And then what?

Friday 22nd November 2013

Cool this morning, about 2 degrees, light frost. Dropped T off at the bus stop for college, then drove to the Marshside nature reserve and walked out along the old dumper truck trail to the estuary – at least as far as the mud would allow. The skies were a little hazy first thing, streaked with brown and blue grey, but clearing now to a deep blue, a low sun rising behind me and casting long shadows as I look out over the route I’ve just walked. There are a few other cars about, mostly people taking their dogs for a dump, one bearded twitcher standing alone in the reeds, heron-like, with an impressive telescope on a tripod. Across the estuary Blackpool is crystal clear, also Black Coombe, and I can just make out the Lakes beyond, through binoculars, the fells having a light dusting of snow this morning.

I’m probably going to sit here until about 10:00, then go in search of coffee and a new jumper – I noticed yesterday my old lambswool is coming in holes, a bit like me.  I also seem to be scratching about for socks and underpants – so may restock at Matalan.

I’m also trying to think.

I did eventually download that book “Brain Wars” by Beauregard. Hate the title though. Consumed it on my Kindle in one long sitting yesterday. There was nothing new in it for me – a repeat of studies I’m familiar with from other sources – not that this detracts from the importance of the work. Worth the read, but I think I preferred his “Spiritual Brain”. That the mind is separate from the brain seems now all but proven, at least to my satisfaction – only die-hard materialists continuing to deny the evidence that’s been mounting since Myers and the founding of the SPR in 1882. The argument that the mind is reduced by the brain for the purpose of enabling a physical existence in form is also convincing, and further arguments that the mind is freed upon death, back into a greater, non-physical awareness are also compellingly well supported now by an accumulation of evidence from veridical NDE’s. As Jung said, back in ’61, we have to reckon with the possibility,…

Where this leads us I don’t know, what the purpose of the greater mind’s hamstrung foray into physical form might be, again, I don’t know and am probably incapable of imagining. I did get it once, I think, grasped it intuitively, wordlessly, but that was on the other side of an ME, a long time ago. And I’ve slept a lot since then.

The windscreen is misting now, and I’m beginning to wonder what I’m doing here. It’s like this muddy trail in front of me, heading out to the sea. I’ve been passing it for years, decades even, seeing people wandering down it and wondering to myself what was so special at the end of it that might draw them on. Well, I’ve been down it now and it’s just a twenty minute tramp to a muddy foreshore, a couple of stumps and a seemingly infinite plane of yet more mud beyond – nothing that seems very special, in other words,  and always another frontier stretching before you.

The skies are alive with birds this morning, all manner of waders and the plaintive call of curlews and oyster catchers. Great squadrons of geese are moving up the estuary.

Nature is so wonderfully diverse and complex; we look at it and wonder at the purpose of it. But it has no purpose, no meaning, other than what we grant it. The meaning is perhaps what we aspire to, or something we grant it without even knowing we’re doing it. It’s an idea dimly grasped through the fog of an inadequate intellect, and perhaps the full awareness of that purpose will dawn only when there’s been a global shift in consciousness, maybe centuries from now, something that restores us to the perspective of our  immortal selves, temporarily camped out and shivering down here in the mud.

And then what?

But having advanced so far along the trail, I find myself withdrawing from such thoughts now, withdrawing from the mysterious frontier. Life is where it’s at, down here in the mud. Life is where it’s happening, it’s where consciousness lights up if only briefly in form, so with my life more than half over should I not be waking up to the fact of it by now and living it a little more? Should I not be more focussed on simply being instead of sitting here at 9:00 am on a Friday morning with my head up my own ass, ruminating on matters that greater minds than mine have foundered upon?

Okay, time to move on. I need coffee, and underpants and socks.

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Ghost or what?

