Call No Man Master.

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I bought a copy of Call No Man Master sometime ago from the Slough Oxfam shop. I was especially interested in the accounts about Subud, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  RS



An Introduction by Colin Wilson



An overview of Joyce Collin-Smith's life experiences as expressed in Call No Man Master (ref Joyce Collin-Smith website)



In her autobiography Call No Man Master (1988) Joyce Collin-Smith describes her experiences with three of the most remarkable gurus of the twentieth century: Pak Subuh, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and her brother-in-law Rodney Collin-Smith, better known as Rodney Collin, the author of The Theory of Celestial Influence. The autobiography seems to me a classic of its kind and, in the case of Pak Subuh and the Maharishi, makes clear the dangers that can arise from 'discipleship'.



Through her brother-in-law, Joyce was introduced to the teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky - particularly the latter, with whom Rodney Collin had had a relation of deep friendship that transcended disicipleship.



Ouspensky had originally been a follower of Gurdjieff, and his teaching sprang from the same insight: that everyday human consciousness amounts to a form of sleep, and that with the right kind of effort, we can begin to wake up. When Ouspensky broke with Gurdjieff - for a variety of reasons - the chief one of which was obviously that he wished to cease being a follower and become a teacher - he came to London and gave a series of lectures that brought him many disciples. One of these was the woman who became Rodney Collin's wife, Janet Buckley, and it was through her that he was introduced to the 'work'.



By the time Joyce met him, Ouspensky was dead - Collin had been deeply traumatised by his death. As a teenager Joyce had been a member of the 'Oxford Group,'later known as Moral Rearmament, and was ready to imbibe new ideas. The teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, as conveyed by Rodney Collin, satisfied her both emotionally and intellectually.



Rodney Collin died suddenly on May 3, 1956, falling from the tower of the cathedral in Cuzco, Peru - probably made dizzy by the height above sea level. He was 48. So Joyce lost the man who had become her mentor.



Two years before his death, his remarkable book The Theory of Celestial Influence had been published in England. As the title makes clear, Collin attached great importance to the heavenly bodies. Like the ancients, he saw man, the 'microcosm', as a reflection of the universe, the macrocosm. The book shows a remarkable medical knowledge of the human body and its organs, particularly the glands. And when he comes to the assertion that the planets rule different organs of the human body, he adds that it will be necessary to reconsider, from a scientific point of view, the propositions of astrology. (p. 143.) It is significant, he says, that although we have discarded most of the assumptions of mediaeval and renaissance astrology, we still use the names of the planets to denote certain human dispositions - mercurial, jovial, saturnine, and so on. He states his view that when a baby emerges from the womb, it is as if it possessed a set of light-meters, each sensitive to the light of one of the planets, and that these meters record the moment of birth, and determine the child's future development.



It was when Joyce returned to England after Rodney Collin's death that she enrolled with the Faculty of Astrological Studies, and then went on to cast her brother-in-law's chart. When setting it up she was unable to enter his Ascendant (the sign rising at the time of birth), but thought it might be Scorpio. At that point she heard his voice saying to her: 'It's Cancer' - which proved to be correct.



Now Joyce herself has always been 'psychic'. She mentions in The Pathless Land that even in childhood she often felt there was someone in the room with her. 'Angels or fairies, or even people who had died, seemed sometimes to be 'just around'.' So her sense of contact with her brother in law is not surprising. And neither is her interest in astrology, for astrology can give us profound insights into character.



The Maharishi, she told me, was also interested in astrology, but although he admitted to being a Capricorn, he would not divulge the year of his birth - for a reason I shall return to in a moment.



I myself learned just how accurate astrology can be as a result of being co-opted to write a horoscope column for a weekend magazine given away with the Observer newspaper. I knew very little of the subject when the editor approached me, and I accepted because I thought it would give me the opportunity to 'learn astrology'. And over the next few months, I did precisely that. I learned how to cast horoscopes simply by buying and studying dozens of books on the subject. I certainly never thought of myself as a true astrologer. Then an interesting experience taught me to recognise that astrology is not merely an intellectual discipline. One day, a reader wrote to me about her son, who had committed suicide, and gave me the precise time and date of his birth. As I began to cast his horoscope, I suddenly realised that his personality was beginning to take shape in front of me. Suddenly, I understood what kind of a person he was, and why he had decided to commit suicide. I wrote his mother a long letter, outlining my conclusions, and received a reply saying that I had portrayed him so accurately that it was as if I had known him.



