Miracles

At about the same time as the sad events of March were unfolding, I received in the post the brochure for that year’s Mind Body Spirit Festival to be held as usual in London at the end of May. I had visited the festival many times over the years and it didn’t hold the same appeal now as it once had. However, I decided that it would be important to go this time. There was certainly a need for healing; the healer Allan would probably be there, and Chrissie Shirley too. Perhaps the event might mark the start of the transformation that so many dreams had seemed to refer to. After all, the only day I could go would be the 1st June (day one of the sixth month, or ‘one sixth’!). It seemed to be the right decision:

S 24th May 2002: The car number M 86 ARK refers to the miracle of feeding the 4,000; this version is different to all the others of the New Testament, in the size of the crowd and the statement that seven loaves were used.

S 28th May: The number M 32 ARK only seems to refer to “the Sabbath”. Normally I would have disregarded this, except that the next Sabbath (Saturday) would be just seven days after the previous sighting, and the day of the MBS Festival.

S 1st June: On my way to the festival I saw M 643 ARK, which refers to the same miracle as the sighting of a week ago but is a different account of it (here there are 5,000 people). Then just before I arrived I saw the car M 124 ARK, by now a well-known passage urging me to “be prepared”.

There was a good atmosphere at the festival that day. I got myself some healing at one of the stalls and went to an inspiring talk about ‘living without fear’. But the most significant moments of the day were still to come. As I have said, I was still upset about the separation from Alice and confused because the relationship, at some level, still existed. It was hard to accept, however well I understood it, that we had taught each other all that we could and that it was time to move on. In a sense, perhaps this is the most troublesome thing for one’s normal life about the spiritual path: once one has opened one’s heart to love, that love exists and can never go away, however much the relationship which brought it about may change. As I have said, at least making mistakes with this is better than not loving at all. We can only keep trying to do the right thing.

The dream of 17th May 2001 in which I appeared to contact an evolved spirit had seemed to take place at a festival rather like this one, and now that spirit was represented for me by the healer Allan, who was present. However awkward his manner (and the dream spirit had been pretty offhand too), I knew very well that he had a powerful ability. So I had decided to humble myself today and had written him a letter asking for healing in our situation, as if to actualise the dream; giving it to him was, for me, a statement of my faith.

I went home feeling much more calm and went out into my quiet garden in the early evening sun.

S Half way down the path I found a champagne cork. To this day I have no idea at all how it got there.

This felt like some kind of sign of ‘congratulation’ that I was going the right way, albeit pretty blindly! This was reinforced about two weeks later when, having read my letter, Allan invited me for a consultation. Just as in that earlier dream, I found myself rising into a very strange and distant, otherworldly level of consciousness as soon as I entered his room. He talked in language I completely understood about paths and mountains and the tasks of the soul, and emphasised the greatest lesson of all to be that of learning how to love unconditionally. He told me, as if ‘master to pupil’, that I was doing all right but that a cycle had ended and I now needed to rest. It took a long time to come down to earth after this experience, but I felt peaceful and strong for the first time in months. More importantly, it was the first time that anyone had really seemed to understand what I had been trying to do with my life and had said “well done”!

At times, Alice and I were still good friends during this month, though she was just as unsure as I was. But we were about to be presented with a final clarification. By the end of June, many dreams seemed to have been fulfilled: the exams and the World Cup were over, the MBS festival had come and gone, my son’s team played at Highgate (the dream of July 2001 - that night I had also again dreamed of my car being stolen) and during the school’s next fire alarm practice I stood next to and then walked across the playground with a teacher named Allan (the dream of May 2002). Then the conflict with Alice’s family resurfaced (just as her mother turned 88!) and I was again marginalized. This had to be the decisive point. Her path was for her to choose, and everyone must be allowed that absolute right and freedom. So it was time for me to let go, to withdraw, to accept. I wrote a goodbye letter. The same day:

S 4th July 2002: As a joke, I had hung a large plastic spider (actually a toy for my cat) from a branch of a tree in my garden soon after meeting Alice two years earlier. The spider in some way represented our relationship. Today, it disappeared from the tree.

