When my marriage failed in 1995, I knew I had hit the student’s crucial snag: I had to learn an entirely new way of being.

But how is that possible?

Leaving aside the idea of ‘fate’, many of us certainly recognise that there are rhythms and patterns in our experiences. The same challenges keep coming up. We keep responding in the same way to certain situations. The more mindful we are of these, hopefully the better we are able to do things the next time. This is being the ‘conscientious student’, learning as we go along. For example, it may simply be a matter of realising that “I am behaving just like my father did...” But maybe these patterns are so deep that we can do nothing about them? Should we not just ‘accept ourselves for what we are’ (and insist that others do the same)?

This is giving up! It is perfectly clear that however entrenched a pattern may be, we can still make different choices however hard that may be. You can choose, for example, not to react like your parents did. You can choose not to accept an opportunity that has opened up to you, however valuable or exciting it may seem, because you may not feel ready for it or you just feel comfortable as you are. You may be lucky enough to get two different but exciting job offers at the same time. These are all real choices. So because to all intents and purposes we do seem to have free will, then we do. We are not determined by fate.

Yes, there may be some pretty powerful forces pushing us in certain directions and there will be times when resistance is downright foolish. Think of it as travelling along a river. There are times when we simply have to go with the flow, mindful of the current and the rocks and the weirs but with little control; yet there will be other times of relative calm and there will be tributaries that we can choose between - we might even be able to divert the flow entirely! Wisdom is about knowing the river. I decided that I had to start learning all over again, and let the river teach me.

I had to try to give up control and accept that I didn’t know where to go.

This meant inviting ‘higher guidance’ and taking my strange experiences more seriously. Being a mathematician and naturally analytical, however, of course I couldn’t stop trying to understand what was going on. But this had to be balanced with other non- rational ways of knowing and accepting that there may be subtle, paranormal energies at work in our lives. The first step was how to put this new attitude into everyday practice...

It seemed important to try to live quietly, the better able to hear, and as far as possible in harmony with nature. It would also be valuable to adopt a regular spiritual practice, a daily period of quiet inner vision. There would have to be a willingness to experience life as fully as possible, on as many levels of consciousness as possible, to follow wherever the river led whatever the pain and discomfort. Education is about personal change and that is never easy. Without wishing to stretch the school analogy too far, and in case all of this sounds horribly serious and gloomy, I want to say right now that:

And so I made the deliberate decision to keep a careful record of my journey, and try to understand the path. There were three kinds of personal paranormal experiences that I learned from: readings of the I Ching oracle, my dreams, and of course the sort of signs and omens I described earlier. Many of these will be described in this account and labelled IC, D, and S.

Here are some examples showing why I think these things to be so important.

The I Ching

The Book of Changes is of ancient Chinese origin; originally mainly a set of oracles, it developed into its present form of ethical guidance about three thousand years ago. Its central theme is that all life undergoes continuous change and transformation according to natural rhythms and cycles. If we can understand these, it helps us to make wiser choices in life.

When we consult the book about some vexing question, we are directed to one of sixty-four ‘hexagrams’ (six-line patterns). Each one has a general commentary describing the significance in human circumstances of a certain kind of situation. (More information about how to use the book is given in Appendix A.) Nobody knows quite how it could be that this description invariably closely matches the question posed; presumably it is some kind of psychokinesis. The reading will usually draw our attention to specific lines of the pattern, and associated with each of these is a more detailed description of the forces at work in our individual circumstances. These are the factors undergoing change or movement and the reading will offer some ethical advice here as to how to deal with the issue. It is always assumed, though, that we have entirely free will in understanding and responding to this. The final step in the consultation is to look at the new hexagram that will result when these ‘moving lines’ have eventually changed their nature; this resulting reading then describes the likely outcome if we heed (or do not heed!) the advice.

So, yes, the I Ching is a form of oracle but it is not an instrument of ‘fortune telling’ - its purpose is to help us understand the true nature of the situations we find ourselves in so that we can develop a spiritual attitude in our approach to them. The fact that this book is still in continuous and widespread use (the oldest book in continuous publication in history) is testimony to the accuracy and helpfulness that countless people ascribe to it, even if we haven’t the faintest idea how it works...

I was very fortunate to be introduced to it in September 1982, through a mutual friend, by a serious China scholar who taught me its underlying philosophy. He also taught me, in no uncertain terms, the serious attitude of mind required for its use! This is not a simple tool of prediction. It demands a mindful and indeed reverent attitude towards the important developments in our lives. If we consult it on frivolous matters, the response will be dismissive! Its language and symbolism are not easy to understand (although at times its words are just astonishingly clear and apposite). Therefore there have been several translations in recent years that offer alternative interpretations with varying levels of sophistication, some very down-to-earth and simplistic. I have tried some of these but always go back to what many others agree is the truest rendering of the spirit of the original, by Richard Wilhelm. I approach each reading as if it were a meeting with a spiritual guide, calming my mind, focusing on my question, preparing the room to shut out the distractions of the everyday world and approaching the event with a prayer for ‘higher’ guidance.

