My own self-actualization process or 'path' — Part 1

Introduction

Some of the information on this page has appeared in other writings on this site, but here my aim is to bring it all together into a coherent whole, so that people can get ideas most readily to assist them on their own self-healing / self-actualization process. Where possible I keep the length of this page to a minimum by referring the reader to glossary entries and accounts, descriptions and explanations that I've given on other pages — so the links I give are important ones that need following up to get the full picture…

I want to emphasize that, as explained below, for much of my life I followed a particularly tough self-healing path, with only very belated recourse to painless fast track methods. I'm NOT suggesting that anyone else should follow my own route — no matter whether all or even any of it — though I think many will find some helpful pointers for themselves.

Inevitably this page will give further ammunition to those who seek to dismiss or discredit me, pointing to this as yet another piece of rambling on about myself on a mega-ego trip. On the other hand others will see this page as another example of my being prepared to fearlessly use anything in my life process as 'demonstration model' for the benefit of others — which indeed is my intention.

How many spiritual teachers or indeed teachers of healing or 'self-realization' tell you openly and honestly about their own self-healing / self-actualization process or so-called 'path' in its fullness so that you could learn from that, including their past errors, sidetracks and 'difficult' experiences? I don't know of any, though surely there must be some. I hope others will take some leaves from my book and do this themselves.

My story and, er, 'interesting times'

Up to my emotional crisis

My childhood tribulations were in a sense part of my lifelong healing and self-actualization process, because in the long term they were drawing my attention to issues that needed addressing and indeed resolution. Born in 1942, I had the most troublesome night hells (aka night terrors) up to the age of six*. I felt immensely lonely and often deeply sad. I was bullied and ridiculed at school, and sought solace in my natural history interest, getting away frequently to local public woodlands to collect insects, which were central to my interest, and, later, lizards and snakes.

At puberty I discovered masturbation and then soon became frightened as I came to realize that my erotic feelings were all towards people of my own gender. The social environment at that time was pervasively homophobic, so I felt that I couldn't reveal my so-called homosexuality to anyone and was terrified of anyone finding out.

About that time I woke up to my deep music interest and connection, when I heard Stravinsky's Petrouchka for the first time — it hit me like a bombshell and had me electrified. Yet my response to this awakening was to keep it to myself and hide my musical interest from virtually everyone until after I'd left home in 1967. Even during my last years at school, increasingly I had music composing itself in my mind, but again I hid this fact from everyone, and in any case I hadn't learnt to read or write music, so couldn't act on it at all.

All these experiences compounded my increasingly desperate feeling of loneliness. Once I'd moved from home for a job at the Animal Virus Research Institute at Pirbright in Surrey, I 'came out' about my musical interest and started collecting records, exploring almost exclusively 20th Century music, as I didn't feel much resonance with the earlier music that I heard played so much. So, although I was getting some more sharing of interest with my few friends, I was still out on a limb with my own particular musical interest and tastes, and longed to meet others with whom I could really share such music and the deep experiences I had.

A growing pressure to resolve the issue

In 1971 two crucial things happened for me. First, there was a local performance (in Guildford) of Bohuslav Martinů's powerful choral work, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This shook me up emotionally a good deal, for a highly significant reason that wasn't to become fully apparent to me till 2012.

I then bought the Penguin edition of the legend known as The Epic of Gilgamesh, upon which Martinů's work had been based, and felt unprecedentedly strong emotion as I read it, being on the verge of crying, though valiantly not allowing that to happen because I'd grown up with the actually very harmful notion that adults don't cry except when a 'breakdown' occurs. However, that legend seemed to have loosened something up, for my longings were coming increasingly to the surface and the underlying emotional pain was also pressing at me increasingly.

Later in 1971 I took a bold step and recognised that I was feeling so lonely and devoid of real friends that I had nothing to lose in 'coming out' about my having a homosexual orientation. Then I started meeting 'gay' men and was revolted at the superficial, unloving, manipulative attitudes and behaviour manifested by those 'gay' men who I encountered, and soon withdrew from that whole scene, resolving not to meet anyone on the basis of their sexual orientation or indeed their gender.

That was all very well, but it left me isolated again. I intuitively 'knew' from deep within myself the sort of relationships that were meaningful to me*, and I'd learnt from experience that my whole being wasn't going to settle for less than made real sense for me, even if it meant my remaining on my own for quite some time to come.

During the summer of 1972 I was beginning to feel desperate, for increasingly I felt close to crying, but believed that I mustn't cry because that would mark a 'breakdown', and I was terrified of any such happening. My whole body ached with the weight of crying that seemed to be forcing its way to the surface. I felt pure horror at the way people around me were prepared to go to a doctor or hospital and be drugged or otherwise 'treated' to change their mental or emotional state, and I had no intention of following their misguided example. I became increasingly frightened as it seemed that I was indeed heading for a 'breakdown' — whatever the latter really was.

Re-Evaluation Counselling — My salvation and betrayal

I'd read about encounter groups and thought that getting into one of them could be the answer to resolving my pressing problem, and so I asked a recently acquired local friend with a lot of social contacts whether there were any encounter groups in Guildford where I was living then. It turned out that there wasn't an encounter group, but there was a group with some similarities* that was going to start that October at Surrey University, in Guildford — the second British ongoing fundamentals class in Re-evaluation Counselling (RC).

The class wasn't due to start for a few weeks but at least I was able to buy a book about RC — The Human Side of Human Beings by Harvey Jackins, the founder of RC. Upon reading that I felt my first 'homecoming' feelings, for here was an explanation of how experiences mis-store in the memory when trauma occurs and isn't released at once, and how trauma (Jackins used the term 'distress') accumulates but could all be released (healed) retrospectively through crying, trembling, etc.

Not only was it an explanation, but it was one that made total sense to me, and I suddenly had real hopes for RC and for myself. At last I understood that, if that book was correct, far from heading into a breakdown, I was about to start an intensive healing and recovery process, which would lead me into new and very positive areas of experience and functioning.

This discovery increased my internal pressure still further, and I fled from my research job at Pirbright, needing time and space to sort my issues out. With the first meeting of the class still a week away, I felt desperate, wanting to get started with some crying but not knowing how to open the floodgates on my own. I managed to book an RC session with the secretary of the class teacher, who I shall call P.

So, in that first, one-way, session of mine, which P was giving to me on the basis that sometime later on I'd give her an exchange one-way session, the two of us were sitting, facing each other, holding hands. I said I knew I needed to cry and cry, and at this stage just wanted to find out how to use RC to enable that to happen. She invited me to choose something to start talking about — and it came to me to recount a dream (in the present tense) that I remembered from the age of about five or six, which involved an intense feeling of loss, separation and subsequent loneliness.

There was a point in my recounting the dream when my voice wavered upon saying a particular phrase. With a warm, appreciative smile, P at once interjected: Say that again!. And the moment I started saying it again the floodgates opened and I cried. In fact on that occasion I didn't cry for very long, but I felt the most extraordinary sensations, as this release had changed the configuration of my whole 'energy system' (not that I knew of such things as 'energy systems' then). I felt a powerful tingling up my spine, over my scalp and in my arms and hands, and this lasted for perhaps half an hour, gradually tailing off.

That night my mind was in a tremendous tumult and I didn't sleep a wink. The mental tumult was a massive sifting and re-evaluation, as all manner of my life experiences and thoughts and feelings up to that time were reviewed in my mindspace* and seen in the new light of my having found a way through — and indeed a way eventually to realize many if not all of my deepest longings rather than simply become 'cured' and 'normal'. My heart was thumping with the excitement throughout that night.

The basic practice of RC, then, is a particular type of peer co-counselling, in which, normally, the time of a session is divided into equal halves, with one person being client for the first half and then roles being switched at half time. The person who is in 'counsellor' role doesn't give advice or opinions, but gives warm loving support instead. RC counsellors learn to smile supportively and appreciatingly when the 'client' gets into difficult-feeling material and when emotional release occurs. The aim is NOT for the client to say things that the counsellor thinks are 'right', but for him to achieve emotional release.

The counsellor's role does involve an active element because very often the client needs to be directed to say something again, perhaps in a different way, in order to break the 'control pattern' that's preventing release from occurring at that point. Or it may be necessary for the counsellor to find a phrase for the client to say or a simple action to do, which contradicts a particular negative pattern that's operating at that point and preventing emotional release. Otherwise the client could go rabbiting on talking and talking with little or no emotional release. The client's giving an interesting or entertaining talk in sessions is NOT what RC is about.

The ultimate aim in RC isn't to become 'cured' in the conventional sense, and 'normal', but to enable one's whole self to manifest, for, apart from the effects of trauma, we're naturally positive, dynamically happy ('zestful' in RC jargon), loving, creative, alert, clear-thinking and flexible.

Thus through RC we become far from normal, but in the very best sense — because at the present time normality actually implies a normal set of malfunctions and limited functioning. Even people who are widely regarded as being well adjusted and 'doing fine' are in most cases operating on only a small proportion of their true potential that at least theoretically can be manifested through ongoing practice of RC.

Increasing frustrations

In the group sessions I sometimes cried intensely (particularly when I focused on The Epic of Gilgamesh), but I became increasingly frustrated that people in the group would get upset or uptight at my crying so much or so intensely, so preventing me from continuing. An upset or uptight counsellor is no good to man nor beast. In the group we chose partners for one-to-one co-counselling sessions during the week, in between class meetings.

Again I became frustrated because I found that my regular counselling partner was both resistant to his own emotional release and also couldn't support me through the intensive crying that appeared to be pressingly important for me to do. I was so determined that I still managed to do some crying, but often it felt no better than doing it myself with no assistance. I subsequently had other counselling partners, but I rarely felt I was getting the level of aware support that I needed in order to get really strong and sustained emotional release.

I quite soon gave up attempts to bring up the Gilgamesh legend in counselling sessions — even though that could elicit my deepest and most intense crying. The other RC-ers clearly didn't really understand what RC was about and had learnt some rules and techniques without real understanding. So, if I started crying about the Gilgamesh legend (or Kafka's story Metamorphosis, which also made me cry with similar intensity) the counsellor would soon interrupt and say something like Well, now I think it's about time you worked on some real material. Now, try saying I'm living completely in present time!.

I completely failed to get it through to these unaware people that the point of RC sessions wasn't for the client to do what the counsellor felt was 'right' for him to do (at least, unless having considerably greater depth of awareness and a much deeper understanding of the RC process than any of those people had), but was for the client to do what achieved maximum emotional release, and sustain it, even for a full hour — at least, when there was a considerable weight of material available to release.

I certainly wasn't going to stick with one partially satisfactory group meeting and one usually unsatisfactory one-to-one session per week, so I had more or less daily emotional release sessions on my own, where I was effectively my own counsellor. I had the ability to mentally step outside of the troubled aspects of myself and thus lovingly carry out that role.

In these sessions (usually lasting a half- to one hour) I could often do the sort of sustained crying that I really needed to (i.e., in the absence of any better means for clearing the stress / trauma material), though I was well aware that I was working within a strong isolation and loneliness pattern and therefore these sessions were not as healing and liberating as they would have been if I'd been working with a really supportive counselling partner of a similar level of awareness to my own, and the intensity of the crying was usually less than I'd have experienced with truly aware support.

Various other RC people warned me against 'doing it' on my own, but they were voicing their own ignorance and unawareness, and I disregarded them. It wasn't as though they genuinely knew better than me or were offering any positive assistance; they were just wanting to pull me down to their level of unawareness.

I attended occasional national and international RC workshops, and at those, here and there I had really wonderful co-counselling sessions where I'd managed to get paired up with somebody who was, relatively speaking, really aware and supportive.

On the other hand I had many troublesome encounters with tiresomely unaware people too, so overall it was rather a fraught experience for me, even though I was also very excited at finding myself in a worldwide community that was dedicated to realization of full human potential — love, clear thinking, 'zestfulness' and all that. This appeared at the time to be my way forward, whatever the difficulties caused by the widespread lack of awareness or deep understanding within the RC community of what RC was really about.

One tremendous thing for me in the RC community — whether at workshops or with local RC-ers — was that it was the done thing to embrace warmly and awarely on meeting and parting (and at other times as one felt moved to do so). This was often marred, however, by the fact of everyone being made to feel obliged to hug, so that hugs were often something of a ritual, not having a healthy spontaneous and warm, 'meant' quality, and this problem was compounded by the ritual of being expected to say a nice, appreciative thing ('validation' in RC jargon) to the person you were hugging.

Saying nice, positive things to each other was great in principle, but if it was being done out of a sense of duty its positive effect was at best reduced and all too often actually reversed to transmit a negative message.

This meant that many hugging experiences were degraded by unawareness in the hugs and the tiresome duty of having to find something positive to say to the other person, and of course all too often having unaware and unhelpful 'validations' said to oneself. Because that was usually not spontaneous and it was often evident that the person was having a struggle to find something really appropriate and positive to say, this was a detail that regularly made my heart sink.