D 5th July: In a city (perhaps Wolverhampton where I grew up) there was a big advertising campaign by an organisation which was promising “to make dreams come true”. I was excited by this and got my girlfriend to come with me to see the promotion, encouraging her because she was reluctant at first. We went into a big store called “Evans”. There were lots of happy people, all being given a small plate of things including eggs - several of these had been thrown about and broken. We weren’t sure where to go but then got on an escalator and went up very fast. At the top we took a shower and were very happy. Finally, two large tickets were given to us to take part in the event.

Exactly at a very critical and sad moment, I was again experiencing a powerful and vivid dream (the first memorable dream for nearly two months) that seemed to promise not only recovery but a wonderful future in which, no less, ‘dreams would come true’.

Was it a message from ’eaven?! Broken eggs, of course, suggest omelettes - nothing worthwhile can be achieved without some pain and disruption, and my whole path had been about breaking things down in order to rebuild. The escalator is, like ascending stairs, an archetypal symbol for great and rapid improvement; a shower is cleansing and refreshment; tickets represent opportunity.

But who was the girlfriend? This is something, I now realise, that I often made mistakes with by allowing my desires to interfere with the deeper meaning of a dream (and the same might be said of I Ching readings). At this particular moment, of course, my mind was involved with Alice and the first impulse was to identify the woman in the dream with her. But how could I be seeing a ‘rapid improvement’ when we were in the very throes of parting again? This illustrates one of the most difficult aspects of dream interpretation. The unconscious mind must naturally use situations and people that are familiar to us in presenting information (or perhaps it is the conscious mind that colours the information with familiarity); we must try to discern the underlying information, to detach it from our present feelings. This is very hard to do for ourselves - an argument for sharing dreams with trusted friends or therapists! It took a long time for me to understand (or accept) that while a particular person in a dream may sometimes simply be themself, more often than not they represent an aspect of the dreamer’s life. My ‘girlfriend’ may have looked like Alice but I was dreaming about my own emotional recovery which lay ahead beyond the breakages. As it would turn out, in fact I was again seeing well into the future and the same symbols would reappear in fifteen months time.

If we are very self-aware, or plain lucky, it may be possible to recognise the defining moments of our lives when they occur. There can be an inner sense of awe, a heightened perception of the significance of everyday events, and there is definitely fear. We generally become afraid whenever something familiar is ending because it means that something different and unknown lies ahead. Even if the familiar past has been uncomfortable or painful, it can be hard to let go of what we have got used to and even invested much effort in. One’s career or one’s marriage may be deeply dissatisfying, for example, but it can still be very difficult indeed to make changes. Many people feel they cannot take the risk of stepping forward into new territory, the unclear and misty future. We may lose what we have. What we have is better than, perhaps, nothing.

Students may be nervous about the approach of important exams but often there is an even greater fear afterwards. Where to now? Yet it is possible to understand such fear not as a negative emotion but almost as a joyful sign that we are growing, becoming more, learning what it is to be human. If we can recognise that and risk ourselves, the defining moment can become a personal transformation, a door through which we pass and need never return to. Thus we embrace our spiritual nature more fully in all that we do and are.

In letting go of that which no longer serves us, we become stronger.

No, we don’t get instant peace - fear and confusion reign for a while - but we may be blessed with powerful signs and events which confirm our new path.

This is what happened for me now. Certainly, during several weeks of this early summer, I felt dreadfully afraid. The rollercoaster of emotional life had picked up greater speed and was making the craziest turns through the joy of love and the pain of rejection. I really hate rollercoasters. And there seemed a real chance that this one would kill me if I didn’t get off. It is a beautiful thing to touch another person deeply, to feel the peace of unconditional and indivisible love. But human beings - ordinary ones at least - cannot live perpetually at this level of consciousness. We have to deal with the demands of the everyday world where events are constantly moving and where psychological and emotional stresses inhibit the spirit.

In the depths of our being we may be untroubled, but on the surface the weather is whipping up waves. The challenge of peace is to bring more of this deeper quality of consciousness into our lives - but it is so hard when we are thrashing about in disturbed waters! Of course, thrashing about fearfully doesn’t help our chances of survival much...