My reading material is a bit left of field, and it has been for the past decade or so. Currently I’m reading Myres’  Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), also Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living (1886), and a little more up to date Fontana’s Is there an Afterlife?(2005) I’m on the fence so far as this sort of thing is concerned, but I find the early history of the Society for Psychical Research, and the biographies and life-works of its leading lights fascinating. The research outlined in these works, and the conclusions they seem to draw regarding the true nature of the human personality is compelling, but there’s also something in us that would have us disregard such startling material – no matter how weighty the evidence – because,… well,… we live in a rational, physical world and for their talk of a discarnate dimension, it doesn’t help much when your mortgage is screwed, your pension is screwed, and you’re wondering how you’re going to stump up the fees to send your boys to university.

But I digress.

My family are very polite about my reading habits. My books lie around all over the place – I’m a bit careless in that respect – okay so the weird stuff is mixed in with Louis Lamour, Niall Williams and John LeCarre, but the strangeness of some of my reading has perhaps led to my being labelled as a bit “alternative”, or a bit “mystical”. Now,… when someone has an experience they don’t understand, something that doesn’t seem rational or logical, you can understand them wanting to share it with someone, preferably someone who won’t laugh at them. So,… if you see, let’s say, a ghost, who would you tell? Or would you not tell anyone? Would you keep it to yourself for fear of being labelled gullible, unreliable? Me? I’d blog it to my unknown reader, but other than that who is there? A minster of religion perhaps? Or a close relative who reads weird stuff? I mean it’s not always an explanation you’re after is it – just the simple act of sharing the experience with another human being helps in the acceptance of it.

Several weeks ago now a close female relative confided in me – quite out of the blue – that she had woken at dead of night to see a figure in her bedroom – a woman, unknown to her. It was quite real, she assured me,…  startling, terrifying – yet she was unable to move or even speak to her husband lying asleep beside her. What did I think? What was it? Was she going mad? Was it real? Was it a ghost? Would it happen again?

It reminded me of a story told by my newly married grandmother of waking to see the figure of a man staring at her – this would have been in the 1920’s. The story goes she recounted the experience to my grandfather the following morning, describing the spooky interloper to him, and my grandfather told her it sounded like his own father who had long since passed over. One smiles at these tales, repeats them perhaps on Samhain nights, when the family gathered round and feeling perhaps for one day of the year at least a little philosophical, but mostly we shrug and get on with our rational workaday lives,… until someone tells us a similar tale and wants some reassurance that they’re not going mad.

Then, as if this were not enough, my own good lady – no more sober, nor level headed a person on earth – told me that the other night, she thought yours truly was gawping at her from her side of the bed and what the bloody hell did I think I was doing? However, she found herself unable to remonstrate with me as she might normally have done, as she felt unable to speak or even to move. Then she heard the toilet flush and yours truly – the real version – came shuffling back to bed.  The apparition, or whatever it was disappeared. The experience shook her and it took her most of the following day to gather the words to recount it to me.

Ghosts or what?

The answer to these enigmas come from the books I’m reading. It was Gurney I think who first mentioned the hypnopompic hallucination. You’re coming out of sleep – perhaps disturbed from it by a careless spouse going to the loo at dead of night, or perhaps even just snoring too loudly, and you see a figure in the room. I’ve never experienced such a thing but those who do  are adamant that the figure, the apparition is real, and clearly defined – in spite of the fact that it’s dead of night and pitch dark. In one striking case listed by Gurney a man is asleep in his room, in India, in the 1800’s and wakens to see a native standing by his bed. The native drops at once into a squatting posture. The man, alarmed, leaps from bed and takes the potential sneak-thief by the throat, only for the sneak-thief to shape-shift into a dirty laundry bag, tied at the top. In his long study of so called Phantasms, Gurney calls these borderland cases, in that they occur in that strange hinterland between sleep and waking, and they’re rather more common than one might suspect. They are less the product of of some external, supernatural agency, more the product of the unconscious, dreaming mind. Having said that, they’re still considered a rare phenomenon, one that requires the connivance of a mind that is more than commonly adept at visualisation.

Naturally, if you were to experience such a thing yourself, you might jump to the conclusion that you’d had a brush with the afterlife, but the consensus is that such phantasms are simply the stuff of dreams projected into physical reality, though no less startling and fascinating for all of that. It’s odd though, that they should be so rare, and yet I’m given two fresh first hand examples from my own family, and within weeks of one another.

 

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