It would have been so much better if people had been urged to be much more flexible and spontaneous about such things and to say nice things to people only when they came naturally and could be really meant and felt. A warm, truly aware hug is a tremendous mutual appreciation without any words needing to be said — and in that particular context an obligational or/and unaware hug would have been better simply not done.

RC didn't recognise any broader aspect of life than the physical and mental /emotional, and, on the surface, neither did I at that time, and I had no connections with any appropriate people and so had no idea that RC, when applied fully and with deep awareness, could be used as a self-actualization method (albeit, as I came eventually to recognise, by no means a very efficient one) that could theoretically take you to the point of enlightenment and indeed into further self-actualization beyond that. I say 'theoretically' because in practice few people indeed would get very far along that route by use of RC.

It turned out that John Heron, our class teacher in Guildford, was actually teaching a serious distortion of RC, putting a big emphasis on set exercises in our class meetings, and distorting his whole presentation of RC to accommodate his deeply ingrained seriously troublesome authoritarian pattern (as a result of which latter he was a university academic).

Set exercises are alien to RC because they have nothing to do with paying attention clearly and precisely to where the client is at and what that particular client needs to do in order to achieve emotional release and healing of their particular traumas at the particular time. Ironically, if I'd understood correctly, set exercises would be more the thing that's done in encounter groups, which I then understood would very likely have screwed me up rather than helped me.

I therefore thank my lucky stars that RC came to Guildford at just the right time and 'rescued' me from the prospect of encounter groups — even though what was being promoted initially was a distortion of RC, still with some similarity to an encounter group.

Then another teacher took over the ongoing class, and she at least made the classes more authentic as RC classes, but she lacked the level of awareness that I longed for in order to be able to move faster myself — and she herself also had a quite problematical authoritarian pattern (as a result of which she worked as a schoolteacher). Yet another teacher eventually took over, but she was similarly very lacking in deep awareness and supportiveness for my level of working (albeit without overt authoritarianism), and indeed always seemed to be rather afraid of me, and was thus particularly unable to be genuinely supportive for me, so my frustration continued.

Breaking of patterns

An important development in RC was a growing recognition of the importance of breaking rigid patterns of behaviour and outlook in our everyday lives, because by taking positive steps in our lives to contradict and dismantle these patterns we could free up old traumas for emotional release, and when things were done this way the emotional release could be very intense but relatively brief, so making the whole process much more positive and efficient…

An early bit of pattern breaking for me, in early 1973, came when, as one of the set exercises in the group, we were paired up and then each directed to ask the other person to do some small appreciative thing for us, to bring or manifest at the following week's group session. The young woman who was paired up with me then asked me to write a poem for her.

That opened the floodgates of my creativity. I'd never before thought of poetry as something I could do, yet suddenly I found myself writing down the most amazing and original outpourings. Many of these were not well formed and clearly represented too much of a working-out of my old negative emotions to be worth keeping long-term as worthwhile literary writing, but even after severe purges later on I've kept a core of about a quarter of these works, a selection of which are presented on this site, and the full collection of which is nowadays available as a quality paperback and Kindle e-book.

In many of my poems I was intuitively practising symphonic music composition processes — in particular the fluid application of 'motivic metamorphosis' that characterizes the mature symphonic music of Vagn Holmboe and indeed the later symphonies of Jean Sibelius.

As part of my more forward-looking, pattern-breaking approach to RC, having been to a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem in Guildford Cathedral and been greatly moved by it, I set myself a long-term goal of actually singing in that very work. Superficially that seemed impossible because of my not being able to sight-read music notation, not to mention my strong embarrassment about the very thought of being heard singing, and also the War Requiem was an intimidatingly large and challenging work to perform. In reality that apparent impossibility was part of the point of the exercise, because it was starting to focus me on breaking the patterns that were preventing me from getting involved musically. In other words the important thing wasn't whether I'd ever get to sing in the War Requiem, but rather, the direction and positive processes that were set in motion by my having that ultimate target, which in any case would be subject to review and amendment according to how my life developed.

So, following from that, one positive step that I took that was really dramatic for me was, in autumn 1975, to join the Surrey University Choir, which operated at the University in Guildford. To many people that would be nothing special, but for me, to go to my first rehearsal with that choir was the most courageous thing I'd done up to that time (and indeed in my whole life, even including my garbage-sourced ordeals of 2003/7, of which you'll read a lot further below).

As I set out from my flat for that first rehearsal (for Bach's Christmas Oratorio) I was shaking like a demented jelly, feeling as though a most horrifying death were just round the corner for me, and all manner of dark and scary feelings and thought voices were urging me to stop and go back to my flat.

But I persisted, and came to sing regularly in amateur choirs until about 2008 (apart from the 2003/4 and 2004/5 seasons, when I was preoccupied with my big ordeals, of which more further below). It turned out that I didn't need to be able to sight-read the music, because during rehearsals I was able to pick up my part from others around me, and the choirmaster would help the different choir sections on the piano. So I was able to learn my notes at least well enough to get through.

My move to Exeter in October 1976 resulted from another 'positive direction' that I'd set for myself to take me forward. In February 1976 I had my first attack of genuine influenza in my adult life, and it was a full-blown severe attack. I'd long dreaded getting flu again, for I remembered how in my teens I'd had such horrible depressive emotional feelings while ill with the flu. So this time I set myself a strategy of resting comfortably while really ill, allowing all depressive and negative thoughts to surface for observation, and contradicted each one, as it arose, with its positive opposite.

Many of the depressive thoughts were about my life situation then and its apparently not leading me anywhere, and so this led to my working out a major step that could open up all sorts of possibilities for the future. I decided that I'd apply to go to a university to study belatedly for a first degree. My feelings were all saying No, no, NO! I can't!, but I was clear that my reasoned decision would rule. And so it came about that I moved to Exeter, to study there for my degree. So, for that big step I have to thank a severe bout of flu!

And now in Exeter…

In Exeter I found a local RC ongoing class and joined it, only to suffer increased frustration, as these people were all colluding in avoiding working through their more deeply ingrained material — what Harvey Jackins called 'chronic patterns'. These people were on edge about me, for they felt threatened by my determination to work through my own deepest and most ingrained material without accepting their own limited views of what RC was about.

There was a definite air of defensiveness and resentment towards me, because I understood RC and was proficient with it to a level far beyond where they were at, and instead of welcoming that fact they were semi-covertly regarding me as an unwelcome alien intruder in the group, who might rock their comfortable, mutually colluding little 'boat'.

They clearly saw me as something of an attention-seeking smart-arse within the group, for in their view I was supposed to be meekly and 'respectfully' letting the hopelessly ignorant and unaware 'teacher' and the various equally ignorant and unaware trainee teachers posture as 'teaching' me without a peep from me that they were just wasting my time and money (in class and workshop fees) and they'd do better to start learning RC — properly for once — from me, at least if no-one more suitable was available.

Unfortunately there was no means by which one could be in the RC community without being in a 'fundamentals' class and having to put up with whatever flaws the particular class teacher and indeed the whole group had.

To skip the details, in 1980 I was excluded from the group with the highly dishonest excuse that I myself had a pattern that made RC unsuitable for me. What they couldn't face doing was to be honest and admit that they were afraid of working at the sort of depth at which I wanted and needed to work, and they simply didn't want me in the group. — Indeed they were really an unsatisfactory group for me rather than the converse.

I did consider going to the top and contacting Harvey Jackins to fight the group's decision, but I realized that that wouldn't work, and would cause me a whole lot more stress, for I'd have been seen as an aggrieved person out on a limb and with a chip on my shoulder and therefore would have been seen to be unsuitable to be in such a group anyway.

So, I felt deeply hurt — indeed betrayed by the very people who supposedly represented a liberating direction for me. This situation remained then over the years. Occasionally I'd have solitary sessions of emotional release, but had nobody to give me any support — and I felt a sort of dark cloud hanging over me from the betrayal by the RC people — a crushing injustice that it seemed that I was powerless to do anything about. I still had no idea that there were any other genuinely effective healing avenues for me where the basic means of emotional release would be welcomed, or indeed could be almost entirely bypassed (i.e., without going into denial, such as if one took up the meditation or more general spirituality sort of mindset).

I still recognise RC as a sort-of effective method for clearing one's emotional issues — but now with a number of major reservations, so that I actually recommend against using it, at least if to be used to any really serious extent, even though its underlying theory (as expounded in Harvey Jackins' book The Human Side of Human Beings) is very useful as far as it goes — though unfortunately it didn't recognise the major part that the garbage was playing in human dysfunction and the formation of major and especially 'chronic' patterns.

Here are my main reservations, then:

• In practice most RC-ers are too wrapped up in their own ingrained trauma- / stress-based patterns of outlook to understand RC properly and use it awarely. According to my particular working model of how our problems operate, soul programming is the underlying culprit for most of this.

• One big problem with the RC community globally was that Harvey Jackins had his own personal control agenda, and chose new teachers very much on the basis of their both looking likely to tow his 'Party line' and — sorry to have cause to say this! — they themselves having particular 'chronic patterns' that made them either weak and inarticulate as supposed teachers, or/and authoritarian (and therefore really not genuine teachers of RC at all).

  He weeded out prospective RC teachers with authoritarian patterns only if they looked like clashing with him, whereas he always claimed that he wasn't allowing anyone with significant authority patterns to teach. I don't suppose he was consciously aware that he was operating in that way, for the garbage interference that was causing him to behave that way would have been giving him his own awareness blocks.

  I got so frustrated with this that eventually I applied to be approved as an RC teacher myself, not because I really wanted then to be formally teaching RC, but because all the local 'teachers' of RC (all accredited by Harvey Jackins) were so hopelessly damned awful and I wanted the opportunity to get some local people starting to understand what RC was really about and how to really go about using it. NONE of those so-called teachers really understood RC, and it was a matter of 'the blind leading the blind' in just about all respects.

  I wasn't altogether surprised — though I felt pretty betrayed and disgusted about it — when Harvey refused my accreditation. Indeed, my application had to go through my group, which I was still a member of at that time, and part of the process involved Harvey consulting with the extant teacher of that group.

  — So I have little doubt that the general message that Harvey would have got from the group was something like We've passed his request for teacher accreditation to you only to keep him quiet, because he's a bit of a smart-arse and thinks he knows it all, and is a bit of a problem in our group. We don't see him making a good teacher, because he's not willing to learn [from us]; we'd be very happy if you refused him accreditation..

  As I now clearly understand, ANY self-healing / self-actualization method whose dissemination is controlled by a single person* is bound to run aground and get distorted into all sorts of relatively ineffective variants despite any intent and attempts of the controlling person or founder to keep the teaching of the method 'pure'. The problem is always the same — personal power / control agendas.

  * That doesn't mean, however, that a self-healing / self-actualization method being controlled by a group or organisation would be any better; in such cases the method, as disseminated, would be 'rotten in the bud', because of the inevitable control agenda(s) that would almost certainly be there right from the start.

  These always mitigate against 'pure' and effective operation of any self-actualization method, for they're inherently incompatible with self-actualization in the first place. And power / control agendas and 'authority' patterns will always seek to silence and suppress those more deeply aware individuals who have the fullest and deepest understanding of the method.

  — So, if you want really effective emotional clearance and self-actualization, there's absolutely no point in relying on a 'teacher' or guru at all, except perhaps initially just to pick up some initial data on the method. Basically there's really no effective alternative to doing it yourself and being your own teacher. That happens to be fully compatible with, and indeed an intrinsic aspect of a genuine self-actualization process.

• RC, especially when practised 'promiscuously' is potentially dangerous! It isn't intrinsically so at all, but the problem is that a fair proportion of people who get involved in RC have particular types of garbage interferences and 'entity' attachments that cause them to be very controlling (and so actually very unsuitable for anyone to open to in a RC session), and, furthermore, can have very serious consequences for particular individuals who are no-soul people (such as me).

  I had one experience in particular, where, in a workshop, I got paired up for a session with a man who I found very disturbing, for there was something visibly 'not right' about him, which was reflected in the menacing ways he moved his face when he spoke (and his overall 'vibes'), and he was very interfering and controlling in the session, which I found quite upsetting.

  In hindsight, by my use of inner inquiry supported by Helpfulness Testing, I have pointers to his having had a powerful spirit attachment that was being controlled by the garbage into trying to frighten me enough to cause me to go out of body sufficiently for me to get landed with a partial walk-in or another sort of extremely troublesome 'entity' that could possibly have completely wrecked my life. Fortunately I remained too grounded for that to happen.

  Basically the risk of picking up 'entities' and other 'energy nasties' exists in all client-counsellor [/therapist] sessions, so this problem isn't unique to RC. However, the fact of RC being a peer co-counselling procedure results in the client potentially being more vulnerable in sessions than in virtually any other type of therapy or counselling sessions (the big exception, however, being any therapy involving hypnosis, which is the most harmful and dangerous of the whole lot).

• RC is actually not worth a second look for anyone who has attached parasitic lost souls — and virtually everyone who goes for RC would have some. RC isn't all that efficient for clearing even one's own emotional issues, but the normal state of people doing RC is to be carrying a variety of traumas and emotional issues that are not their own and instead belong to parasitic lost souls attached to them.

