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By Nigel Peace
It was New Year and a new school term was about to begin. I was driving across a wasteland and then crossed a border.
Arriving outside a tall building in south-west London, a group of people challenged me to get to the top of it. They said there were just over one hundred steps and it had never been done before. I hesitated. But then a happy, tall, blonde woman teased me about it and ran ahead towards the steps.
Well, I’m just a feeble man so of course I followed her. It was hard to keep going but we made it to the top with a great sense of achievement. Back on the ground, the front page of The Times newspaper had a story about me – I’d been given an award in the New Year’s Honours!
I woke up. My bedside clock showed 4.12 a.m. and the song Visionary by rock band Strangelove was playing in my head.
Admittedly, I’d been rather an odd child. I welcomed bedtimes because they often meant exciting adventures in colorful places. Even some ordinary dreams seemed important, especially when the events actually happened in waking life a while later. I taught myself to record my dreams so I could prove precognition. And I began to learn how to interpret the more symbolic ones. In time, I realized that school related to emotional relationships and numbers were clues to time periods. So the dream I’ve described began to make sense. I was approaching a new period of my personal journey, and it sounded promising if also challenging. And just over one hundred days after New Year would be about April 12th, or 4.12, the time I’d woken up.
A few weeks later, I saw a woman at a distance across a playing field and felt a powerful connection. I approached nervously… When she removed the hood of her jacket, I recognized her immediately, happy, tall and blonde. Yes, there were a few challenges at first but our relationship began on April 13th (darn, one day late!) and became deep, spiritual and transformative.
Of course, not every dream is significant. Mostly, they seem to relate to the brain reorganizing information and memories. But I’m in good company when it comes to precognition.
In 1865, the American Civil War was coming to an end when General Robert E Lee surrendered his Confederate army on April 9th. Despite this relief, President Abraham Lincoln had a dream that someone was dead in the White House East Room and a guard said that an assassin had killed the president. On April 11th, he told Ward Hill Lamon about the dream – and three days later he was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth.
In Europe, almost half a century later, there were some tensions but no real signs of open conflict. Then C G Jung, the father of psychoanalysis, reported several dreams in which he’d seen “a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps… [and] the floating rubble of civilization…” He predicted a World War. There have been many other reported cases of important dream predictions, from Robert Kennedy’s assassination to IRA bombings in London, England, and the World Trade Centre terrorist attacks.
Happily, dreams have sometimes led to huge scientific breakthroughs. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev was determined to finding a way to organize the chemical elements but there seemed to be no pattern. He wrote all their names and properties on cards and kept shuffling them without success. Then one night he dreamed of seeing all the cards falling into place logically, forming the Periodic Table.
The sewing machine, the Theory of Relativity, the unique hydrocarbon structure of benzene were all discovered by the unconscious… as were the melody of Paul McCartney’s Yesterday and the storyline of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight! Even though science is yet to identify the energies involved, it can no longer be doubted that our minds are incredibly powerful. Every one of us can reach elevated states of consciousness, foreign to our physical senses, where time and space are irrelevant. We can enter worlds where everything is known and everything is possible. And yes, folks, we can time travel!
Over and over again, telepathy and remote viewing have been proven, despite Faraday cages and vast distances, with odds of billions to one against chance. There are numerous accounts by honest people of integrity of out-of-body and near-death experiences that support the belief of so many great mystics: our consciousness – our essential self, perhaps – does not depend on the physical body and can live fully and independently.
This is no longer just a spiritual belief. Medical science has proved that consciousness does not depend on the brain, whilst neuroscience suggests that we each have ‘a mental field existing in another dimension’. The rapidly developing discoveries of quantum physics, from the 1927 Double-Slit experiment to the 1972 proof of quantum entanglement to the present day, show us that the essential building blocks of matter defy all previously accepted theories and even behave differently depending on whether or not we observe them. It is our deliberate awareness of elementary particles that creates their nature and behavior.
