Bill Johnston | Multiplicity/Reincarnation | Homepage | COMMUNICATION with
SPIRIT Communication with the dead: a fascinating possibility, but no more fascinating than communication with the soul yet unborn. Or could these be the same thing? In the light of the Time-Enigma, both should be equally feasible, or equally improbable. Perhaps the main reason for the lack of progress in Spiritualism has been because enquirers usually focus their attention on one particular dead person, one newly-dead entity, instead of approaching such communication primarily as a means to obtain wider knowledge of death and what lies beyond death. It would appear to most thinking persons that the entity most unqualified to communicate would be the newly dead. Which would account for the spate of 'spirit guides' in spiritualism. It seems reasonable that such guides would be needed. However, the vices and virtues of Spiritualism can be left until later. Let us return to the subject of Time. Obviously, if any of us could step back through Time, we could see, feel, and hear the ones we loved again, just as they were. But it must be borne in mind that nothing would be changed. We would only be able to say and do the things we have already said and done; and so would they. Neither they nor we would be aware that they were in any Time but that particular present. But if we could go forward in Time, both the dead and we would have progressed, and everything would be new and different from what has gone before. It sounds rather complicated, but everyone's present is someone else's past or future. Conversely we are each living in the past, present and future at one and the same time. The greatest obstacle to an understanding of Spirit by we on Earth is the Space-Time limitations. A great obstacle, but not insurmountable. Try to imagine our world without any of the man-made time measurements. It is a strain on the imagination, but worth the effort. No clocks, no time signals no calendars. No seconds, no minutes, no hours, no days, no weeks: months or years... Only the human memory, the memories of living humans to decree what is past and what is present. Even the seasons, especially in temperate zones, are sometimes blurred and a bit unreliable. Under these conditions you might switch off your television set and idly pick up a book which had. been written fifty years earlier. In the absence of any time-measurement you would not know anything called fifty years. In the book you might read one man's impressions of the world he knew. In the absence of time-measurement you would believe that everything still existed as it was set down by that person. You would believe that the persons he mentioned still walked the earth, just as he described them. You might guess, by the condition of the book, that it had been written some time before (but you would not know the word 'Time' or its meaning). Let us suppose that the book is in excellent well-preserved condition, giving no clue as to its age. It might have been written very recently, as far as you can tell. Let us suppose you were also, able to pick up a similarly well preserved book, which had been written five hundred years before. To you, the reader, with no understanding of Time, the world of five hundred years ago would still appear real and existent. Or, conversely, if it did not approximate to the world you knew from your own experience, you might well judge it to be wholly the figment of the author's imagination, a description of something that never existed. But suppose that in the book there was a description of Stonehenge, and that you were able to verify for yourself that Stonehenge still existed more or less as described. You would then be inclined to believe that all else he described must also be real and existent. You might seek out the remaining scenes described in the book, only to find them vastly different. You are not to know that Time has changed the scenes. Remember we are assuming you know nothing of the passage of Time as such. You know that your present view of the scene is real; you are standing there looking at it; you must presume since the author correctly described Stonehenge, that his description of this other scene is also the truth as he saw it. You would indeed be in a sorry state without being able to measure Time. You would be forced to conclude that the author of the book was mad or deluded; or that you were mentally afflicted yourself. So we will restore the knowledge of Time; and you now stand gazing at the scene with the knowledge that you have been reading a description of the same place as it appeared five hundred years before. You know that your present view of the scene is real. The author's view of the scene was also real to him. So both scenes exist in Time: one for him, one for you, - and another for your grandson in the future. Three scenes, all different, all occupying the same Space, only separated by Time. Which is the true reality? To you, the scene you are looking at. To the man of the past, the scene he gazed upon. To your grandson, still in the future, the scene he will gaze upon. All three; scenes are true and real; not co-existing, but same location existing serially. Our lives unfold second by second, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, as we move forward through environments, which are keeping pace with us. If we could travel back through Time, every scene of the past would be real to us, even though, as in reversed