  Such traumas and stresses can very gradually be released by use of RC, but they're released so slowly that you can't reasonably expect RC to clear them fully over a lifetime's intensive use of the method.

• As I found out the hard way, both from my own experience in using the method and through my observations of how other people were using it, it was all too easy to get attached to one's particular way, or a popular way, of using the method, to an extent that one effectively loses touch with the real goal of the method and its underlying process, so that one is achieving little but a self-deceiving stagnation.

  Some people would get very attached to putting on an appearance of emotional release, usually much of it more a dramatization of their feelings than actually allowing the release process to occur with proper effectiveness, while others would treat counselling sessions as an opportunity to talk about their problems and experiences (which RC is definitely not about), and would collude in avoiding any useful amount of emotional release.

  Others yet again would put emphasis on pattern-breaking and de-emphasise emotional release. While that could theoretically be powerfully effective if applied awarely, generally due awareness wasn't applied, so that generally people talked about breaking patterns rather than actually breaking patterns — and in any case generally the 'chronic' patterns, which were the primary ones that needed clearing were not being recognised in any useful way in the first place.

  Such situations are really effectively identical to that of the very many people whose underlying motivation for self-actualization gets side-tracked into some version of 'spirituality', where they believe they're into some sort of 'self-realization' but actually have got stuck into a sort of 'spiritual correctness', in which they believe in or intellectually 'know' supposedly all the right things but actually have little or no genuine self-actualization process.

  Thus belief has replaced awareness, and all manner of rigidities and orthodoxies are masquerading as 'correct' or 'enlightened' thinking.

• I now know that there are much speedier and more efficient and painless methods for emotional clearance or healing, which are also completely safe because they don't require you to work with anyone else. See Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way.

• RC needs to let go of its tiresome little bits of jargon, which set up a barrier for many people. Words such as 'validation' (saying nice, positive things about someone), 'discharge' (emotional release or healing) and 'distress' (emotional trauma or stress) all in my experience set up barriers when I sought to explain about RC to people.

  The use of jargon is completely out of place in a method that's all about our reclaiming our intrinsic flexibility, and nowadays I don't use the RC jargon words, even though I use the insights of RC in my everyday life without putting a label on them — albeit combined with my more recent, broader based insights.

In this period (1980–92) I felt to be lost and drifting, and did my best to ignore the dark cloud over me that I felt through having been excluded from the RC community. I put my attention more on other, positive things — my hiking, my annual spring visits to the Scottish Highlands for walking on the mountains, my giving adult education classes in natural history using my own nature photos, and indeed my doing intensive nature photography on my many hikes. I also wrote occasional short stories.

Then in 1990 I discontinued doing the adult education courses and one-off slide talks (and indeed the intensive photography) and instead concentrated on writing highly unorthodox novels. All these developments I saw as part of a continuing opening up and breaking of restrictive patterns of outlook, so, even though I wasn't so often having emotional release sessions I hadn't 'lost the thread' and still very much felt committed to positive changes in my life. It just seemed that my whole life process was in enforced solitary mode, with no support to get things moving any faster with regard to my emotional healing.

I was regularly singing in Exeter University Choral Society right up to 2000, and imagine my amazement and joy when in 1985 they chose to perform Britten's War Requiem — the fulfilment of that impossible-seeming goal that I'd set for myself back in 1974! It was terrifyingly difficult to learn and perform, but WHAT an experience! And little did I know then that I'd sing in that work twice more, not many years after that, with Exeter College Choral Society.

Of course, it was interesting that I'd so soon achieved what had seemed to be an ultimate and probably unrealizable goal for my life. What exciting and even spectacular advances still lay ahead, then?

Alexander Technique — beginnings of real self-empowerment

In 1990 I began to get ominous clicks in my neck, and then my neck started aching. I tried to counter these things by using the (actually harmful) McKenzie exercises for the back and neck, which had been recommended to me by a physiotherapist, but any improvements were short-lived and my neck got worse.

By the end of 1992 it was getting very troublesome ('advanced cervical spondylosis' was diagnosed from an x-ray at the hospital) and I was really frightened, especially as the medics and physiotherapists clearly had no clue and I felt abandoned with what was surely going to make me a cripple in next to no time. I was starting to tell friends and acquaintances that I'd have to give up hiking there and then because my neck hurt so much for days after each hike.

It was then that one of those acquaintances recommended to me the Alexander Technique (AT), mentioning a centre in Exeter where I could take lessons, and also pointing out that there were books on the AT, so I could read up about it before committing myself. I promptly looked out and bought a particular book which 'stood out from the crowd' of AT books.

It was Your Guide to the Alexander Technique by John Gray, published by Gollancz. Fortunately I'd just received a legal settlement of some £2,000 resultant upon a local publisher having closed down their operations and thus scuppering a book on Dartmoor natural history that I'd just produced for them under contract — so at this point I could actually pay for a course of AT lessons if indeed it looked as though that was the direction for me.

As with The Human Side of Human Beings, reading this book was a homecoming experience for me, for it made so much sense of what had seemed so baffling and indeed tormenting for me up to that point.

What is the AT, then? — The Alexander Technique is a mental discipline that allows you to progressively undo your lifelong accumulation of habits of body misuse. That misuse includes all chronic tensions, slumpings, distortions and the excess effort that we put into just about every movement and indeed position.

What isn't officially stated about the AT is that at a more fundamental level it's a process of recognising and interrupting habitual tendencies, which can be purely mental / emotional ones with no obvious related body misuse.

As I was to come to recognise later on, it's in fact a wonderful and grounding way of cultivating the aware and alert state that in Buddhist 'teachings' is often called mindfulness, with no need ever to resort to formal or sitting meditation, which actually I came more recently to understand to be seriously harmful when regularly practised in an ongoing manner (for anyone — NOT just for people without a supposedly appropriate guru!).

Having read the book, at once I booked some AT lessons, being convinced that not only would this address the pressing physical issues but also it appeared to have the potentiality to take me on a new process of sorting my life out, taking over where RC had left off. However, it was coming up to Christmas and I had to wait some three weeks before my first lesson. Was I going to wait for three weeks before even starting to sort out this urgent issue of my spine?

Hell, no! I well understood the AT from the book*, and at once started experimentally doing the lie-downs, which are the main thing that you overtly 'do' (the technique itself really being in the way you use yourself in everyday life rather than in any exercises). The point of the lie-downs is to retrain the body to let go of all the excess tensions and distortions and to experience good alignment without any of the habitual interferences.

For those three weeks up to my first lesson I was having 12 to 14 of these lie-downs per day. I got uncomfortable if I lay like that for long, so I reckoned that a large number of shortish lie-downs would fit the bill best for me. In retrospect I think it was probably much more beneficial done this way than the normally recommended one or two lie-downs per day of about 20 minutes.

In the first week, each time I lay down (on my back, with head on a rest and legs somewhat drawn up so that the knees were raised) I was aware that there remained a space under my lower back, which latter remained arched. At the end of that first week, during one of the lie-downs that arching of my lower back released and my back gently flattened against the floor — a tremendously blissful feeling. Also, I felt muscles in my upper back releasing and allowing the shoulder blades to move apart — again a wonderful blissful feeling.

That marked the beginning of the physical release process, but also, with those first physical releases I was feeling in my everyday life a great feeling of emotional relief — as though I'd been released from a whole level of deep anxiety. This tallied with my understanding that emotional issues — even some deeply ingrained ones that are difficult to address in RC — are locked up in physical tensions or distortions, so if these physical issues are released, then the related emotional issues can release also.

What I didn't know was whether that meant full release of those emotional issues or simply partial release or/and freeing them up so that the underlying emotional trauma could be more readily healed with ordinary emotional release. I thought then and indeed still think that in practice it's most likely a bit of each.

I still needed the lessons really, for there were certain aspects of the AT that are best learnt directly from a teacher rather than just from a book, so I went ahead with my AT lessons. Initially I had a teacher who was teaching an abomination of the technique even though he was fully qualified by STAT as an AT teacher. He was making each lesson a process of trying to get things right, which was screwing me up, and I knew this was wrong and told him so.

I then switched to another, excellent teacher at the same centre, who made each lesson feel to be a joyful journey of self discovery rather than trying to get anything right. This was important, because you let go of your habitual interferences in your body use not through trying to let go (a tense attitude that maintains the problems) but by observing (without judgment) how you're interfering with yourself and then allowing yourself to act differently.

The AT saved my hiking there and then, and I continued going on my hikes, indeed with a greater sense of ease than ever, for with the AT I'd learnt a much easier and less stressful way of walking. I also felt progressively lighter emotionally, and when I thought of the local RC group who'd excluded me, my immediate thought was: "Let them eat cake! They know not what I know! "

One of the wonderful things about the AT used instead of RC was that it was a method that you learn to use yourself, and once you've learnt it you continue to practise it, not as a named method or technique but simply as a better way of living. Thus after your initial lessons you were not dependent on any sort of partner or co-worker, and your progress depended simply on your own mastery of the AT and you own motivation for positive change in your life.

After my series of 15 lessons (10 weekly, then 5 monthly), that was it for me as far as lessons were concerned because I didn't have the money to keep spending on them. But in any case I'd fully integrated the AT into my life and really had no cause to keep having lessons — though very occasional further 'top-up' sessions would have been handy even though not essential, if only I'd had the money then to make that a realistic option.

I settled on four lie-downs per day — one after each mealtime and one short one before going to bed. Doing it this way I'd not get neglectful about having the lie-downs as most people seemed to. The lie-downs were part of every day's schedule and linked to other scheduled activities so that they wouldn't get forgotten.

I still allowed myself occasional sessions of emotional release, but these were mainly when some person or situation had restimulated some old trauma material of mine (or in other words I was feeling stressed or upset in some way), so I'd then use emotional release to enable myself to clear the stress or 'upset' as quickly as possible and use it as a healing opportunity for another little chunk of my buried emotional trauma material.

More pattern breaking

As part of my opening up and pattern breaking I joined a small local amateur drama group, thanks to its leader being one of the participants in the local Job Club, which we both had to attend as we were long-time unemployed. The drama group was very amateurish and pretty shambolic but did give me some enjoyable challenge, and it got me among some more people. I stayed in it for a few years until an unforeseen development engaged most of my attention…

In 1995, following a modest computer upgrade, I commenced my music composition work, starting with my Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha)…

It felt to be a great healing in itself, at last to be composing major and indeed powerful music works after all this time of feeling so isolated with my internal music, which I'd been unable to share with anyone. I was able to do all my composing on the computer without having to sight-read music notation; I could play back any note, phrase or whole passage at a click of the mouse, with all the correct instrument sounds, so I knew exactly what I was putting together.

I still didn't overtly recognise myself as being on a powerful self-actualization process (or 'path', as many people would unhelpfully describe it), but that was more a matter of not having the expressions 'self-actualization' and 'self-realization' in my vocabulary.

I think I did encounter the term 'self-actualization', which I recognised as being relevant, except that that term was associated with certain psychology disciplines, and for that reason I didn't want to use it, because of the immense confusion and lack of genuine understanding of human consciousness and indeed emotions within all psychology disciplines of which I was aware.

I just thought of my 'process' as my progressive 'emergence' as my 'real' self, unobstructed and unobscured by emotional baggage and patterns (which of course really is the meaning of 'self-actualization').

'Spirituality', however, wasn't really in my mind, even though I always felt a small openness of mind towards it — though actually not even really knowing what 'spirituality' was, apart from something that was supposed to be 'good' but was apparently connected with religion, which I'd already had plenty enough of. I suspected, however, that my own lifestyle and outlook were getting close to Buddhism, even though I'd yet to learn anything much of the latter.

I did notice, though, that certain parts of particular of my music compositions seemed to have a certain quality that I interpreted as 'spiritual' even though on the surface I didn't then really know what 'spiritual' meant — though at least assuming that 'spirituality' was something 'good' —, and felt rather spine-tingly excited at that, as though that was a pointer to something 'special' that was beginning to open out, which I didn't yet understand.

Also, especially during 1996, at times when I was walking about in town or having one of my lie-downs I'd get a faint impression of the top of my head expanding into a whitish or very pale blue light, and this had about it a feeling of warmth and peacefulness. I assumed that this was something to do with 'spirituality', but my intuition was not to dwell on it and just to carry on my life as it was until I was somehow guided to do differently.

Enlightenment and 'Dzogchen'

Then, on the evening of New Year's Day 1997, when in the middle of composing the last movement of my Symphony 6 (K2 — A Song of Striving and Adventure) — which movement was intended to be a celebration of 'spiritual enlightenment' (which I didn't know anything much about except that it was supposed to be a very good and special thing to happen to one) — to my astonishment I myself became enlightened! This is recounted in detail in my article 'Spiritual' enlightenment — Personal experience, clarifications, tips.

I then immediately 'recognised'*, to my utter amazement, that I wasn't only on a 'spiritual path' but on a very high one indeed. I then understood that my thoroughgoing use of the AT had been cultivating everyday mindfulness** — a way of being that's highly prized in Buddhism and is regarded as a normal prerequisite for enlightenment to occur.