So I am not surprised that the Maharishi was unwilling to provide the necessary information to cast his horoscope. It is like allowing someone to read your private diary. And the Maharishi, I am inclined to believe, was not the kind of person to wish to give anyone access to his inner being, for a reason touched on in Call No Man Master. When Francis Roles, one of Ouspensky's leading followers, took over the English branch of the Maharishi's organisation, it seems he lost no time in applying to it the obsessively strict discipline which was typical of Ouspensky's own interpretation of 'the Fourth Way'. Soon he had driven away those followers he felt to be too light hearted or insufficiently enamoured of discipline. The Maharishi's headquarters in Prince Albert Road, Regent's Park, ceased to be full of laughter. Suddenly, all was serious and rather gloomy. Returning from his travels, the Maharishi found this disturbing, and exerted all his charm, persuasiveness and hypnotic power to persuade Roles - who was also the financial provider of the group - to alter his approach. This failed completely, and Joyce records that those who saw the Maharishi immediately after this confrontation saw 'an expression of naked anger' on the guru's face. 'He looked frighteningly human' said one follower, to which Joyce comments: 'It had already occurred to me that, in spite of the claims on [his] flowery writing paper, Maharishi could not be called a fully-realised man'. It was the beginning of her disillusionment with him.



It was in the late '60s that Joyce first began to study the Tarot in depth. At an Astrological Association conference, a fellow delegate did a spread of cards for her, and she was astonished at their accuracy. The man spoke of her two marriages, one brief and unhappy, her estrangement from her daughter, and then went on to speak about an old friend who was 'distressed about a dear one' who was very ill in another country. Joyce, he said, would be able to assure her friend that all would be well. That evening she visited an old friend in Barnes, and learned that she was indeed frantic about her son, who had fallen ill in Australia. But, as the cards had foretold, he recovered.



But how can this be possible? Even if we are willing to accept that the Tarot reader may have been 'psychic', this still leaves the apparently unanswerable question of how the cards themselves can have indicated that Joyce had been married twice, etc. Of course, most Tarot readers would reply that it is not the cards themselves that provide the information, but the subtle interaction between the cards and the mind of the 'reader'. But that still leaves the question unanswered.



It is, of course, the same question we encounter in other 'occult' arts that depend on 'readings', whether of hands, tealeaves or the I Ching. There can be no logical explanation of how any operation that depends on chance - the patterns formed by tealeaves or the throwing down of three coins - can produce anything but a chance result. Yet anyone who is skilled in the practice will tell you otherwise. And I personally accept that this is so.



Joyce herself comes close to suggesting a reason when, in Call No Man Master, she remarks that the Maharishi's teaching was 'an attempt to turn the world back to the innocence of its own beginnings, and says: 'But in my heart I believed that the way forward for man was not by returning to first beginnings, but by pressing onward in some way. In this I was subscribing once again to the idea of man as a self-creating being, as Gurdjieff described him, and thinking of an evolving system of some kind, and of the growth of consciousness. I did not think one could actually contract out of the sufferings that seemed to be a part of life in a developing world'.



What she is implying is that man has some odd capacity to create himself, to expand into areas that already, in a sense, belong to him. In this present book, Joyce evokes an image used by Gurdjieff: that we should think of man as someone who lives in an enormous house, with dozens of rooms, but for some odd reason, confines himself to the basement. Moreover, the house possesses electricity, and all he has to do is throw the switch; but he has forgotten about its existence, and lives by candlelight.



In his poem The Maze, Auden writes:



The answer that I cannot find



Is known to my unconscious mind.



I have no reason to despair



Because I am already there.