A few weeks after my introduction to the book came my first proper opportunity to use it. I had been considering a new teaching job, a promotion with more money. It seemed like a good career move and I was offered the job after an interview, but before making my final decision I wanted to consult the book.

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It is fairly unusual to find four ‘moving lines’ (suggesting much change) in a reading. Counting from the bottom, the first is a ‘moving yin’ line, the third and fourth are ‘moving yang’ lines and there is another ‘moving yin’ at the top. Looking at the interpretations of these, there were references to “misfortune”, a danger of “attack or injury”, a need for “great determination” and the likelihood of “disaster if one presses on too forcefully or too far”.

This was all pretty unequivocal. Yet the book was not, as it were, telling me that I should not take the job - for we always have a choice - rather, that the experience was likely to be tough. When one proceeds with the reading and allows the moving lines to change (so the first and top lines becomes ‘yang’ while the third and fourth become ‘yin’), a new hexagram results which represents the likely outcome of the situation. Here, it is Hexagram 27: “Nourishment”. This describes personal and spiritual growth resulting from the experience.

So what should I do? I had felt optimistic about this opportunity, really wanted to leave my present post where I was frustrated, badly needed the extra money and had no ‘evidence’ to support the I Ching’s verdict. And after all this was my first reading so I might have got it wrong anyway... I delayed my decision and two days later asked a further but rather different question.

IC 5th November 1982: “Is it God’s will that I should go ahead with the new job?” (Meaning, would this be the right course from a spiritual point of view?)

This time the answer was Hexagram 35: “Progress”, with the second and top lines moving. The interpretation of this was much more encouraging, describing “reward and advance” for one who “adopts a right and modest attitude despite sorrows”. Further, “deserved happiness” would be received through the assistance of “a woman in authority”; and provided that one remained “determined but not forceful” the result would be Hexagram 40: “Release”. So I was still being promised a hard time but, if I could deal with it properly, it would be rewarding.

I accepted the challenge and found myself embarked upon twenty months of torment and stress! It turned out to be an appalling school and I was given the lowest achieving and most ill- disciplined classes, with virtually no support from a weak management. There was indeed “misfortune” in the form of personal abuse, theft and vandalism of my property, and there was even “attack” in the form of an assault on me by a pupil. There were times when I almost did “go too far and too forcefully” in my determination to uphold my values... But I held on and just about kept control; moreover, I really learned how to teach and I certainly learned a lot about people. My character was strengthened, my understanding of the world advanced. I also wrote two books of mathematics material for my disaffected pupils (since the school had virtually no text books) and these were accepted for publication by the first company I approached, whose commissioning editor turned out indeed to be a woman. This gave me great satisfaction and happiness especially in such difficult circumstances. Then finally I seized an opportunity to change jobs again and was ‘released’ to an excellent school where I stayed for more than twenty-five years.

So the I Ching proved astoundingly accurate in this instance, a book written thousands of years ago even identifying literal events that I would experience as well as interpreting their personal meaning for my development. It doesn’t always work so well. Sometimes the book’s answers, while clearly apposite, are extremely difficult to understand or seem too vague to be useful. Maybe this is due to the reader’s ‘wrong state of mind’, to poor preparation or to there being too much inner confusion or anxiety. I don’t think anybody knows how it works or why it sometimes doesn’t. Carl Jung, who wrote the introduction for the Wilhelm translation, said that given another lifetime he would devote the whole of it to studying the I Ching!

It seems to be, rather like dreams perhaps, a means of reaching into an inner stream of consciousness and reading its patterns (like dipping a hand into the river and feeling the current). Sometimes the waters are pure and clear, sometimes muddy. It shows us that the future is not determined, but that there may be more or less strong probabilities in how it will turn out; these outcomes depend upon our choices and, significantly, our attitudes. The book is certainly hot on attitude, much of its ethical advice being in the form of how ‘the superior man’ should respond to the situations it describes. Naturally, none of us can claim to be him, for however high our ideals we fall short of them time and time again. But the determined soul who keeps trying will find a wonderful personal relationship developing with this extraordinary book, almost as if indeed it is the voice of a wise and spiritual master. One just knows when the answer is clear and trustworthy. And if the message isn’t clear, that’s far more likely to be due to our poor understanding than to a deficiency of wisdom in our teacher.