In fact I'd been cultivating this mindfulness to quite an extent even when I was in the RC community — in particular when I was (so frequently) having my solo RC sessions, when I'd observe so much of what was going on in my mind and interact with it as though I were a second person — a peaceful and loving observer and guide.

From that point on I was following a simple but powerful 'practice' (actually not really a practice at all but just a subtle mental discipline) that could be regarded as being the essence of Dzogchen but without all the cultural and religious beliefs and esoteric practices with which Tibetan Buddhism had surrounded it.

In basic Dzogchen, all you do is keep your self-identification upon the deepest level of consciousness, which is naked awareness beyond all concepts. That is your 'enlightened essence'. By continuously experiencing that as I, you, as the 'meta-space' within which all experiences and phenomena arise, are then the peaceful observer of whatever you experience. This allows many minor emotional issues just to dissolve as they arise, and leads over time to a great quietening of the mind.

It seemed to me that Dzogchen fitted beautifully with the AT, making for a much fuller breaking of patterns through simply observing troublesome or negative thoughts or feelings and allowing them to dissolve as you watch.

I also thought that at some time I probably should get into spiritual healing, but was concerned not to rush into it, lest my 'ego' get involved (the very distorted Buddhist teachings about the 'ego' had rubbed off on me a bit, though actually it was good that they'd caused me to be somewhat circumspect about getting into spiritual healing). I thought that if I were 'meant' to have that sort of involvement, then circumstances would guide me to it at an appropriate time.

Spiritual healing — Reiki

Circumstances did indeed guide me into spiritual healing, as described on my FAQ page — and little did I know at the time what huge and potentially catastrophic problems this was leading me into!

In late 1998 I joined a small local healers' group, led / facilitated by a certain Sheila Neve, who'd just taken on the Buddhist first name of Pema (henceforth abbreviated to PN), which met every Thursday lunchtime in what was rather pretentiously called the Argente Centre — one of a few rooms above the Evolution shop in Exeter's Fore Street, just two corners from where I was living. Group members gave 'healing' to members of the public for a small donation, and when free to do so would exchange healing between themselves.

I came into this very tentatively, having little idea of whether I'd be any good at it. Indeed I came into it as a sceptic (in the positive sense), wanting to have clear observations of experiences and happenings that couldn't be explained by Western science before I'd fully accept that spiritual healing was more than mumbo-jumbo.

Although I witnessed no instant miracle cures of physical issues (I understood that these were not to be expected), increasingly I felt the healing energy (or so I thought!*), which behaved in ways that were beyond explanation in Western science and medicine. I also witnessed people who received hands-on healing become much more relaxed and peaceful and have old emotional issues start freeing up so that they could start releasing through crying and related processes.

Longer-term, I was to see people becoming altogether more in charge of their situations and bringing about much needed positive change in their lives*. Healing was thus, at least in some cases and to some extent, manifesting as a process of self-empowerment for the recipients. — Er, well, except that it became clear to me in retrospect that at least most of any genuinely positive effects were caused by other aspects of the respective 'healing' sessions, and the 'energy work' would have done little or nothing of any genuine benefit.

Among my early observations inexplicable by Western science were the following:

• Often when giving healing my hands would be cold, because I have Raynaud's disease. Yet it was common for recipients to feel a lot of heat from my hands, whether on contact or a few inches away, and in some cases would indeed heat up quite a bit all over, even when they could also feel that my hands were cold. This wasn't a matter of the recipient's expectations, because it happened with the odd people who came, who had never had hands-on healing before and didn't know what to expect.

• One young member of the group, who came for a small number of sessions, gave me a session in which I could feel a strange tingling like a mild electric current from his hands. Not only that, but when he faced his palms closely towards my back, with the chair back in between, I could still feel that 'electricity' sensation in my back, and it moved as his hands moved. I felt it too in my feet when he put his hands there (i.e., on the tops of my shoes).

• On one occasion when I was being given healing by PN and another experienced healer, towards the end of the session I was feeling what seemed to be a steady and quite spectacular build up of what I interpreted as 'love energy' in my 'energy field', which seemed to be resonating between the three of us. I was sitting on an upright chair, and PN had had her hands on me through a descending sequence of positions and finally had her hands on my feet, so she was kneeling on the floor, and indeed was concentrating while facing the floor, so she couldn't see me at all apart from my feet.

  Experimentally, and without saying anything, with my intent I focused that supposed 'powerful love energy' on PN, who was kneeling there in front of me, looking down at the floor. At once she raised herself and exclaimed to me in amazement, Philip, what was that? It was beautiful!. She'd felt a tremendous wave of what she interpreted as loving energy pass through her, and indeed was sure it had come from me.

  What I didn't realize then was that such happenings, although indeed not accountable-for by Western 'science', were not the wonderful and benign manifestations that I thought at the time. Such impressions that people get during 'healing' work are almost always produced by the garbage in order to keep the people hooked on such experiences rather than true healing.

  So, as already noted, the only fully safe and effective healing 'energies' are from one's own deepest aspects, which are based in fundamental consciousness ('the Ultimate'). Also, those 'energies', if they exist in the first place, wouldn't be feelable. So anything that is significantly felt during a healing session is virtually bound to be a distraction given to one by the garbage for some highly problematical purpose — never mind how wonderful it may feel.

Gradually I gained experience, also helped by having a weekly 'healing' exchange with a member of the group. PN was a Reiki teacher* and eventually I went on a Reiki I workshop led by her. Later on I went on a Reiki II workshop of hers. However, I wasn't given a Reiki II certificate because of a stupid little technical detail that was to do with personal power politics and not Reiki at all, and so I didn't take Reiki III with her and went eventually to another teacher for that (a single weekend workshop, of course).

Even though I then had a Reiki III certificate which, laughably, said Master on it (see above), I was in no hurry to set up any sort of formal healing or teaching practice, because I still saw my priority as self-healing, especially as it was clear that I still had a lot of isolation and loneliness material (including an invisible barrier that kept people distant from me and prevented my gaining ongoing significant friendships), and until this was cleared I simply wouldn't have many clients coming to me.*

Also I was aware of a little inner nagging about my early childhood torments, for these seemed so far to have hardly been addressed at all in all my self-healing, and it felt as though there were something highly significant and menacing there, still awaiting my attention — such time as I really knew what to do about it. This was underlined by my continuing fear of being alone in the dark, and by my morbid dread of any hint of 'the occult'.

For a few years I carried out daily 'self-healing', sitting on an upright chair, using notionally standard Reiki hand positions (there actually being no one 'right' set of hand positions). This was in addition to my AT lie-downs, which now incorporated healing visualizations. It seemed that such 'healing' didn't in itself fully heal emotional traumas, but it did loosen them up so that emotional release could occur much more readily*. It thus seemed to go naturally alongside RC.

It was a relief, too, to find that most spiritual 'healers' more or less accepted some degree of emotional release, when it occurs, as a common part of the healing process. So I was able to cry more again, not only on my own but sometimes with somebody too — though now my emphasis was normally not on sustaining long periods of emotional release, but rather, allowing release to occur when something triggered it, and then to allow it in full but let it tail off naturally, so that the short period of emotional release took its place as a part of a broader healing process rather than being a holy grail that was always sought for in itself.

I had the occasional people come to me for 'healing', and generally I taught them the basics of 'healing' and had them exchange healing with me, so that I (thought I) was benefiting and at least they benefited to some extent from the personal empowerment that I was giving them. However, one of these people, who suddenly stopped coming and dropped all contact with me, turned out to have brought with him a very serious 'entity' issue, and had apparently left a seriously problematical 'entity' or 'spirit'* in my flat, of which I myself wasn't aware, but which a 'healer' friend Mark Cox (henceforth abbreviated to MC), who gets further 'honourable' mentions further below) noticed a month later and supposedly removed**.

I describe that situation in more detail in "Am I a healer?" — Explaining 'healing' and the problems it causes

Despite that, I still occasionally had people come to me in my flat for 'healing', and I taught them something of how to be their own 'healers' (usually including a brief Alexander Technique lesson).

Accepting reincarnation as 'fact'

One thing I'd taken on board as 'read' when I crossed the enlightenment threshold and temporarily came under the spell of Buddhism was the process of reincarnation, and I assumed I myself had had past lives.

Once I was into healing work I found that the vast majority of 'healers' accepted that we all reincarnated and had done so many times before, but they differed from the Buddhist view in regarding the reincarnation process as being a chronological sequence of incarnations as part of an evolutionary process. This made much more sense to me than the Buddhist view, which saw people trapped in a chaotic sequence of karma-driven incarnations with no overall evolutionary process involved.

I soon came to assume that the apparent immensity of certain of my emotional issues — particularly relating to isolation and loneliness — must reflect an accumulation of isolation and loneliness patterns from major and probably repeated separation traumas in previous lifetimes.

 

How clairvoyance 'conspired' to lead me astray

The great clairvoyance problem progressively revealing itself!

One of the two really striking things about this educational little sub-saga was how initially my getting what seemed to be roughly the same story about myself from a whole variety of sources appeared to be an overwhelming validation of clairvoyance and mediumship (channelling). But yet even at the time I was aware that in my eagerness to find out things I needed to know, I was giving a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt to that notion as I sidelined a whole lot of my immediate reservations about details that were not really 'adding up'.

The other really striking thing was how, as time went on, it became increasingly clear that those same observations were pointing to a different conclusion altogether — that all those different clairvoyants / mediums had been given variants or different pieces of the same overall story by one or more unseen sources in order to convince me of the genuineness and accuracy of the big story about myself that I was already picking up directly in little bits and which my own channelling was soon to dump on me Big Time.

— The implication being that no channelled or clairvoyantly received 'information' at all that I'd been given represented anything genuinely worthwhile or true at all, however interesting or 'intriguing' it appeared to be.

Also, as you'd notice as you read below, each clairvoyance or channelling for me, although having common threads, also had a lot of differences too from each other. When one looks at the whole of each of those communications in a more balanced way than I did initially, really any congruence between any of them gets looking faint, tatty and unconvincing apart from showing clearly that 'something' (not necessarily very nice) was definitely going on!

Sally Fox the clairvoyant

About the time I originally got into 'healing', (late 1998) I innocently did something that in many ways was very sensible indeed, but which was in an important sense to put a seal of inevitability upon my new-found path towards my forthcoming near-nemesis at the 'hands' of the garbage.

I'd noticed a regular sign indicating that a particular clairvoyant was operating in St George's Market, just round the corner from where I was living in Exeter, and one day I overrode my normal very strong circumspection about clairvoyance or anything 'occult', and, as an experiment, walked in off the street and had a session with one of the pair of clairvoyants who were operating there.

My intention was to go in with a completely open mind and not volunteer any information about myself, 'just for the hell of it', to see if the clairvoyance really was working at all, and, if it did appear to be working at all reasonably, to see if I could thus get any helpful pointers for my further development in terms of 'spiritual opening up', self-healing and being a 'healer' and some sort of genuinely beneficial teacher for others — not to mention also the matter of getting clear of my tiresome isolation issue.

Whereas a clairvoyant could easily bullshit the average person, telling the person various things about themselves that could be true but equally might not be, it would surely be much more difficult for that to happen in my case, with so much that marked me out from other people — or at least, so I assumed.

Apparently one of the two clairvoyants operating there (David Fox) had a particularly good reputation, but I got the other one, Sally Fox (henceforth abbreviated to SF), who struck me at once as being unhealthy in some way that I found disturbing (what I'd now recognise as poor grounding and both chronic and acute garbage interference, with attached soul fragments and very likely elementals involved), and there was something about her that was very suggestive to me of paganism if not overt witchcraft. Indeed, her semi-darkened booth itself had the disturbing 'feel' of being akin to a miniature witch's lair rather than anywhere I'd want to be.

Anyway, SF started off by asking me a few questions such as date and time of birth, and my name, so that she could do a quick numerological analysis of my situation, followed by use of some sort of divining cards (it might have been Tarot, though actually, in retrospect I can confidently say it doesn't matter one toss because all divining tools operate in the same way and come down to the same thing).

I really didn't want that at all — I just wanted straight clairvoyance and saw this other stuff as seriously unhelpful mumbo-jumbo. However, the results she came out with took me aback because of their apparent accuracy. I can't remember all the details now, but she told me that I was a 'healer' and spiritual teacher, and that that was very much my destiny* in this lifetime. There were other things too that appeared to be 'spot on', but I don't remember those now.

Then she got me to hold a fairly large quartz sphere for about half a minute, and then she held it and gave her clairvoyant 'reading' while still holding it. Again she came out with a whole succession of things about me that were either true or looked near enough to being true that I took it that they were so. In that context it appeared that certain bits of alleged past life information she gave me must be more or less correct.

These latter included a 'revelation' that I'd been burned at the stake as an alleged witch in a long past incarnation; SF said that I hadn't actually been a witch, but was a herbalist at that time, in one of the Nordic countries or possibly Ireland — in any case, a country where it was cold and there were mountains — and the Roman Catholic Church was effectively waging a war of terror against herbalists and all who were seen at least implicitly as a challenge to the authority of the Church.