films we would see buildings being "unbuilt", and so on. But Nature has limited such travel to brief dreams and visions, which may be likened to small mechanical occurrences. We live forwards, or more truly, we live clockwise, like the whole solar system. What is true of physical scenes must also be true of physical humanity. The people of the past are as real and existential somewhere in Time as are the people of the future. It seems strange that we can so readily believe in the inconceived future men and women, and yet be so swift and eager to deny the reality of the dead. Both the unborn and the dead have common ground. Before conception, the future human is as much a query mark as the last crumbling shred of a skeleton. The processes of birth are normally hidden, though in these enlightened days most of us know how and why it all occurs, how the foetus grows in the womb until it is ready to emerge and become a new human. But the processes of death have been pretty well open to inspection all through our history. The dead have lain on battlefields to rot before our eyes. We know well enough how the flesh decays and is eaten of worms and putrefies until the bones are revealed; and how the bones themselves in time will crumble into dust and disappear. Death is hardly pretty at any stage. But is Birth any prettier? Any mother will tell you that intelligence, even age-old wisdom, is recognisable in the eyes of a new baby. But it takes time for that intelligence to learn to use its new machine. The machine itself has to grow. When we chide the young for not learning quickly enough, we are approaching the matter from the wrong angle. We are really chiding the intelligence using the child's body for not adapting itself as swiftly as we would wish. We know little of these formations of intelligence that we call entities, souls, and spirits. It seems certain that some of them have trodden the earth or some similar world in previous lives. There have been many indications of this in child prodigies, particularly when the child seems mentally unrelated to either parent. We each expect such a formation of intelligence to take up its abode in a new child and direct its life from birth onwards. And Nature sees to it that this is usually the case; but there are exceptions: often the physical impairment is due to human fallibility, as in the case of thalidomide. Impairment is not by any means always physical. A perfect physical vehicle can contain the mentality of a sadistic murderer or a pitiable idiot We need to know much
more of the inhabiting spirits which govern our lives from the cradle to
the grave.
Modern psychology and
psychiatry are the tools of mechanics tending the grey matter.
So far, there are no real
mechanics for the soul. Least of all our modern priests. 1941At that time there wasn't much point in worrying unduly about life and death. Life was ones good fortune. Death might be just around the corner. The obvious thing to do was to make the most of life while it lasted. Much of ones time as a serving soldier was occupied in obeying orders, dashing from point A to point. R, as the fortunes of war dictated. Certainly one was much too busy to think very much about abstract things, about the great issues of life and death. Death was familiar. Life was a bonus. The strange incidents that emphasise our attitudes to these things, however, often force themselves on us at the most unlikely times, and in the most unlikely places. An N.C.O. of the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, twenty-four years of age, I was in Greece on the morning of April 21st, being jolted along a coast road in an army lorry. All our light tanks had been ditched or disabled in the mountain passes farther north, and we were moving southwards as speedily as possible, with the Germans in hot pursuit. Indeed, there were times in this chase when the Germans were actually ahead of us, and we had to get round them under cover of darkness. It was ignoble, inglorious, no doubt; but with the little we had left with which to fight, there was no option but to retreat as fast as we could. I attribute the subsequent circumstances - when I missed death by inches - to the daytime equivalent of a dream. A kind of elementary 'trance-vision'. It all happened in broad daylight and bright early sunshine. I was fully alert to the ever-present danger of dive-bombing Stukas. We had been bombed and machine-gunned all the way down through Greece. There were a couple of dozen soldiers in the lorry, laughing, talking, and singing the usual army songs. I remember that there was one exception - a soldier with whom I was quite friendly, and I need not name him here -who was quite sure that he was going to die. He wasn't by any means a coward. He simply had this premonition. We didn't take much notice of his gloomy foreboding. It seemed improbable to us, just as improbable as our own possible deaths. At some stage we acquired some bottles of beer; and we were swigging from these bottles as we gazed out over the high tailboard of the lorry on the lookout for Stukas. In the midst of this intensely busy scene, jolted up and down by the lorry's speed over a rough road, I suddenly and quite unintentionally became 'unconscious'. I was not sleepy. Conditions were all dead against sleep. The Germans were not far behind us, and for all we knew they could easily appear unexpectedly ahead of us. In spite of which, I was suddenly lifted above that