Dreams

In 1994 my school had two minibuses, one older but in better condition than the other, and I learned that they were to be sold off at a nominal price to make way for new ones. I made the Bursar a token offer of £100 for the older bus, intending to convert it into a campervan for holidays; the offer was accepted and we shook hands on the deal. On the 10th of April I did an I Ching reading about my project: the result described “distrustful people” and “difficulties” leading to “grief” and “shock”. I was getting a warning but I really couldn’t understand or believe it; so I tried again but the new reading also described “others interfering with one’s good intentions” and the matter being closed in “a period of seven”.

D - That same night I dreamed that I was returning home from abroad in a hired car. Near a crossroads I saw someone selling horses, a mare and a foal. I switched the hazard lights on and stopped to talk to the man, offering to buy the mare for £450. Still, I didn’t feel sure about the deal. While I was deciding, I saw the police take my car away so I left to try and retrieve it without making the purchase. The dream ended with the police returning my car to me.

My interpretation ran like this: being abroad and hiring a car suggested a holiday time, while the crossroads and the hazard lights clearly indicated a decision to be made and perhaps danger; selling horses (that is, ‘horse trading’) is a cultural symbol of dishonesty; my car being taken away obviously meant that my progress or plans would be damaged, though without too much harm done since the car was later returned. I didn’t know what to make of the other details and, perhaps stupidly, I didn’t even connect the dream to the I Ching reading immediately - well, I trusted the Bursar and had no reason to believe anything was amiss in that situation.

Almost exactly seven weeks later on the 26th of May, the Bursar reneged on his promise, claimed that we’d never even discussed the idea let alone shaken hands on it, and put the minibus up for secret auction (I have never found out why). It was eventually sold to a colleague of mine - I had thought he was a friend and had discussed my plans with him - for £450. It now became clear that the two horses in the dream represented the minibuses (one older than the other) and it may be worth recording that the Bursar’s name was clearly hinted at in the dream!

What is so remarkable about this dream is that it is not some vague premonition that something might go wrong with the deal, as if perhaps I’d picked up the man’s body language and had had inner doubts.

No, this was an actual precognition of factual details, which nobody knew at that time.

Although there has been much excellent research and many interesting theories put forward, still nobody fully understands much about dreams, even about why we have them let alone what they mean. I started to become fascinated by mine as a child and gradually taught myself to be able to remember and record many of them. Typically I will wake up immediately after what seems to be a ‘significant’ dream and use a small tape recorder kept at the side of my bed to keep an account of it, which I will write up and study the next day. Over the years, my dreaming has become more and more often lucid, that is to say I am aware of dreaming while it is going on rather like watching a film (although, curiously, I am aware of being a character in the film at the same time). Therefore I am also able to study and begin to interpret the dream while it progresses. One can develop an attitude of detachment towards one’s own mental events, just as for example we may be totally involved in playing a game and yet at the same time know that it is a game.

So while I cannot claim to be an expert on dreams, I can offer a few observations from my fifty years or so study of them... There are clearly several types. Some are pretty chaotic and involve recent events and impressions perhaps from the previous day or something we have seen on television; it is as if the brain is scanning all the information to decide what is important and worth remembering. I call these Filing Dreams. Other dreams seem to recall old memories, perhaps integrating past experiences with more recent events, or checking through old files to assess their continued usefulness so that they can then be discarded or stored in the attic to make room in our consciousness for new learning. These could be called Spring Cleaning Dreams. We all do exactly these sorts of things in our everyday lives with the masses of correspondence and bills and information leaflets, brochures and magazines that come our way.

But then there is another kind of dream which is more coherent, often developing some kind of episodic story and usually riddled with strange or archetypal symbolism; irrational things may be happening, the scenes and characters may change suddenly, yet the whole experience hangs together in a way that insists we take notice. Such a dream can seem to be quite long and can have a powerful effect on us. It seems as if the unconscious mind is trying to bring to our attention some important information which we cannot - or will not - grasp by normal conscious thought. Maybe it is something that we ought to know but have failed to recognise in our daily lives because of lack of evidence or maybe because we’re afraid of what it means and the consequences it might have.

This kind of dream can be one of (at least) two kinds. The first arises from our deep-rooted anxieties or desires that have been suppressed - a Therapy Dream. The other is a dip into the stream of consciousness in order to make some sense of the underlying patterns in our lives (getting to know the river) - this might be a Clairvoyant Dream. It can be extremely difficult to distinguish between these two and, in any case, in my experience any one dream may be a mixture of all the above! 2[2]

In case you are thinking that this is all too problematic, subjective or even pointless, I have to say that my dreams have often been unbelievably helpful to me in understanding how real life situations are developing on inner and as yet hidden levels. Sometimes, as above, they actually foretell the future.