I was amazed by all that, and then took SF to be a really good or even great clairvoyant (which actually, within the terms of reference of clairvoyance, she did at that time appear to be), and I actually recommended her to others, including a recommendation in the 'spirituality' oriented predecessor of this website. Would that I'd known then about the inherent problems about clairvoyance, and where it tends to lead one!

Chris Thomas the psychic surgeon / clairvoyant

Very soon after that clairvoyance session I had the first of a small number of 'healing' sessions from Chris Thomas (henceforth abbreviated to CT), an apparently highly reputed psychic surgeon who at that time was living in Exeter.

My aim there was particularly to address certain seemingly intractable physical issues of mine, as well as possibly the mass of emotional trauma, especially relating to isolation and loneliness, which latter issue seemed like a never-ending bottomless pit, defying all my healing methods to make significant impression on it — albeit my not having anything like the tremendous weight of emotional garbage that had driven me into Re-evaluation Counselling so many years ago.

There were various issues about those sessions with CT that I've mentioned elsewhere, but the point of interest here is that he too gave a little bit of 'reading' of supposed past life information that was supposedly in some manner possibly related to the issues I was seeking to address. In particular, he too told me that I'd been burnt at the stake as a witch.

He gave more details, giving me an exact year in which I'd allegedly been burnt (1642), and an approximation of my supposed name at that time (Emily [probably more like Emilia] Zbrignew) and the location (roughly Bratislava).

Although there were some conflicts of the clairvoyantly obtained 'information', overall what SF had told me appeared to tally quite reasonably with CT's more partial account, and I had little doubt that I was getting pretty good information coming through, even though with some rough edges and by no means 100% correlation.

There was, however, one thing in CT's 'reading' that conflicted with other readings that I'd had, or was to get later on, from other people, in that he 'explained' my homosexuality in this lifetime by claiming that in the considerable majority of my previous incarnations, including my most recent one, I'd been female, and I had a sort of 'carry-over' of that femaleness into this lifetime, which was the cause of my homosexual orientation*.

And further, he found no indications that there had been anything special about me in my previous incarnations, that pointed to any sort of special destiny for me as some sort of spiritual teacher or anything else special in this lifetime — whereas 'readings' by other people generally either stated or implied that such a destiny had been developing over many lifetimes and I was always tending to be marked out as somebody a bit 'special'.

Although none of them referred to my gender directly apart from the odd specific past life episodes, the general tacit assumption appeared to be that I'd usually been male in my alleged previous incarnations.

Clairvoyants at the local Spiritualist church

About that time I also started going to the weekly services at a local Spiritualist church, and to some of their weekly spiritual healing sessions for members of the public. About the services, I felt very awkward and self-conscious about doing so, because the whole notion of any sort of church service was anathema to me, but I was going then just in order to attend the free clairvoyance sessions that followed the service proper each time.

I was hoping and expecting that some 'spirit' or higher being would communicate some messages and 'guidance' that would assist me in finding my way in resolving my long-standing major issues and generally expediting my self-healing process.

In the event, to my surprise and disappointment nothing of consequence ever came through to me there — but that was in the context that the messages that were coming through to other people in the small congregation there were almost all of a remarkably banal and trivial nature, and were usually coming from supposed deceased relatives or friends, which latter point never really rang true with me.

To my understanding even then, people's consciousnesses simply don't hang around like that beyond death and communicate with people as though they were themselves still incarnated people (albeit not in a body) — so any messages coming to the clairvoyants must have been coming from some other, and indeed deceitful, source if indeed they were not just being made up by the respective 'clairvoyants'.

Just one of the clairvoyants at that Spiritualist church — Sue — did say something relevant to me. She said that what had caught her eye about me was that she could see that I was nobody's fool, and that I generally saw through people's posturing and pretences, and would take no bullshit from anyone. She sounded somewhat awed and made a big thing of emphasizing this aspect that she could see about me. That was all — but at least for once, there was somebody who was actually coming out with something palpably genuine and insightful for a change! At that particular point she herself wasn't bullshitting.*

After a very few months I stopped going to those services, to a great inner sigh of relief at my getting clear of all that Spiritualist stuff with all its trappings of fringe churchy Christianity and also indeed aspects of paganism.

One thing I found particularly uncomfortable and unhealthy about that whole scene was that the church congregation were clearly virtually all people who were still attached to relatives or lovers who'd died and were hoping to get comforting messages from the supposed 'spirits' of their 'loved ones'. There was no vibrancy of motivation for significant life improvement at all there, let alone for an actual self-actualization process. These people were all stunted and stuck in their little ruts of wanting comforting messages from the supposed 'other side'. Yeeeuck!

As regards the healing sessions, I wasn't going so much for the 'healing' (I didn't want supposed 'healing' that was associated with any church or religion), but because Dave (henceforth abbreviated to D), one of their small team of people who gave 'healing' in those sessions, had a very high reputation not only as a 'healer' but as a clairvoyant / medium, and commonly gave 'readings' to people who went to him for 'healing', and I was really going to those sessions in the hope of getting him and getting some really helpful channelled information from him.

In the event, every time but one I got other 'healers' there dealing with me, and I never felt really comfortable about them. They all seemed to be of relatively shallow awareness, and I felt very unconvinced that the 'healing' they were giving me or anyone else was more than a bit of show, even though presumably given in good faith and with genuine good intention.

However, on just one occasion I did get D (Yippee!). — Well, except that there was something a bit dour and overbearing about him, and the moment I said I'd appreciate a 'reading', he cut me off in a rather heavy and authoritarian manner and said it was best that we just get on with the healing and see if 'they' have anything to say once he's finished. That 'healing' session certainly felt different from the others, with a lot more feeling of supposed 'energy' — BUT even then it seemed to me that what I was feeling really was primarily the intensity of his own pretence, in compulsively seeking to impress me with his supposed superiority and powerfulness.

What he did impress me with was a disagreeable self-importance! This was underlined when he'd finished the 'healing'. He then, in a most pompous manner, made out to be listening to 'them' for about half a minute, then, in an unbelievably still more pompous and self-important voice he pronounced We consider that at the moment you're not yet ready to hear what we have to say, so we advise you just to continue with your healing for the time being, until we consider you to be ready for it.

What the eff?!! That whole performance sounded false from top to bottom, its main purpose appearing to be to cut me down to size and put me firmly in what he saw as my lowly station, and I was quite sure that the supposedly channelled message was a fake, even if D superficially believed he was genuinely channelling.

What genuinely 'higher' being with genuine positive intentions would withhold information that I was earnestly seeking to enable me to speed the clearance of my issues, and indeed would patronizingly not even explain anything to me? Clearly this was just D's great 'ego' trip at work — and I was amazed that apparently all the other people there or who went for healing looked up to this puffed-up and overbearing impostor and thought the world of him and his supposed powers!

Needless to say, I had nothing to do with their healing sessions after that, but remained a little incredulous that such a widely acclaimed and supposedly squeaky-clean source of spiritual healing and clairvoyance / mediumship supposedly to assist people in their lives was so hollow if not altogether downright false.

Yes, Sue the clairvoyant there had indeed got it fundamentally right about me, despite my various aberrations caused by my increasing ungroundedness!

Cheryl, the clairvoyant

About a year later, in 2000, I visited Cheryl (henceforth abbreviated to C), a particular local clairvoyant about whom I'd had some good reports, because I was still wanting to get some sort of information or guidance that would assist me in resolving my ongoing personal isolation issue and expedite my finding really compatible companionship and, in particular, my finding the soul mate who I imagined must be destined at some point to come together with me.

She amazed me by pointing to somebody who was at grammar school with me as being that very soul mate*, and telling me that I was due almost imminently to reunite with him. She also gave some reinforcement to the 'burnt at the stake as a witch' scenario, though without adding details — and she gave considerable weight to the notion of my having had a particularly severe separation trauma a very long time ago (i.e., many lifetimes ago), which was very much connected with my isolation issue.

Indeed, C said one thing about the supposed severe separation trauma that appeared to be both very useful and to prove to be something of a bane upon my life because of the way it was subsequently being exploited by the garbage to make my life feel all the more difficult and isolated, and, in particular, to considerably increase the power and magnitude of the convoluted 'story' with which I was to get embroiled once the garbage started its overt wrecking tactics upon me from late 2003.

What she told me was that when the particular person had died, I'd been so beside myself with grief and anguish that I'd resolved / vowed never to form a close relationship ever again — and that that vow had carried over from lifetime to lifetime, resulting in a lot of loneliness in my lifetimes from then on, including in this lifetime.

C finished the session by describing to me the supposed physical appearance of three supposedly guiding beings who she said she 'saw' around me*. I don't remember much detail about that now, but one was the seemingly inevitable Buddhist monk, and there was some woman in very flowing robes, who seemed to have some Earth and paganistic connection — and I think there was one who she said looked like a Native American medicine man.

Anyway, her credibility became a bit dented when I recounted that in full detail to the previously mentioned local 'healer' MC, for he got immediately snotty about her, dismissing her as 'crap', because she'd quite recently then given him a reading, and she'd given him exactly the same descriptions of three alleged guiding beings who she supposedly 'saw' around him — which left one suspecting that she was trotting out the same descriptions to most or all her clients — and of course happily taking their money for the privilege!

Sue the clairvoyant

Somewhat later on, Sue, another clairvoyant, in a public clairvoyance session at a mind, body and spirit fair near Paignton, without my saying anything about my situation, told me there were lots of angels all around me, and they were saying that I needed to be patient, because there was a soul mate destined to come together with me, but it would still be some time ahead. She said, You go out walking a lot, don't you. And you encounter people out there when you do that. So, you need to accept and enjoy those passing encounters as your company for the time being.

That was amazing again, because she didn't know me at all, yet had picked up that I go out hiking, and indeed it was true that most of the meaningful companionship I experienced was just the transient encounters during my hikes and the hitch-hiking journeys out and back.

Sue Sutton the 'healer' / clairvoyant

Then, at a surprising serendipitous healing session at a fair in Bude, the 'healer' Sue Sutton (henceforth abbreviated to SS) of Newton Abbot, who I mention again just a little further below, told me she could see the supposed 'Grand Master' of Reiki — none other than Mikao Usui himself! — around me , and she was picking up also that in a very recent lifetime of mine I'd actually been a student of his.

Allegedly I was thus basically an important 'Reiki Master' who was going to sort out various of the confusions and misinformation that had been accumulating in the worldwide Reiki 'community'. Wow — my great destiny was now beginning to unfold! May 'Gilgamesh II' save us all!

Mark Cox the 'healer' / clairvoyant / channel

This was the last 'clairvoyance' experience before I myself started channelling and thus dropped myself deep in the brown stuff with the garbage. On that occasion, on 8 October 2003 — just the very day before I was actually to start channelling — the previously mentioned local 'healer' MC visited me.

He came to offer to me (to sell to me at a price!) a quite attractive moldavite pendant, which he said he'd been wearing himself for a bit. His story about it was that a Pleiadean spirit* had come to him that day and told him that the particular pendant was actually meant for me. And so I bought that off him and immediately started wearing it, so further compounding my developing problems (because moldavite has such a strong ungrounding effect upon the user and especially wearer).

However, MC also wanted to give me a 'reading' at that time, because, so he said, he was practising for getting officially accepted as a 'qualified' medium by some organisation, and so he gave me a free personal clairvoyance session — lucky me! 

I can't remember all the details now, but it was a real 'grand revelation'! According to his 'reading' (as I say, in October 2003), I'd have cleared ALL my emotional issues by that Christmas(!), and then I'd be clairvoyant, clairsentient and clairaudient, with various 'special powers', and would thereafter get quickly known around the world and be in great demand for lectures, so that I'd be travelling round the world lecturing (and presumably demonstrating healing methods and so forth). Wow!

MC also described to me a few 'beings' that he could see around me, which were tacitly assumed to be various sorts of guides. I can't remember his descriptions now, except that he particularly remarked on there being one 'being' who was different from all the others and was of a very pushy disposition and was waiting around me to periodically give me a 'kick up the arse' to see that I kept actively on course on my 'spiritual path' or/and destiny.

Even then, his description of that 'being' caused me a certain unease, for it didn't tally at all with my idea of what most people thought of as 'guides', which were supposed to be gentle and accepting, and not directive and pushy at all. Nowadays I'd recognise that as simply a surprisingly candid visual representation of the garbage seeking to have control over me — indeed something of a figurative representation of what was just about to start happening for me.

Anyway, it was on the following day that I started channelling, and the actually illusory 'Ahn' first made 'himself' known to me, and my tribulations then started in earnest — about which, more further below…

Stephen Webb, highly reputed channel

This case doesn't involve clairvoyance as normally understood, but channelling comes from the same camp, and in any case there's no clear dividing line between the two.

I encountered Stephen Web (henceforth abbreviated to SW) in my first visit (of two) to the Findhorn community, in June 2005, when I was in the thick of my troubles. He seemed to be a charismatic person, and both he and I were drawn together, because he was more or less no-soul, though I didn't know about the latter till many years later. He seemed to have a strong whitish radiance in my inner vision, which I nowadays recognise as indicating the person being seriously ungrounded. He gave me a brief supposed 'healing' while we were in an extended embrace, during which he invoked — hardly a surprise! — Archangel Michael, and some supposed 'Christ' manifestation.