scene, suspended between life and death. I had a very vivid impression of my sister (a housewife in London at that time) leading me by the hand, urging me away from 'something'. It was so vivid that, as I struggled back to normal consciousness from this brief 'daydream', I felt confused; it was as though I could still feel the warmth of the hand that had been holding my own hand. This took only seconds, but these were vital seconds indeed. During that tiny interval our convoy of lorries had ground to a halt in a village street. Most of the occupants of the lorries jumped eagerly into the street, as the lorries halted, mostly in the hope of finding some more beer I guess. Some of the lads literally climbed over me; I was huddled against the inside of the tailboard, shaking off my sister's restraining hand. In the same instant a stick of bombs from a high-level German bomber struck our lorries. Some of my fellows, including the lad with the foreboding, were instantly dead. Others, less fortunate, were lying around, groaning in agony, minus limbs. I was unscratched. A few days later the Germans captured many of those who survived this incident, including myself. Naturally enough I thanked my lucky stars, but did not attach much importance to the strange 'daydream'. Why should such a happening occur to one man among so many? Had not all the other chaps wives or sweethearts or mothers who were praying for their safety? No, it was just a queer and lucky coincidence. Until November 21st, 1941, when I received the first letters, from England. One was from my sister, the sister whose hand had held mine away from death; and her letter contained the following passage: "…which reminds me, probably it was pure coincidence, but one morning just before going to work, round about the time you must have been missing, I was suddenly overcome by a terrible depression and just sat and cried saying 'Oh, Fred, Fred, where are you, where are you ?' It was horrible and I wasn't surprised when you were reported missing. Probably I was just down in the dumps; but it was strange, because as far as we knew you were perfectly safe somewhere in the desert. The last letters from me to my relatives were from Egypt, before we embarked for Greece. Coincidence still? Maybe. But I know that my sister's unaccountable depression occurred on the morning of April 21st, 1941. Why did it happen? What weird laws of nature; govern such telepathic communication? Why does the law work for soma and not for others? Why only sometimes and not always? These were questions I began to ask myself more and more often. My sister was very close to me as we grew up. She was a year or two older than I was, the remaining children being older than we were, and consequently not quite so close. Just as a psychological emphasis, I have one memory concerning my sister that seems vaguely related to the wartime incident: when I was a small boy she found out that I was afraid of the dark patches in our little suburban garden. One night she took me by the hand and led me into all the blackest shadows in the garden, pointing out that there was absolutely nothing to fear that everything, within the darkness, was just as I had seen it in the light of day. From then on I never had any fear of the dark. What a turn-up for the psychologist.' Obviously the wartime incident was merely my mind rationalising, since I had once before found a measure of comfort and freedom from fear in the warm clasp of my sister's hand. My mind had re-created her protective presence to again ward off the fear of darkness (this time represented by German bombs). All right, suppose it did, - how the devil did my mind know there were German bombs poised overhead? Nobody else did. Why me? And why should it make my sister cry in London? No, psychology fell short with its answers. As a prisoner-of-war I found lots of time to think about dreams and visions. The general opinion might well be that these subjects are far from rewarding. When most of my fellow-prisoners were engaged in more materially rewarding activities, I would be jotting down what I could remember of last night's dream and try to analyse its meaning, if any. Most of my fellows were already engaged in studies, with the help of the Red Cross, designed to help them in their eventual return to civil life after the war ended. I felt that life was too uncertain to waste time on mundane studies. My only request to the Red Cross... was for the supply of such books as 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead - none of which did very much for me - the fault no doubt being mine. Life is, of course, uncertain at any time; but the war, and P.O.W. life in particular, was a good excuse for drifting. I had always had a lazy, live-for-today attitude to life, and this was the ideal time to give it free rein. I found quite a few kindred spirits. We told ourselves that Life and Death themselves were the only subjects left that were worthy of study. In surroundings where the 'material' had reached its lowest possible ebb, a study of things spiritual seemed more rewarding than it would under normal Conditions. Death took its toll in the camps. We British were fortunate; we had pretty sound constitutions that took most privations in stride; but we could look outwards at less fortunate; sections of the human race and see Death working overtime. I have stood on the edge of a mass grave in Austria, where thousands of pitiable Ukrainians were