When I had written that letter, and then the spider had disappeared from my garden, I felt terrified. Surely I was about to drown. This was the defining moment. And with some primeval instinct I knew exactly that what was being demanded of me was that I let go. In order to survive - no, it was more than that, it was in order that I could become my Self - I had to stop fighting and just surrender.

Maybe this seems perverse. Is it not human nature, when in difficulties, to do something? When faced with problems, do we not try to solve them? That’s what I had always done until 1995. And perhaps this is so for many everyday situations. But here we are talking about extraordinary times, when we stand before the door of transformation, caught in the student’s snag of having to learn an entirely new way of doing things. At such a time we need a teacher: it may be another human being, a spirit or an angel, or it may be our own inner, wiser consciousness - who knows? The point is that we have to accept our own limitations and simply trust in the learning process.

The universe responds.

I had experienced this when setting out on the path in 1995, having to find a new home quickly for myself and my son. I had never owned a house and knew next to nothing about the processes involving estate agents, solicitors and mortgages (except that others told me how fraught with stress it all was). I had very little money and there were complications concerning my eligibility for housing schemes that might help me. So I just set the wheels in motion with some letters, telephone calls and by walking in off the street to the first estate agency I felt drawn to. Then I prayed for guidance, sat back and waited (because I didn’t know what else to do). I stopped worrying and let go. As if by magic I seemed to make contact at just the right time with just the right people, helpful and caring and prepared to bend a few rules, and things fell into place; within weeks we had a peaceful and secure new home.

But the challenge seven years later was altogether of a different order. Learning to surrender meant two things. First, there was Alice. I had broken down some mental barriers and stepped through some emotional doors and begun to experience spiritual life. Now I had to let go completely of the very relationship which had given me this gift, to say goodbye to this wonderful teacher who had shared my path. This did not mean losing what we had learned together for that would always be carried forward with us. (It is the most dreadful thing when people later turn against those they have loved and deny the experiences they have shared, because of the pain of parting.) What it meant was that I had to let go of any and every expectation I might have harboured for the relationship, and overcome my own fears of loneliness or of abandonment or of my human desires and needs being forever unfulfilled. After all, unconditional love means asking for nothing in return. I found this excruciatingly hard - when love is so rare in the world, how cruel is life that it may not be expressed? - and I admit that I didn’t deal very well with it for some time to come.

The other sense in which I was being asked to let go was nothing less than surrendering control of my own life. It was the same lesson underlying every experience on this path so far, but it kept coming back harder and more insistent. Suppose for a moment that there is a God: then right now He was saying “You’ve chosen this unknown journey and asked for guidance, so stop trying to lead the way”. Well, it’s one thing to ask for guidance but quite another actually to receive and act on it! But at moments of transformation that is exactly what we have to do: give up and listen calmly. When we are in troubled waters and calling for help, there comes a point when we must stop struggling or the lifeguard will not be able to get hold of us and carry us to safety.

On the spiritual journey, the lifeguard is the river itself. It knows where it’s going. It will support us because it is our very Self. So we must surrender to its flow and trust it.

In the summer of 2002 I still wasn’t very good at that. The first thing I tried to do was ask the river where it was going. Well, actually I asked the I Ching.

IC 5th July 2002: “What is God’s will for me in the year ahead?” Hexagram 45 is “Gathering Together”, describing a time in which people come together in family or community roups, a time of approach and greatness. The one moving line was at the same time both enigmatic and straightforward: there are secret forces at work bringing together those who belong together. One should simply let it happen, do nothing...

Again it was being suggested to me that I must simply surrender to the inner stream (‘secret force’), that there was a destination to my journey, apparently another important meeting. But the result of this reading was Hexagram 47, “Oppression, or Exhaustion”, a time of adversity requiring strength of spirit and inner stability. It didn’t seem logical that a spiritual coming together should lead to such difficulty. But someone was certainly telling me something important.

S Later the same day I went to the gym where the only available locker in the changing room was number ‘44’. When I left, outside was the car ...444 DAN which refers to interpreting the king’s dream. This was the day after the ‘Dreams Come True’ promotion. Moreover there were further nods to my intuition about two time periods of four years, the fulfilment of which was now one year hence.