Coming back down to earth, it was Wayne Dyer who translated this principle for our daily spiritual lives, saying, “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
In a very real way, then, we are creating our own experiences. Our brains regulate our bodies and draw in physical experiences through our senses, with the resulting thoughts and sense impressions stored in the mind, determining our behavior. But here’s the thing: we are conscious beings with a higher self that can reach out to alternative worlds beyond the physical. And our bodies are, if you like, merely vehicles for this lifetime that enable our minds to express themselves.
The Nobel Prize winner Neils Bohr put it like this: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” Add to this the observation of Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics: “I regard consciousness as fundamental [and] matter as derivative from consciousness.” He is saying that consciousness is the essential fabric of all reality, that it is spiritual.
Now, in this world, of course, we have very real and urgent matters to attend to: our health and security, care for our families and for others and much more. Doing these things to the best of our abilities, while treating others with kindness and causing no harm, is the spiritual path.
Yet at the same time it is essential to recognize that in these things we are normally using only a small part of the huge power of our minds. There are greater levels of consciousness that we can touch, and where we can receive guidance, solve problems and even know the future.
Ah, how many lives could have been saved were these things taken more seriously by those in high office. No, we cannot know for sure what any ‘spiritual world’ may be like and we do not know, at least yet, what kind of energies are involved in paranormal experiences. Does this matter?
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was at first mocked for his comment in 2002 (regarding weapons of mass destruction). “…there are known knowns…,” he said, “there are known unknowns… But there are also unknown unknowns… And it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.” He was absolutely right, of course.
It is the essence of being human that we do not entirely know
what it means to be human. Yet we have a vast amount of real evidence
that a purely materialistic view of life is simplistic and even dangerous.
Now, fair enough, many readers will by now be objecting that they certainly don’t “create their own experiences”. A lot of bad stuff happens to good people. Many things happen randomly and outside our control. This is true.
We can, however, control how we respond to these things. And our responses depend greatly on our understanding of consciousness and our spiritual beliefs. This is what Wayne Dyer meant, that we could change the effect that events have on us.
Once we know how powerful our minds are by, say, having significant dreams or déjà vu, by experiencing telepathy or spiritual healing, we develop a greater calmness in everyday life that soothes anxiety. We know that worldly things are transient and without lasting meaning. We become more in tune with the natural rhythms of life, knowing that ‘all things shall pass’ but our consciousness – our essential self – shall not.
This doesn’t mean that bad stuff stops happening. This world is one of contrast, of light and dark, of strengths and weaknesses. The planet and humanity itself are under threat now because so many of us are out of tune with nature, with each other and even with ourselves. So if we are to evolve as a species we must do all we can to embrace knowledge of the self. The purpose of each one of us must be to achieve harmony in every corner of our lives, to live in peace. Then we can deal with the bad stuff better because we shall have an overview.
And even if we don’t have paranormal experiences, there are ways that we can deliberately reach that greater state of awareness. Meditation can be a direct experience of the higher worlds. The three thousand year-old Sanskrit Vedas speak of the Atman, or inner self, becoming at one with Brahman, the universal consciousness. Meditation can change how we think and behave, as well as having physical benefits.
If meditation is not for us, anyone can learn to become more receptive to the transcendent spirit of life by practicing mindfulness in everyday life: spending quiet times in nature, paying close attention to our thoughts and dreams, recognizing daily synchronicities and realizing, for example, that every event or meeting can be meaningful. In these ways we learn self-knowledge and we get to know better what is important and what, in the greater scheme of things, just isn’t.
We do not need to withdraw from the world – this life is a beautiful gift that we should cherish and experience to the full. But, at the same time, we do need to understand that spiritual values, caring and kindness are what really matter, whatever the world throws at us.
Nigel Peace is the author of the new novel The Unbroken, a story of deep human love and an adventure in mysterious worlds of the mind. It is published worldwide by Roundfire Books. Nigel’s website is https://www.spiritrevelations.com