buried, mostly dead from typhus. When I was doing three weeks 'solitary' for attempting escape, I saw a group of Germans killing by torture some poor devil who no doubt had earned their hatred by opposing them; his cell was literally coated with blood from floor to ceiling. Yet there were some good souls amongst the Germans. Like all races, you have to take people as you find them; it is seldom easy to decipher the proportion of good and bad in individuals. It mostly depends on how they treat you, I guess. A very selfish viewpoint, no doubt. I have never really regretted my neglect of studies to fit me for civilian life. It still seems to me that a specialist in any field must be; slightly restricted in his knowledge of life, generally. The drifter sees the most, whether he profits by what he sees is up to the drifter. Back in those war-days I believed vaguely in the man-made God. Watching my fellows under the stress of screaming bombs from Stukas, I could not help but observe that most of them prayed. Some cursed, instead. These who prayed seemed to address their appeals fairly equally between God and Mother. The amount of direct help given by either of these to the supplicants seemed fairly equally balanced, I began then to question the; meaning of belief in God. What is God? This turned me away from Religion, as I had known it up to then. The Church, and the human custodians of religious truth, was full of words, but what did they mean? That is by the way. I only mention Religion because in any study of dreams and spiritual visions, the most obvious avenue of exploration is by way of the scriptures. The Bible is teeming with examples that, quite rightly, are often quoted by spiritualists. But my primary interest at that time was in dreams; and I can suggest that, to see dream-experience recorded as an integral part of religious belief, the following passages in the Bible should be read: In the Old Testament: I Kings Job Ecclesiastes Daniel In the New Testament: The one barrier, which prevents many persons from accepting that dreams contain truth, is the amount of seeming meaninglessness and nonsense that occurs in dreams. We all know of classic dreams, such as the dream of Maria Marten's mother, which brought William Corder to justice for the murder of Maria. Clear-cut and simple. Whether such examples are offer in fact or as fiction their occurrence on occasion is certain. But at the other end of the scale is the chaos of mere nightmare. The answer, possibly, is that the human brain, like a typewriter, can be used to type out a story; or used to create a jumble of letters and figures that mean nothing. The fault could be divided between the human mechanism and the spiritual fingers that attempt to convey the message. One great misconception has largely contributed to the decline of interest in the meaning of dreams: the use of the psychological term 'subconscious'. It is usual today, when one encounters some unusual dream, to dismiss it as a dredged-up by-product of the 'subconscious' mind. That which is labelled 'subconscious', supposedly because of its less-than-normal content when observed by the psychologist, is really the larger part of human's whole consciousness: out of the world we know only as much as we keep it out by our limited abilities. The root cause of this misconception is that humans, using their small physically limited facet of consciousness, try to examine and pronounce judgement on the remainder, - the LARGER remainder of human consciousness. It is as though a human with a shrimping net got it entangled with the tail of a huge whale and immediately started to bellow about his catch. The psychologists are in just that position. Equally unsatisfactory is the term 'unconscious'. If the so-called 'unconscious.' governs our sleep, how can we dream? We are often conscious of dreaming, and of living our dreams. In this large unexplored region of consciousness lies all we desire and have not. In it we can find all truth and sanity, and perhaps bring some of it down to physical earth. Even Jung was forced to admit that "dreams may give expression to ineluctable truths, to philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides." His phrase 'heaven knows what besides is perfectly true. But - a fact overlooked by psychologists - we are not all out of the reach of heaven.' Heaven, one feels, must be perfectly willing to share its ' knowledge with we poor mortals; but, just as the priests of old claimed yesterday, the head-shrinkers of today claim that only through them can sanity and integration be achieved. Freud may have been a great man, but Psychology today is a mixed blessing. America is an object lesson in this respect, where visits to one's analyst, for many people, are as much a daily routine as eating. Of course, the analysts are very happy with a state of affairs that makes them rich. Jung also said: 'One thing we ought never to forget: almost the half of our lives is passed in a more or less unconscious state. The dream is specifically the utterance of the unconscious. Work out for yourself, if you can, the truth of that statement It will depend on whether you believe your inner consciousness to be dead or alive. We sleep, perchance to dream, all right; but we do not die each time we sleep. Bill Johnston | Multiplicity/Reincarnation | Homepage |
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last updated March
2007
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