IC 7th July 2002: I tried again, to clarify the previous reading, and the book indulged me with a detailed description of how the path was unfolding. Hexagram 12 is “Standstill” and concerns a period of confusion and disorder, but also shows how this can change if one remains faithful and strong. There were four moving lines, each referring to a new stage of growth. At first there is nothing one can do to influence matters, so one must withdraw and persevere quietly; this standstill will change but one must let it happen naturally - allow spiritual forces to act. So far the reading is absolutely consistent with the previous one (and with that of January, “Waiting”). Then there will be a transition to good fortune but it is still a time of danger for one is not yet secure and caution is needed - this expands on the last reading’s result (and clarifies the February reading of “Development” leading to “Difficulty At The Beginning”.) But now I was given a bonus, for the final line looked a little further ahead again to when “standstill ends”; personal effort would still be required to maintain peace, but the result would be “Return”, a new cycle in which the darkness is over and people are in harmony.

Happy though the prognosis was, it seemed a long way off (indeed, this reading looked forward more than a year and a half); and the very fact that so much guidance over a long period of time was so consistent (which suggests that it can be trusted) actually did little to cheer me. After all, I was now at ‘standstill’ and being advised to ‘do nothing’!

Little did I know that I was on the edge of probably the most miraculous of all my mystical experiences so far. I said earlier that if one can surrender then the universe responds. It did so now in the most dramatic and yet very personal way.

S 7th July 2002: on the day of the last I Ching reading I saw again M 118 ARK - “prepare” for something. This sign has never failed to deliver. I now recalled the other recent car numbers suggesting that “something hidden will come to light”.

The school year was now over. It felt like pretty much everything was over. I desperately wanted to get away on holiday, to rest in new surroundings where the sunshine might clear away my mental shadows. But when I started checking ferry prices I was upset to realise that I possibly couldn’t even afford to cross the Channel with my tent. And then, unaccountably, my very reliable car developed ‘an electrical fault’ which defied two different garages. Clearly, I wasn’t going anywhere: even if the car got fixed, the repairs would probably use up what money I had. At first I was angry and frustrated, but then I found myself accepting that somehow this was meant to be - after all, I’ve had some experience with the interventions of fate...

S 12th July 2002: I returned home from another fruitless garage visit to find that a piece of paper had blown off the street onto my front doorstep, with a white feather next to it. The paper turned out to be a flyer, several months old, for a Spiritualist church a couple of miles away.

I have already described my scepticism about the common belief that white feathers indicate an angelic presence. But especially in the light of the recent car registration signs, I could hardly ignore a synchronicity like this. I hadn’t known about this church before and indeed hadn’t visited any Spiritualist church for some thirty years, but I knew that I had to go to this one.

S 18th July 2002: As I left my house to do so, I found that another piece of paper had landed on my doorstep. It was a page from a child’s school diary, about seven months old and very weathered. On it was written that a Commendation had been awarded for “good work in History” and also for “team work”.

My spirits were certainly lifted - this seemed like a sign that I had got something right at last! An hour and a half later, however, I returned home utterly deflated by a dreadful evening of vague pseudo-clairvoyance which reminded me why I had left Spiritualism in the first place.

S But on the way home I noted the registration M 314 ARK which refers to healing and ‘the Sabbath’.

For a couple of hours I felt pretty stupid for having believed in all this stuff. Then I calmed down and thought it through. For one thing, this whole path has been about having faith - in other people and in spiritual guidance - however irrational it might seem. For another thing, there had just been too many coherent psychic messages lately for all of this to mean nothing. So I resolved to give the church one more try - after all, the next meeting would be on ‘the Sabbath’.

S 21st July 2002: while out in the morning I saw M 370 ARK, referring to one of Christ’s miracles.

S Oil painting is one of my hobbies. This afternoon I felt an irresistible impulse to work on one of my paintings, called “Grace”. In the evening I arrived at the church to learn that the medium’s name was Grace (and the first person she spoke to later was also named Grace). The medium was wearing an unusual t-shirt, which was identical to mine.