It is surely this unknown part of the mind, what the paranormal investigator F. W.H. Myers called 'the subliminal self', that explains how a chance operation, like throwing down coins or shuffling cards, can produce meaningful results. Many of us take it for granted that we can tell ourselves that we have to be awake at five in the morning, and wake up on the dot of five. The same 'unknown self' seems to collaborate in interpreting the cards or a birth chart. Jung regarded this 'unknown self' as responsible for synchronicities.



But to place too much emphasis on 'the unknown self' would be to misrepresent the way Joyce sees reality. She also accepts the existence of what, for want of a better word, we have to call 'spirits', as well as of 'elementals' and fairies. And it was in this connection that I came upon one of her rare incomplete or one-sided stories, which presents me with an opportunity of saying something important about her attitude to 'the spirit world'.



On page 40 Joyce mentions the famous case of the Cottingley fairies, which was brought to the attention of the British public by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine for 1920. Two schoolgirls, Frances Griffiths, 10, and her cousin Elsie Wright, 17, claimed they had seen fairies by the 'beck', a stream in a wooded dell. The adults naturally disbelieved them, so Elsie borrowed her father's camera, and came back with a photograph of Frances leaning on a bank and gazing at tiny winged creatures who were apparently fairies. Soon after that they brought back a photograph of Elsie watchng a dancing gnome. Elsie's father made several prints. But it was not until after the war that a meeting of the local Theosophical Society was told about the photographs, and copies fell into the hands of a London Theosophist who examined them and decided they were genuine. After Conan Doyle's article, Elsie and Frances became briefly famous. And in the face of powerful scepticism, the girls continued to maintain that the photographs were genuine.



A psychic investigator name Joe Cooper made a television programme with Elsie and Frances in 1976, on which they continued to maintain that the photographs were genuine. But in the following year, a researcher named Fred Gettings proved otherwise. Looking through a volume called Queen Mary's Gift Book, published during the First World War, he came upon the fairies of the photographs, illustrating a poem by Alfred Noyes. The magician James Randi thereupon denounced the two girls in an article in The New Scientist.



In 1981, Cooper met Frances again, and she admitted that the fairies had been propped up with hatpins. And that seemed to close the case.



But not quite. Cooper, whom I had known since the previous year, had written a book called Modern Psychic Experiences in which he had argued - as Joyce does - that there really are such things as 'elementals', nature spirits, and investigated a number of cases in which people claimed to have seen them. As it happened, I had also come across a number of such cases - for example, a Scots television interviewer had told me casually, in the course of a conversation in a pub, that he had once seen a gnome on the pavement outside a convent gate, and that it had 'scared the hell' out of him. And a friend named Lois Bourne, a psychic who (in her book Witch Among Us) describes herself as a witch, tells a completely circumstantial and detailed story of how, on holiday at Crantock, in Cornwall, the husband of another member of a 'wicca' coven had taken her to a local stream at sunrise, where she saw a goblin sitting on a stone washing his socks. It saw them and disappeared. 'Now do you believe us?' asked the husband.



Now according to Joe Cooper, both Elsie and Frances were psychic, and Frances had been seeing fairies for months when she told her cousin about them. She admitted to seeing fairies when her parents beame irritable with her when she had fallen into the back a second time, And asked her why she went down there, Frances had admitted she went to look at fairies. And it was the total incredulity of the adults that led Elsie and Frances to concoct the hoax with the cut-out fairies.



After Conan Doyle's article, the girls were in a difficult position. In effect, they had to live their lives with a lie. But if they admitted it was a lie, they would also be claiming that the fairies never existed. And that, they insisted, was simply not true.



Like Joe Cooper, I am willing to believe the girls were telling the truth. Both had had many psychic experiences, which Joe records (and which anyone who wants to explore further can find summarised in my son Damon's article on fairies in our joint book Unsolved Mysteries Past and Present).



Joe's book The Case of the Cottingley Fairies received little publicity and is still not widely known. This has given me the opportunity to speak of my own attitude to these things, and to explain why, like Joyce, I accept the reality of these 'elementals', as did the poet W.B.Yeats and his friend Lady Gregory, and as did the writer and researcher Evans Wentz in his classic book on the subject, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.



All this explains why I can recommend the present book so whole-heartedly.