I had relatively high hopes of that, because of his seemingly supreme self-assurance about his channelling connection and healing ability, but my troubles returned after my return from Findhorn, so it wasn't clear that I'd really gained anything worthwhile from him.

Then on my second visit there, in July of that year, I encountered him again, and said I was still getting the attacks, and he told me a visualization to use, which of course achieved nothing obvious of any use. But also, he told me of an informal lecture he was to give to the Findhorn community, and I went to that. He talked there about how 'Archangel Michael' came to him one day to form a clear and strong communication channel for him in his system. He'd had  an 'absolutely huge' visual impression of this powerful being arriving over / around him, accompanied by a whole mass of 'nature spirits'. As he said in strong voice of a sort of awe, There, now there could be no doubt about that — this really couldn't have been other than Archangel Michael himself!.

He went on to talk of a national conference he was due to give a presentation, where they were seeking to work out how to solve various global human problems through working as channels for various higher beings. He was to be there as representative for 'Archangel Michael', and describe the latter's purported plan or system for altering human DNA to make it resistant to radiation, such as in nuclear attacks.

That really didn't ring true with me, not least because by then I was pretty sure I myself didn't know and couldn't really know the true identity of whatever kept communicating with me, so how on earth could SW possibly know he was dealing with Archangel Michael? I myself had had the experience of a seemingly enormous and electrifyingly powerful presence — allegedly a manifestation of 'Divine Consciousness' — appear dramatically to me in my living room one day in early 2004, but in my case it was part of a whole session of tricks that were being played on me, so in next-to-no-time it became obvious that it really was just another trick, however convincing it might appear to have been.

Anyway, in my continuing desperation I arranged with him then to have a personal consultation to see if his channelling from this 'Archangel Michael' really did add-up to anything that would be at all helpful to me. In that consultation the supposed archangel's words certainly appeared to be wise and friendly, but it told me Your tests and trials are almost over, and 'confirmed' a variety of bits of channelled misinformation about various supposed past lives of mine, including my supposed past life as Gilgamesh, without finding any errors — and indeed congratulated me on the quality of my channelling. In the light of what I understand now, that's clearly indicative of garbage influence in whatever SW was receiving (and indeed what ANY channel or medium would receive).

For more about that encounter, see Your tests and trials are almost over — Archangel Michael has spoken!.

To sum up…

To sum up this section, then, it's clear that my various encounters with clairvoyance had set me up with certain notions that were helping very potently to point me away from genuine self-actualization and towards increasing emotional attachment in my life, and towards ever greater involvement in 'healing' and being a so-called 'spiritual teacher' — indeed, even a supposedly 'important' one…

As I now recognise in retrospect, that was all basically the same garbage agenda for me, which was coming to me through various mediums / channels / clairvoyants, and it all helped ensure that I didn't follow the simple logic of my own enlightened viewpoint, and instead allowed myself to be increasingly 'pixie-led' by all these beliefs and distorted notions that were swirling around in the various healing communities and traditions. Would that I'd known what a seethingly festering can of worms I was unwittingly creating for myself by allowing myself to get led in this way!

The one big difference about the final instance of 'clairvoyance' that I recount above (i.e., with MC) is that it was definitely false, and given me for a seriously harmful (i.e., ultimately murderous) purpose! — Wow, 'interesting times' à la Chinese curse!

Extending Reiki — Kwan Yin, Seven Archangels

A seemingly 'guided' hitch-hiking encounter led me to SS, the 'healer' living in nearby Newton Abbot who I've mentioned just a little above, who, not long after, gave me the attunements to Kwan Yin and six other goddess figures, and also the Seven Archangels, at particular workshops that she was running then. The Kwan Yin / Seven Goddesses attunement used the OM symbol, and the Seven Archangels attunement used the six-pointed star in a circle.

After those attunements I found that my intuition in healings was repeatedly to use either of these symbols in place of the standard Reiki ones. With these symbols I started being more intuitive about healing and less tied to the Reiki tradition that I'd been taught but had felt to be limiting. In any case the Usui Reiki tradition was hardly an old one with the apparent authenticity of any sort of antiquity to 'commend' it.

Indeed that tradition was actually passing on something very different from what Usui himself had been teaching — though it wasn't till very much more recently that I came to understand that every single version of Reiki was just another 'flavour' of garbage involvement, so Mikao Usui was no less garbage led and deceived than the individuals who are dishing up something different as 'Usui Reiki' or indeed any openly different version of Reiki such as Karuna, Golden Ray, Tera Mai or even Vortex Healing (which latter makes no claim to be related to Reiki and is claimed to be way 'above' it).

I felt a new level of warmth coming through me in healings*, and was sometimes moved to give impromptu attunements for Kwan Yin or the Seven Archangels, on hiking outings and even to the odd alcoholic homeless people in Exeter who asked me for healing. Yet still nobody was really connecting with me as a reciprocating friend, and I was sometimes having to be very diligent in keeping my loneliness feelings in the background and still attending to what was positive in my life.

Crystals and Wands — preparing the ground for my near-nemesis…

It was about that time that I was also tending increasingly to wear the odd crystals and stones and to put crystals on myself during my AT lie-downs. I had no special knowledge about crystals and how to use them, but did learn the main (purported) healing properties of a few crystal and stone types. So, I used crystals and stones in a very ad-hoc sort of way. I was gradually acquiring quite a collection of them — most of them actually becoming nothing more than ornaments in my flat because I had little idea how I might usefully use them. 'They will surely come in useful sometime', sort of thing.

Then, in 2002 the Evolution crystals-and-books shop just a couple of corners from where I live obtained a wonderful variety of the most beautiful crystal wands made by Chakra Gems Art, an Indian co-operative. I bought a fair number of them and even had a few made to special order. I felt that they had the potential to take my healing into a new league (actually one of the garbage 'messages' that I was getting and misinterpreting as my own good sense), but yet I had little idea of how to use them.

I then also found myself looking with great interest at other wands using crystals. As with single crystals and stones, I had an urge to possess this and that type of wand in the hope that they'd bring about some quantum leap in my self-healing. It was as though a 'wands' button had been pushed for me* and there was some special type of wand that I was looking for and had yet to find.

At the same time I'd discovered in another local crystals shop Lemurian seed crystals, which are a special type of quartz, which seemed to me more powerful (i.e., in 'energy' terms) than any other crystals I'd come across. I accumulated a number of them, feeling about them a bit as I did about the wands — that somehow they could have special purposes for me but yet not knowing really what to do with them.

I did understand that they were supposed to be powerful channelling aids and could channel what were claimed to be particular ex-Lemurian beings who were wanting to bring a lot of new healing to Humanity through these crystals. So, I tended to put certain of these crystals on myself during my lie-down sessions, and I carried one about with me in a little pouch. Indeed I had one set in silver to wear as a decidedly chunky pendant.

Another powerful kind of stone I was introduced to about then was Moldavite — a rare kind of tektite found only in a small area in Eastern Europe. Up till early 2005 I accumulated several pieces — all pendants except for one, which was a beautiful relatively large uncut piece on a silver bracelet.

Moldavite allegedly has many high-level healing properties, but in particular it's regarded as having the highest 'vibration rate' (of the subtle energies) of any known mineral on Earth, and so it's widely claimed to be good for raising one's 'vibration rate' and bringing about further 'high spiritual opening up' and connection with Galactic and Universe energies.

In late 2005 a local 'healer' friend — yes, MC again! — introduced me to Preseli bluestone, and I used two pendant pieces and a large massage-type wand cut and polished from this stone. This was claimed to be powerful for healing past life traumas and so I wore the pendant pieces and had the wand on myself in addition to the other wands and stones during my self-healing lie-downs.

Sacred geometry Wands — Would-be instruments of my destruction

It finally turned out that there was indeed a special type of wand that I was apparently 'meant' to find. When I pored through the 2003 brochure for that year's Quest 'mind, body and spirit' fair in Newton Abbot I saw an advert from a small 'lightworking' business called Angelic Light, which made sacred geometry tools, including wands.

The sacred geometry wands made by the proprietor, the already mentioned Gordon Hughes (abbreviated to GH), turned out to be what I thought I'd really been looking for. It seemed to me that my higher consciousness* must have known about them for some time, to have been directing my interest towards healing wands in the way that it had. I had only to look at the pages about the wands on the particular website and I felt at once that these were in a completely different class from any other wands I'd seen, and had the potential to bring my self-healing forward very significantly.

 These wands were all individually made, and claimed to be 'programmed' for the specific user, so they were not only supposedly very powerful healing tools but were also claimed to be focused and tuned in a way that no over-the-counter wand could ever be*. Also, the wands came with instructions for their use. To my relief, the instructions were brief and the main suggestion was to use one's own intuition, and that in any case it was perfectly effective just to hold the particular wand in a hand or even just to have it in one's 'aura'. So apparently there wasn't any complexity of usage to learn at all.

Being keen on getting moving with my self-healing, I had several of these wands made for me initially — the Healing, Prosperity, Advanced St Germain and Galactic wand, and it was the full-size and thus more powerful versions of the former three, not the small versions that GH had illustrated on his website. Each wand was supposedly programmed to channel the 'energies' of (allegedly) particular high-level healing beings such as Mutu, St Germain and Archangel Michael.

Curiously, it was the day after I'd placed my first order for some of these wands that I had a hitch-hiking encounter with a woman who was on her way to a Vortex Healing (VH) workshop. I hadn't heard of VH before, and learnt from her that VH is a bit like Reiki but much more complex and also, allegedly, much more powerful, having the potential to clear all a person's emotional and karmic issues from all lifetimes, within this lifetime.

That was the first time I'd heard such a claim made for a healing system, and I was at once very interested. Could it be that this was really what I needed to be doing, and that these sacred geometry wands that had so much excited me were already virtually redundant, even before I'd received any of them?*

However, when I looked at the VH website back then I thought this all looked horrendously complex, with a prodigious number of necessary attunements, and it was clear that many costly workshops would be required for me to get 'there' with VH, and I was low on cash resources. So I asked GH whether I'd be able to channel VH myself through a wand of his. He said that actually Merlin, who allegedly channelled VH to Ric Weinman (the founder of VH), was the same as St Germain and so I should be able to do something about that with my St Germain wand.

My subsequent channelled 'information' was that Merlin wasn't the same as St Germain, but because their 'vibration frequencies' were quite similar, Merlin could channel through the St Germain wand. Big deal!

Anyway, once I received the first wands I didn't know how I might get channelled communications through them and just concentrated on their (supposed) healing functions, putting them on or around me during my lie-downs. By this time my lie-downs were fully my (supposed) self-healing sessions, combining the sessions' AT function with the purported spiritual healing from the wands and any crystals I used. I was no longer having sitting sessions using standard Reiki hand positions.

GH had all the hallmarks of garbage and especially cacoprotean network influence and indeed control — including having taken on an 'angel name' — Zacharius Melchizedek (Melchizedek being one of the so-called ascended masters, all of which are simply illusions created in people's minds by the garbage) — and working with supposed external non-physical beings (especially 'ascended masters') and believing that the human race and indeed the Earth itself will very soon flip from the physical 'dimension' into the supposed 5th 'dimension', which supposedly would be some sort of paradise.

All those 'New Age' preoccupations are part of the means of the garbage to divert us away from true enlightenment, freedom and happiness and into illusory realities and even astral realms, in which we would be captive to the garbage.

Channelling — the Ordeals — 'Am Re Reiki'

From late August 2003 I started using a pendulum in a way I'd seen a very experienced dowser use one, which produced consistent unequivocal answers, and quickly. Then on 9 October, while holding a particular Lemurian quartz crystal in my receptive (left) hand (intended as a channelling aid) and using the pendulum with my right hand, I began to get coherent yes/no answers from what seemed unequivocally to be a non-physical being.

I assumed at first (from what I'd read about that sort of crystal) that this was an ex-Lemurian being connected with the Lemurian crystal. However, this 'being' claimed to be an 'ascended master' by the name of Ahn, allegedly in the '4th dimension'.

And thus my troubles began, for what I didn't know was that the garbage had been effectively waiting for me to start channelling. I've written at length about these experiences and indeed at times severe ordeals in my long and educational narrative report The 'forces of darkness' ('astral beings') — My own tough experiences.

Until April 2004 I didn't understand that anything other than supposedly true higher beings were involved, and so was getting increasingly troubled and confused as an assemblage of what were allegedly ascended masters, high-level guides and even supposedly 'Divine Consciousness', played all manner of reckless and sometimes cruel tricks on me and eventually, from early 2004, subjected me to serious psychic attacks that felt hellish and were disrupting my life, and seemed near to destroying me.

I soon progressed from using a pendulum to using guided hand oscillations to get my yes/no answers, and this soon progressed to my getting internal visual yes/no answers, also sometimes with an actual 'thought voice'. This meant I was getting more deeply involved with the 'entities' that were communicating with me, and I was thus unwittingly giving a lot of power to 'them'.