It was a small but pleasant church room occupying the ground floor of a converted private house, and the people were welcoming but not fussy. There was a sparse congregation of about fifteen; I sat unobtrusively towards the back, aware of a peaceful atmosphere quite different to that of three days earlier. At such a meeting there will normally be a few hymns and prayers, much like at any other religious service; the medium will give a short address on a subject of his or her own choosing and then spend twenty minutes or so giving ‘messages from the spirit world’.

As this evening progressed I gradually felt a deeper sense of awareness and, unmistakably, I felt the real presence of my father next to me. I should say that we did not have a good relationship when he was alive; although he provided well for his family, he was a withdrawn and remote figure in my childhood, very conservative in his attitudes and, on the rare occasions when we did converse, he could be quite dismissive of my more liberal or alternative interests. To be perfectly honest, though I am not proud to say it, I had been quite glad when he died to be free at last of his shadow. In the nearly ten years since, however, I had continued to feel much pain over this relationship - angry at what I saw as his lack of guidance for me as I grew up, while also sad that we had never had a proper male relationship. Much of this difficult emotion came back to me now in that church.

S “I need to speak to the man at the back with his eyes closed,” said Grace. “Your father is with you. He wants to tell you that he is proud of you. You had a very hard time four years ago, but you’ve come through it well and grown as a result. He says he is sorry that he never said things like this to you when he was alive.” Grace went on to make several other ‘evidential’ remarks about my family (including facts about my maternal grandfather which were unknown to me but which I later checked and found to be true) and about my personal circumstances; there was even a reference to this writing.

This message was both wonderful and deeply reassuring for me, not only offering encouragement and commendation but it was also an important gesture of reconciliation. It seemed significant that he referred to my crisis of four years earlier (after Eve had left) rather than to my present trouble: surely this would have been mentioned if the medium had ‘simply’ been picking up information about me telepathically? Indeed, Grace Kennedy was probably the best medium I had ever encountered (and I’ve met a lot); she was clear and direct in her remarks, asked no questions, gave specific details such as names and dates, and everyone she spoke to that evening seemed to understand and verify what she said. If what she does is mind-reading then that is in itself quite incredible.

For what it’s worth, I later realised that this event occurred just two months (one sixth of a year) after my dream in May which described change and healing associated with the number one-sixth.

And probably the most wonderful aspect of the experience was that I did feel an immediate and genuine healing of all that inner pain concerning my father and my early life. It is true that he had never told me that he was proud of me and never once said “sorry” to me when he was alive. Now all of that was just wiped away. The effect has lasted undiminished in me ever since and indeed led to a wider healing of relationships within my family. Whatever the truth of the source, this is real. It was a genuine moment of grace.

So what of the source? Those who question the reality of spirit contact (and I have been one of them) will have to turn instead to telepathy or clairvoyance, and that of the highest order. If Grace were tapping into some collective unconscious or universal field of memory, and brilliantly so, then this raises huge implications for the nature of the human mind. But when one considers the whole sequence of synchronicities in their totality - from the strange car fault which prevented me from going away, to signs about “that which is hidden coming to light”, “God speaks”, “be prepared” and references to miracles and the Sabbath, to the flyer (for a church I didn’t know about) with its white feather, to the diary reference to commendation and history, the painting entitled Grace, the medium’s name and even her t-shirt, let alone the accuracy and appropriateness of her words...well, it’s very difficult not to think that these events must have been deliberately orchestrated by some intelligent force or beings. This is a truly mind-boggling thought: it’s one thing to suggest that significant ideas could have been introduced to my mind (happening to notice certain car numbers, working on that painting or choosing to wear that t-shirt), but quite another to imagine how physical events in the real world and beyond my influence (like the flyer, the diary and car fault) could have been created.

The sequence of events was by no means over either - the car was still causing a worrying problem! Didn’t this now deserve to be healed too?

S 31st July 2002: The familiar number M 106 ARK suggested again that I should “be prepared”. It was soon followed by ACT 18 ... which reads “You will receive power...”

S 2nd August 2002: The unusual number LL 51 UKE refers to a passage just before the miracle of the fishes.