But does the example I’ve given suggest that the future is in fact determined? Not at all. I have already said that we have plenty of experience of making real choices which lead to very different outcomes. Rather, my minibus dream seems to have been nothing less than time travel!

Occasionally, then, in dreams as with the I Ching, perhaps we can see the future with some clarity. But how can we tell when we have? It can only be a personal judgement based on our previous experience and on the coherence and impact of the dream or reading. And, yes, sometimes we’re bound to make mistakes...

Signs

I described earlier my first experience of being guided by signs or omens. But what do these things really mean and where on earth do they come from? If they do have meaning, then they are some kind of ‘psychic signposts’ which indicate that one is on the right (or perhaps the wrong) path. For me, they are usually encouraging or reassuring, strengthening my resolve when life is hard. Sometimes they seem to warn me that my thinking about a particular matter is misguided. At other times they can even be predictive and are followed within a short time by some appropriate event.

If you haven’t already stopped reading on the grounds that this account is plain ludicrous, I promise that you will simply not believe some of the signs that I will describe later... And there are moments when the circumstances, the meaningfulness and the sheer creativity of a certain synchronicity are so astonishing that surely it must have been deliberately and cleverly engineered by some intelligent force beyond me...

The existence of guiding spirits or ‘guardian angels’ sometimes seems the simplest and most obvious explanation. Yet it is one that I continue to resist despite my earlier interest in Spiritualism. Of course, like very many people I want to believe it; but as I have said earlier, there are too many profound implications, not to mention possible alternative explanations, even if some of those are equally outlandish. So I am not going to propose spirit worlds as The Truth. I prefer to think that our minds can somehow access an alternative or inner consciousness, where the underlying energies and patterns of our lives can be perceived more clearly than in the rush and noise of the everyday world. I therefore apologise publicly now to my spirit guides for denying and often ignoring them if indeed they are working so hard and so brilliantly to help me...

Many others have spoken or written about similar synchronous phenomena (although even Carl Jung seems to have missed car registration plates!) There is nothing special about my experience except perhaps that I have kept a careful record of hundreds of such instances. I am sure that everyone can develop awareness of this inner consciousness and see the signposts - everyone has experienced a really strange coincidence - just as everyone can record and study their dreams and everyone can read and learn to interpret the I Ching.

What I am going to describe now, everyone can experience. There are many ways of ‘knowing’. All it takes is an open mind, an honest heart and a passionate desire to live a meaningful life.

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1 Take the case of survival of death. There can be very few of us who do not desperately long for the knowledge that we shall continue as individual personalities beyond this life, that there are angels and guides to support us, even that we might get another chance on Earth later... This would be the most incredibly comforting knowledge with immense implications for how we live now. And there are some extraordinary mediums who seem to offer evidence of survival (although for every one of these there are a hundred appalling ones plying their vague and mindless trade among the hopeful and broken-hearted). But what is the quality of even the ‘good evidence’ that some mediums offer: are there clear and verifiable names, addresses, dates and factual accounts of events which could not possibly be known otherwise? And even when we strip down the accounts to those very few which do seem highly evidential, shouldn’t we then consider alternative explanations such as clairvoyance, telepathy or the collective unconscious (for extraordinary as these are in themselves, they don’t have the same implications for the nature of the human soul)? Moreover, there are very few of these wonderful accounts compared with the billions and billions of human deaths there have been and therefore the billions and billions of souls who presumably would have wanted to communicate with their loved ones left behind and yet have not managed it... Clearly, even if there is a ‘spirit world’ then communication with it is extremely difficult and highly suspect!

2 For example, if a dream seems to suggest that a significant event may occur in the future, is this actually what is going to happen, or may happen, or just what I want to happen? And if it is difficult to know what type of dream one has experienced, it can be even more of a challenge to understand its meaning. There are many psychological approaches. Most people who have studied the field recognise that there are certain archetypal symbols (‘running upstairs’ represents an improvement, a ‘flash of light’ means the solution to a problem). I started by using a respected ‘dictionary of symbolism’ that helped me to become familiar with the general language of the unconscious mind. But then many symbols are entirely personal and will mean different things to different people: for many, a dream of being ‘at school’ may suggest there is something important to be learned, whereas for a teacher, for whom school is an everyday experience, it could represent something entirely different. I have come to recognise that for me this symbol refers to my emotional relationships. However, there is an amusing snag here: once we think we have understood a certain symbol, in future our minds may seek out an entirely different symbol with which to convey similar information because, after all, it is trying to tell us something which we do not know rationally! So it is only through personal experience, study and self- awareness over a period of time that each of us gradually learns what our minds are telling us. Ultimately, although there may be common recognisable scenarios, we are the only ones who can really interpret the detail of our own dreams. Yet for all the difficulties this is surely one of the most fascinating of phenomena in human experience.