During all this confusion of bizarre tricks and attacks there was much happening on the 'healing' front, however. Although apparently it was largely troublesome 'astral beings' communicating with me, what I was receiving actually appeared to be a mixture of communications from 'them' and from higher sources*.

Thus I was getting a lot of apparently good and important information as well as the more obvious fiction, and I was at times being guided through what appeared at the time to be very strong self-healings — although these were hard work because they were not using painless fast track methods, which I didn't find till later — the garbage, posing as 'guidance', having diverted me consistently away from anything that would make my self-healing easy and fast.

During late 2003 I was given many seemingly powerful self-healing sessions, allegedly guided by the well-known high guide Orin. In retrospect I'm sure that it's meaningless to say that Orin was or wasn't involved*, but at least what at the time seemed to be some powerful self-healing work was done, in addition to my self-healing lie-downs with the wands. I had a number of intensive emotional healing sessions, when I'd focus on some appropriate idea or image and get crying, with the Galactic Wand pointing closely at whichever supposed chakra position was feeling the most discomfort**.

In this manner I was guided through healing an apparent past life trauma* in which I'd allegedly been strangled as a baby and rescued in the nick of time by somebody who, allegedly, in the present incarnation is a musician friend of mine. My 'guidance' presented me with all the images and directions for facilitating my emotional release and clearing the core of that trauma, without the need to do a 'regression' — i.e., to go through direct memories of the incident. I was also similarly taken through my allegedly being burnt at the stake as an alleged witch in Bratislava in 1642.

There was also one memorable self-healing session of mine when a purported memory of being in some cosmic cataclysm* emerged, with a very disturbing absolutely blinding white light emerging for a few moments in my inner vision.

I handled this as I'd do for any past trauma at that time, by breathing in the image and trusting my own deepest aspects to transform the trauma and 'negative energy' into (healthy) light and healing energy* — to various expressions of great consternation from the perceived 'higher' beings attending to me (which of course were only garbage-sourced illusions), as though I'd been breathing in the actual event — which would hardly have been possible, seeing that it was allegedly the destruction of a whole universe!

The following day the garbage, posing as the well known (supposed) guide Orin, exploited that 'healing' event by plying me with a completely different very disturbing image during a self-healing session, and telling me it was the destruction of another universe. What I understand in hindsight is that that second one was actually an image picked from the tremendous mass of hell material available to the garbage. Anyway, at the time I took it to be another universe destruction — though it looked bizarre beyond belief and had about it a feeling of something being greatly wrong — and I breathed the image in as with the previous one.

This time, however, I felt a queasiness and a niggling fear that perhaps I really had done myself a mischief that time — and this queasiness persisted for the rest of the day. What I didn't know at the time was that what I was experiencing was the garbage putting on a slight attack, giving me both a worrying pseudo-thought and the nauseous feeling. It's a wonder that it didn't take advantage of the situation and attack me really strongly then, for at that point it could well have really freaked me*!

Out of the maelstrom — 'Am Re Reiki'

It was in December 2003 that, through my own persistence in asking questions to my 'guidance' (i.e., the garbage, but at that time still posing as the high guide Orin) and trying things out, I stumbled into what appeared to be effectively a new spiritual healing system akin to the well-known Reiki but using a new symbol that had been channelled to me the previous month. I was told that the symbol was the new OM, intended to be distributed far and wide as a replacement for all previous versions of the OM, and I was 'guided' to put it on my website for that purpose.

This eventually turned out to be misinformation from the garbage (though of course at that time I had no idea that it was from the garbage), and for the first half of 2005 I actually withdrew the symbol from use because I wasn't sure whether it was really fully 'of the Light', considering the dire circumstances in which it had been given to me and in which the supposed healing system using it had arisen.

However, in July 2005 at the Findhorn community in Scotland I had a session with Stephen Webb (henceforth referred to as SW), a seemingly very clear and reliable channel for Archangel Michael*, and I then had apparent confirmation from 'Archangel Michael' channelling through him, that the new symbol was indeed fully 'of the Light'** and was intended to be widely used to help bring Humanity forward.

Although I had no time then to inquire further about that symbol, I did soon after that get some communications, allegedly from my true highest guide and Archangel Michael*, and got confirmation that the symbol wasn't regarded as the 'new OM' at all but rather, as a synthesis of OM and spiral, and I was free to name it myself. As I'd then been given the mantra Amiloys Re** to use with the symbol, it seemed to me natural and harmonious to call the symbol the Am Re, the healing system using it then being called Am Re Reiki.

As for so-called Am Re Reiki, as noted above I originally stumbled into it in late 2003, then calling it Divine Consciousness Reiki (usually shortened to DC Reiki), because allegedly the so-called new OM connected you to 'Divine Consciousness'*, allowing you to channel 'Divine Consciousness' rather than passive Chi energy, which latter is supposedly what you get in standard Reiki. So, allegedly, I'd channelled a very simple healing system that had all the potentialities of Vortex Healing (which also works with purported 'Divine Consciousness') but without the complexities and need for lots of workshops or attunements. Allegedly, only one attunement was required — to the 'new OM' (i.e., the Am Re).

I stumbled into this supposed healing system through a process of experiment and asking questions of my 'guidance', leading to my devising a simple and quick 'full clearance' healing, using a rather harmfully 'over-blown' version of what I came to call Tonglen Breathing, used in conjunction with the 'New Om' symbol.

— Except that I was misinformed at that time (of course!) and eventually was further misinformed that it wasn't really a full clearance healing for most people but really a fast clearance healing. Following reckless guidance (the garbage of course being responsible), I publicized this healing system on my website — in retrospect I'd say, very prematurely — and found some volunteers (mugs! ) who were willing to be experimental subjects for the alleged full clearance healings.

What was interesting was that in a minority of the recipients quite severe emotional crises followed those 'fast clearance healings'. Once again, the garbage, posing as my inner guidance and information source, gave me a false explanation.

Purportedly the fast clearance healings were working very powerfully indeed, strongly freeing up emotional trauma material, but, as with various other very powerful healing methods, the trauma feelings still had to be finally released from the system. So some people had a lot of buried emotional stuff surface, which they could feel strongly but didn't know how to release fast enough, and so they had a rough time — indeed what many 'healers' know as a healing crisis.

In March 2006 I was thrown into confusion again about the true purpose of the particular symbol that I was calling the Am Re, because I showed it to the psychic surgeon CT, who was claiming to have an exceptionally strong connection to the Akashic Records, and he had the following to say on it:

What CT said was amazing but confusing for me. The symbol apparently had a special significance for me in view of my supposed Gilgamesh connection that had become apparent through my self-healing 'path' and my 'guidance' having actually told me that I'd been the historical Gilgamesh*, but I had here a discrepancy about its purpose, for according to CT it wasn't appropriate for use as a healing tool, and yet I was given it allegedly as a powerful healing tool, not just for me but for Humanity in general.

At the time it was also puzzling as to why I'd been given the supposed Hindu version rather than the original version. Could the discrepancy about function come from this not being the original version? Perhaps just the original version was a guarding / protection symbol while this version really was meant as a healing tool. Anyway, it had certainly seemed at the time to work as the latter*. In any case I hadn't been aware of it in any way keeping the 'entities' off me, despite my many attempts to use it for that purpose.

In August 2006 I channelled what seemed to be more accurate information about the Am Re. Goodbye to 'Am Re Reiki', but, if my new information were correct, at least the Am Re truly was an important symbol for protection, 'lightworking' and increasing the power of healings that one gives.

Also, I channelled an intimation that, although the original Hindu name for the symbol was (allegedly) the Chikodakta, the name 'Am Re' for this symbol was better to use at the present time, because that and the mantra 'Amiloys re' that I'd been given to use with it added a certain level of healing quality to it, even though it was still not primarily a healing symbol in itself. And then indeed I channelled what was claimed to be the Sumerian original version — for which I was given the name 'Kashak'.

Now that I've got myself so much clearer from garbage influence, I can say with a reasonable degree of security that whether or not the 'Am Re' had ever had Hindu usage (or indeed had ever been called the Chikodakta) or the later-channelled symbol had ever been called the 'Kashak' or had had Sumerian usage, both symbols had originally come from the garbage for the purpose of causing trouble for people, increasing the hold upon them of the garbage, and so they were clearly both for discarding.

The ordeals begin in earnest

In early 2004 (from January) the garbage started putting severe attacks on me, in the guise of supposed 'ascended masters' carrying out experiments on me and giving me training, which was required for me to fulfil my alleged future higher purpose on Earth.

The type of attack that was given me for about the first week of this new phase of now really disruptive tribulation was my supposedly having a whole lot of vengeful traumatized 'spirits' — especially alleged tormented wolf spirits (purportedly resultant upon people having gone killing wolves) plus an assortment of supposed 'demons' set upon me, and my task was to send each 'to the Light' as soon as I was aware of it — well, except that the 'demons' couldn't be sent to the 'Light' and had to be transformed into angels instead, which I could supposedly do!

In the course of those extremely stressful sessions, on a couple of occasions the supposed ascended masters did a horrendous-seeming trick on me, which greatly upset me the first time it happened, because in the middle of doing my best to be sending off all this volley of 'spirits' and 'demons', the supposed ascended masters switched off my ability to (supposedly) send them off, and so suddenly I was apparently defenceless and unprotected.

However, what I quickly learnt was that when that happened all I needed to do was to just stop trying to send those confounded things off and just to leave it to 'Divine Consciousness' (or whatever) to do what it would with me. Each time I did that and just stopped worrying myself about what would happen to me, the attack would stop.

Following that, the main type of attack for a time was what the supposed 'ascended masters' (i.e., the garbage) were claiming was my having my 'relationship chakra cords' closed down to a very low level*, so that I felt as though I were being killed by diabolical psychic attacks.

In fact when I had those greatly troublesome experiences a certain amount of actual healing was quite likely occurring, because, being enlightened, I was experiencing the feelings as (relatively) peaceful observer, and theoretically by this means a certain amount of the underlying emotional traumas would have been gradually released permanently from my system.

However, I'm sure the harm being done in those ordeals was far outweighing any small and grossly inefficient healing effects.

Of course my remarks above are made in hindsight, and at the time I didn't know what the hell was going on and was getting to feel desperate. In any case, re-experiencing such feelings, and in such distorted and amplified form, would be no sane person's choice of healing method for them!

After a particularly disruptive and potentially dangerous attack crisis in April 2004 I had no more obvious attacks till the autumn, though I still had unreliable 'guidance', which happily gave me a mixture of what appeared to be good information and also very definite reckless fiction. During that summer I took delivery of still more powerful sacred geometry wands — particularly the Higher Galactic and Advanced Higher Galactic wands.

After a short acclimatization period I was using both wands a lot, and had them both against me during all my self-healing lie-downs. They felt very good to be close to, but of course I was very likely overusing them and was running the risk of harmful effects*.

In Channelling and clairvoyance problems — The safe alternative you can read what I finally did about the sacred geometry wands.

During the summer of 2004 I added to my arsenal of sacred geometry wands two rather similar devices from the Maitreya monastery at Glastonbury. Even at the time I felt a bit uneasy about all their sacred geometry devices (of which they had an impressive range). I felt there was something very impersonal and rigid about their 'energy' and whole 'presence', but had become so infatuated with the evident power of sacred geometry wands that I didn't heed my own inner warning signals.

One of the devices (both illustrated below) was a weird pendant and the other was a double-ended device a little like GH's Galactic Wand but with a crystal shaft and magnets bound onto it by copper winding. This latter device I'd paid a premium price for (£400) because it was actually not new at all but allegedly well used by Gyalwa Jampa*, the leader of that Buddhist sect, who was claimed, with a lot of 'fanfares', to be a living buddha** and the current incarnation of Maitreya. You see how pixie-led I was becoming?!

Remember that saying, All that glisters isn't gold…?

And so this Philip Goddard muggins innocently wore the pendant daily and placed the latter double-ended device on himself during his self-healing lie-downs every day (so help me, er, somebody 'up there' who isn't a garbage invention! ).

Indeed, I'd gone further and ordered from the Maitreya Monastery a still more potent device — a 'small' Maitreya Cross (now apparently superseded by more complex and no doubt devilishly more harmful models). It was on special offer just then, and a 'mere' £400. Although it was the 'small' version it was still larger than any of my then extant sacred geometry devices, and wasn't a wand but was really for hanging up in a fairly large room.

I was so keen on it (thanks to pressure from my 'guidance'), that I overrode my decidedly uncomfortable disturbing feeling about it and ordered it despite my really having nowhere suitable for it to go in my small flat. It turned out, however, that I'd have to wait some time for it because it would have to await a new delivery from the USA.

In October 2004 my ordeals resumed, with my 'guidance' taking me through excessively rough day-and-night alleged self-healing sessions* and a variety of ordeals, including getting into some relatively benign Satanistic-type practices. These ordeals led to the first of the new series of severe attacks, which in turn led to my being hospitalized — though psychiatry was definitely not what I'd needed. The actual attacks were more a feature of the subsequent series of ordeals in December, which again led to a hospitalization.