Three days later I took my car to the manufacturer’s main UK service centre. They reported at first that they’d never seen this fault before, didn’t understand it and would have to refer to the company’s design engineers abroad. But then, acting on an intuition, one of the engineers discovered that the onboard computer was giving false readouts; he had to hack into it but managed to reset it correctly, discovering that the original actual problem was indeed a very minor one. It was fixed in minutes, and cheaply!

S 5th August 2002: Just as I left the garage I saw the registration ... RWP (my father’s initials) followed soon after by ... DAD.

You can understand, I’m sure, why I felt an overwhelming sense of my father’s real involvement in my life at this time. Of course, it also raised questions such as “Why now?” So many years after his death, and “Why not when I really needed him before?” Not to mention “How on earth does this happen?” - Frankly, I think these questions are just unanswerable until we know, if we ever can, the truth about survival of death. Yet there was even more to come.

My mother was spending a few days with me just now, not an easy visit but our relationship was also now improving. On my way to collect her, a strange thing had happened (though I’m hesitating to call it a ‘sign’): I turned on the car radio to hear the name “George” spoken and at exactly the same instant a stone came flying horizontally through my open window narrowly missing me. (I assume that a child at the side of the road had thrown it.) I couldn’t help but think at this moment of my friend George Stone who had died not long before; but if this was spirit contact it was pretty unorthodox not to mention downright dangerous (though not, I have to say, out of keeping with George’s personality)! Then, on the afternoon of the day that my car had been mended, my mother and I went into the garden to enjoy the fine weather. To encourage her hobby of writing, I suggested that we each write five story titles on pieces of paper, pick one of them at random from a hat and both write a short story with that title.

S She chose a piece of paper. I absolutely knew that she would choose the one on which I had written the title ‘Stones’. Then as I moved my chair next to the hedge to begin writing, I saw a small white feather just near my head.

There was spirit everywhere around me now. Whatever that means. I knew that I had to follow these events up and try to discover more about their significance, so I arranged a private reading with Grace (who, incidentally, lived some distance from London and only visited that church perhaps once a year).

S 7th August 2002: This meeting lasted just over half an hour, and I recorded it. Grace asked only four questions and made more than eighty statements about my family, career, relationships and personal development - only two were wrong, while five or six were predictions. The detail and accuracy of most of what she said was astonishing, giving names, ages, personal descriptions and medical conditions accurately (including facts about my paternal grandfather whom I had never known but which were proved true when I did some family tree research more than a year later). The ‘spirit message’ to me was again one of great encouragement and reassurance, with a significant prediction of “renewed love” in the spring of the next year. Meanwhile, I just had to “let go” of Alice (who was also named).

I visited the London church only two or three more times that summer, and to give thanks rather than to seek any further ‘messages’ (which was just as well since nearly every medium I saw was quite awful). I was determined that this was not going to become a regular part of my life or of my thinking. Despite everything that had happened, I still felt some scepticism (as to the origin of the events) and believed it important to maintain that. Yet the spirit world wasn’t finished with me.

S 13th September 2002: M 935 ARK refers to “...my beloved son”.

S 17th September 2002: M 106 ARK (again) refers to “...be prepared” and to “I send my messenger”.

S 19th September 2002: M 935 ARK again, and also ... NRP (my initials).

S 22nd September 2002: I had a feeling that I should go to the church again today, and was reassured when the first hymn sung was “Breathe in me...” (these words are part of my daily prayer) and the second was “Amazing Grace”! However, there was a different medium this evening, whom I shall not name because she was quite dreadful: she spoke in clichés, was unprepared and rambling, and her ‘messages’ to others were brief and insultingly trivial. So I just closed down and meditated quietly by myself at the back.

Almost at the end of the service she spoke to me and it was as if her whole personality had changed - now she was ibrant and clear, giving a detailed and accurate description of my maternal grandmother (who had died nineteen years before). She repeated the message of encouragement and congratulation that my father had given, and said that the next year would see much change and improvement; the important time (as Grace had also suggested) would be in March 2003, “when the daffodils bloom”. As she finished, the medium described my grandmother holding out a birthday cake with candles on it.

This meant nothing to me at the time, but my mother later confirmed that today had in fact been my grandmother’s birthday. Her favourite flowers had been daffodils. And her surname (look again at the car number of five days earlier) was Messenger.