In these attacks fear-related feelings (fear, anxiety and panic) surfaced to nightmarish intensity (this time without any birth trauma attacks), and I was repeatedly told by my 'guidance' that this was the only way that I could heal the trauma associated with my early childhood night torments and so I had to go through all this whether I liked it or not, day and night for an indefinite period. My 'guidance' sought to make it all seem as intimidating and frightening as possible — and, as I say, this led to my second hospitalization.

Curiously, during the October 2004 ordeals, my 'guidance' urged me to destroy those two sacred geometry devices from the Maitreya monastery, as part of a minor 'orgy' of destroying various things in my flat associated with Buddhism — which I did actually do. There appeared actually to be a positive side in that, in that it was all a symbolic breaking of any ties of mine to Buddhism* and all its control agenda aspects (i.e., garbage influences), and so I went right ahead and destroyed those.

It appeared to me, as events unfolded, that the intention of the garbage interfering with me must have been to use the supposed breaking of ties with Buddhism as a springboard for me to then be taken into serious 'dark' practices (i.e., in the light of the further ordeals that I was taken through), but actually all it succeeded in doing, apart from causing me some temporary severe disruptions in my life, was to show me more of the nature and modus operandi of the garbage — I think not quite what it was trying to achieve!

In retrospect it looks mighty significant that there was never any suggestion that I destroy or dispose of the sacred geometry wands made by GH, and indeed for most of the time my purported guidance was actually encouraging and directing my use of them — very good evidence indeed that they were serving some purpose for the garbage, regardless of any of their maker's purported best intentions.

In fact at the time I was feeling little niggling doubts about those wands, and was slightly feeling that there could be something 'dark' about the merkaba constructions on them — but I assumed that that was just problematical aspects of my 'guidance' trying to put me off them. In reality it was presumably my own deeper aspects continually seeking to warn me about them!

And so, did I harm myself still further with that Maitreya Cross device that I'd ordered? — No, not at all! Sometime not long after I'd destroyed the two Maitreya Monastery devices I got 'guidance' to cancel my order for that Maitreya Cross. In fact the Maitreya Monastery had a really quite unethical completely up-front policy of not making any refund of monies paid to them, so they were happy to take my cancellation, because they already had my money and could treat that just as a donation to their 'wonderful life-enhancing' cause.

Presumably that 'guidance' to cancel was once again originated from my own deepest aspects, albeit with the garbage still relaying it to me and doing what it could to distort the message. That was a considerable relief, even at the time, despite the ignominy of thus having unwittingly made an irretrievable £400 donation to what I was beginning to see as little better than a bunch of scoundrels.

In early 2005 I'd resolved to have nothing to do with the troublesome 'guidance', but I still had major surfacings of anxiety, fear and panic feeling regardless, and on two occasions what I labelled as full-throttle terror — an awesomely testing experience. I still didn't really know whether these troubles were attacks from external beings or were just my healing process being virtually out of control in a particularly virulent 'healing crisis'*. But what was suspicious was that it was only fear and related feelings that were coming up like this.

That suggested very much what I took to be 'low-level astral' beings* as the culprits, for a straightforward healing crisis would normally involve the surfacing of a lot of grief-related feelings as well. Anyway, for the time being I put away the sacred geometry wands that were allegedly powerful emotional 'strippers'** so that supposedly I'd not be freeing up more trauma material at such a great rate.

These attacks continued periodically throughout 2005 and into 2006, but I became very gradually stronger and so, on average, the attacks became gradually less threatening and disruptive for me. In retrospect I see 2005 as having been a very difficult year, despite my having kept my head 'above water' quite remarkably and enjoyed many things in life, in the face of all the repeated horrific feelings of the attacks and the continual sleep deprivation.

In August 2005 "Archangel Michael"* channelled to me an explanation (at last!) of my early childhood torments and indeed my issue with the 'astral beings' and my having all the masses of fear-related emotions surfacing. (See Night terrors and hell experiences — Understanding and clearing them.) So I was then greatly empowered by at last understanding reasonably fully what was going on. After that, as I was still getting 'astral' interference in my channelling I made a really firm commitment** not to accept any more guidance or channelled information, for the 'astral beings' were very intrusive and constantly answering thoughts of mine, and I couldn't tune out from that.

From then on the name of my game was taking measures to switch the balance of power — to disempower the troublesome 'astral beings' (as I still thought they were then) and empower myself. However, for quite some time, because I was interpreting my garbage interferences as 'astral beings', my attempts to disempower them were not effective, except in that I was boosting my own self confidence and enabling myself to feel less of a victim and more the master of my situation.

Unfortunately, by seeking to 'turn the tables' on the 'astral beings' I was actually reinforcing them and enabling them (i.e., the garbage) to lead me on in various ways, so the improvement of my situation was only very gradual, with many very nasty sequences of attacks and near-crises, and indeed very major crisis events in August-September 2006 and February 2007.

I expand on these and my further, increasingly effective self-healing and clearance process on the continuation from this page.

 

What about healings to cast out the 'astral beings'?

Hey, what a brilliant idea — bound to be as effective as healings to cast out noisy neighbours!

I had 'healings' from several other people at different times to try to clear the 'entities' out and seal them out of my energy system. I've detailed these in The 'forces of darkness' ('astral beings') — My own tough experiences. Also, periodically I invoked 'Archangel Michael' or the 'Highest Will' to achieve this end — but always to no avail.

I also periodically used the Am Re Reiki method of supposedly clearing out unwanted 'entities', again, naturally, to no avail. Hardly surprising, of course, seeing that it was all invoking the garbage to clear out manifestations of the garbage — a great formula for success!

Also, as 'astral beings' are not beings nor true entities, as explained in The true nature of 'the forces of darkness' and its interference and attacks they couldn't be cast out by any method at all. They could only be gradually 'faded out' from one's life experience over quite a long time-scale. From May 2007, at long last I started in earnest taking on and using truly effective methods for this purpose.

I must emphasize that this issue wasn't one of normal psychic protection, so people who were advising me to 'protect' myself were way off course and hadn't understood my situation nor the nature of garbage interference at all — nor indeed the fundamental uselessness and indeed serious harmfulness of virtually all so-called psychic protection!

It's a remarkably little known fact that all normal psychic protection methods were ineffective against the garbage and any of the multitude of types of 'entity' that it was posing as — particularly as, as already noted, those apparent entities are actually not true entities in the first place. The only genuine protection from the garbage was the intrinsic invulnerability of oneself as a well grounded self-actualized person, which would be progressively opened up by an ongoing truly effective self-actualization process — see Healing and self-actualization — The safest and quickest way.

Fast-track emotional healing methods

During 2005 my attention was brought to two fast-track methods for emotional clearance, either of which could potentially have helped me a great deal, it seemed at the time — 3D Mind (particularly) and the original Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

It looked at the time as though potentially 3D Mind could have speedily dissolved all my remaining major trauma material, but somehow I couldn't get my mind round its particular way of visualizing and manipulating the emotions. Supposedly it uses a process of what you might call 'neutralization with opposites' using particular visualizations. I did use it apparently successfully on one occasion, but after that I floundered with it.

I soon came to recognise the method as highly problematical, though my understanding of it then and for a fair number of years hence was very much distorted through my channelling attempts and distorted notions I'd already picked up from my channelling, and then my not reviewing it once I'd taken on 'energy testing' (now what I call Helpfulness Testing) for well over a decade.

The EFT I tried later in 2005, and I felt that it had a lot of potential. Also it's very handy because you can learn it virtually for free.

However, later on I came to realize that it was of limited use for me because, like so many emotional healing methods (including The Work — see below), although it would have been very effective for clearing my own emotional issues, in fact I had virtually none left of my own to start with, and what the EFT is much less effective in clearing is the emotional issues of parasitic lost souls or other human consciousnesses that are attached to you.

In early 2007 I did get using it a bit more, and did get some limited weakening of attacks when using it (which of course may have been a result of the garbage simply reducing its attacks temporarily to convince me it was working when it wasn't really), but this was nothing at all like the sort of progressive immunization against attacks that I found much later on I could achieve for myself by the set of methods I built up and really came into their own from 2011 onwards.

Byron Katie's 'The Work'

Four questions [and one or more turnaround statements] that can change your life. This simple and exciting method of inner inquiry to sort out one's life and bring about self-actualization was brought to my notice in March 2006 by a friend who had been using The Work for six months with what he described as spectacular positive results. My own results also seemed spectacular in relation to anything I'd tried before. However, I found certain practical problems about it too.

It turned out not to be so effective at clearing out emotional issues of attached entities such as parasitic lost souls, so actually, despite initial superficial appearances, it wasn't anything like as powerful for me as I first thought. Also, sitting down at my work-desk doing my sessions of that repetitive inquiry every day, each time following through the same rigorous procedure, was getting tedious.

In addition, the garbage at times interfered to make the going difficult, and at times, particularly leading up to my September 2006 and February 2007 major crisis events, the garbage effectively hijacked my use of The Work, making it into a stressful process that was getting reminiscent of the excessively harsh and at times frightening 'healing' methods (i.e., pseudo-methods) that the garbage had been trying to drag me through in earlier 'dark times' with it.

However, to put this in a more balanced perspective, I'm sure that if I'd had The Work at or near the time of my original 1972 emotional crisis I could have bypassed the apparent need for any of the other healing and self-actualization methods that I'd used prior to 2007* apart from the Alexander Technique, and would very likely have crossed the enlightenment threshold in the 1970s rather than 1997. However, I'd almost certainly have still needed much more effective methods to get fully clear of the parasitic lost souls in a reasonable time, together with all the crap that they were carrying.

The very beginning of my real clearance process

I stumbled upon the Energy Egg on 8th July 2006 at the Quest 'mind, body and spirit' fair at Newton Abbot in Devon, and, because of my rather desperate situation with all those 'astral beings' attacks and an apparently rather convincing demonstration of Energy Testing (using the 'strong arm' test), supposedly to 'prove' that the Energy Egg actually works, I went against my very strong feeling of scepticism (and indeed a later-to-be-strongly-justified strong feeling of circumspection about Stephen and Lynda Kane, the people who developed them and were selling them there), and actually bought one.

There seemed to be something about them that marked them out as astute business people, with a strong sense of slyness about them, for whom their business success, rather than making this world a better place, was their priority.

The Energy Egg was claimed to be powerful in neutralizing environmental stresses upon one's person, and this included some suggestion that it could be helpful in addressing 'entity' issues — though by this time such a purchase of mine seemed to be just a little bit of clutching at straws rather than having any very great promise of 'salvation' from my troubles.

However, a pronounced further acceleration in the manifestation of my intrinsic peaceful, buoyant happiness (which was coming more and more noticeably to persist through all attacks from the 'astral beings') then followed, and I could only guess that the Energy Egg was at least in some degree responsible.

As I understand it, this got to work progressively dissolving my lifelong accumulation of environmental stress on my non-physical aspects (in line with claims made for the Energy Egg by its developers)* — and I assumed that that included the significant negative effects of the presence of the 'astral beings'**. To further speed the process, a little later that year I purchased a second one and a Guardian Angel — a larger 'sibling' of the Energy Egg, which was claimed to have additional functionality.

Because of the large amount of damage in my non-physical aspects, it wasn't really possible at that time to tell just how effective these devices really were being for me, if indeed at all, but I did have some sense that for the first time I had something that was probably really assisting in some way towards my eventually becoming immune to interference and attacks from 'astral beings' and any other entities. Little did I know then how much of a turnaround would happen for me the following year and subsequently — apparently facilitated in part* by those devices, albeit as a rather tentative starter!

In mid September 2006 I discontinued ploughing through The Work worksheets every day, and subsequently I was simply putting to inquiry the occasional judgment, stressful or believed thought that arose in my mind. However, to a certain extent the garbage led me astray again in use of The Work, making it a stressful part of the build up of a major crisis event, which occurred in February 2007 — of which more in the continuation of this account.

During my September 2006 very major crisis event my channelling got me my first intimations that the emotional issues that I was carrying and that were being used as ammunition by the 'astral beings' were not my own. However, the story at that time was (of course!) a big distortion aimed at causing me more confusion and trouble.

Allegedly I had healing connections to 26 actual people who were supposedly connected to me from many previous lifetimes, and this was all because of a crazy contract that allegedly I'd made with them at soul level very many lifetimes ago, to heal all their emotional issues as well as my own in this lifetime. I expect that my own deepest aspects were seeking to inform me about my parasitic lost souls issue at that time, but of course it had come out all distorted because it was being relayed to me by the garbage.

The particular crisis event during which I gained that distorted information was quite an eye opener in various ways, and for me a huge and immensely valuable pile of educational resource, and I now invite you to read my page One Really Weird Hike — What Do You Make of This?, so that you begin to see the context in which all this was happening, and indeed a possible particularly sinister aspect, which ultimately assisted me toward an extremely important albeit somewhat speculative insight.

Please continue to the next page…

My Own Self-Actualization 'Path' — Page 2