When Joyce told me she had written The Pathless Land, I was eager to see it, for I expected it to be an autobiographical sequel to Call No Man Master, and because I regard that volume as a masterpiece, could hardly wait to read its successor. Joyce sent me The Pathless Land as an email attachment, It was not what I had anticipated, but I was not more than a few dozen pages into the book when I realised that it is something equally valuable: a summary of what Joyce has learned over a lifetime.



Whether she will now, at the age of 85, write another book I do not know. What I can say is that these two books contain the essence of her life and work, and will secure her place as one of the most interesting writers and teachers of the twentieth century.

Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded About Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?

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Critical views of science in the newsCross-Check Home

Brilliant Scientists Are Open-Minded about Paranormal Stuff, So Why Not You?

By John Horgan (ref  Scientific America Blog area)
July 20, 2012



In last week’s post on the Turing Test, I mentioned a fact I stumbled on in the Alan Turing exhibit at the Science Museum in London. The pioneering computer theorist was a believer in telepathy, or mind-reading. (Turing was apparently impressed by the card-guessing experiments of J.B. Rhine.) Then, last weekend, I learned that a prominent scientist whom I once interviewed had had a vivid vision of the violent death of his child shortly before it happened, an example of clairvoyance. Serious scientists aren’t supposed to believe in paranormal phenomena, sometimes called “psi,” and yet some serious scientists do. I thought it would be fun to list a few, starting with ones who, like Turing, have passed into the great beyond.



Psychologist William James served as the first president of the American Society for Psychical Research, which investigated paranormal phenomena, including ghosts. In his essay “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished,” published in the late 1890s, James called a ghost-channeling medium, Leonora Piper, a “white crow” who had shaken his skeptical materialism.



“I cannot resist the conviction,” James wrote, “that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the ‘rigorously scientific’ mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one’s faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.”

I love James, who throughout his career achieved a rare balance between skepticism and open-mindedness. (By the way, he eventually became disenchanted with Piper.) The psychiatrist Carl Jung was a much more aggressive proponent of occult phenomena, notably “synchronicity,” which consists of coincidences that aren’t really coincidences, that hint at the existence of a hidden reality imbued with profound meaning, where the mental and physical realms interact in ways that conventional science cannot explain. Or something along those lines.

Jung once described an example of synchronicity: “A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since.”



Although he ruled out God, Jung’s supposedly hard-headed mentor Freud did not rule out telepathy. He “expressed greater conviction about telepathy privately than he did publicly,” according to “Occult, and Freud,” an essay by philosopher David Livingstone Smith in The Freud Encyclopedia (Routledge 2001, edited by Edward Erwin). Freud believed that he had communicated telepathically with his daughter Anna and a colleague, Sandor Ferenczi, but Freud “dissuaded Ferenczi from publicly reporting on” the experiences. In a 1922 paper, however, “Dreams and Telepathy,” Freud proposed as “incontestable” that “sleep creates favorable conditions for telepathy.” Freud once compared telepathy to telephony.



Unimpressed that two psychiatrists and a psychologist had occult sympathies? How about the Nobel-winning quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli? After a nervous breakdown in 1932, Pauli sought treatment from Jung, who convinced the physicist that his dreams were packed with synchronistic significance. As quoted by the religious scholar Charlene Burns in a 2011 essay, Pauli wrote to a colleague that “we must postulate a cosmic order of nature beyond our control to which both the outward material objects and the inward images are subject.” He also postulated that synchronicity might stem from some quantum effect that “weaves meaning into the fabric of nature.” (On the other hand, Pauli talked trash about Jung behind his back, complaining to another physicist that Jung was “quite without scientific training.”)



Two accomplished living physicists who believe in extrasensory perception are Freeman Dyson and Brian Josephson. As I mentioned in a post last year, Dyson has written that “paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science.” No one has produced empirical proof of psi, he suggested, because it tends to occur under conditions of “strong emotion and stress,” which are “inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures.” Josephson won a Nobel Prize in 1973, when he was only 33, and since then he has become an aggressive proponent of research on psychic phenomena. “Yes, I think telepathy exists,” he told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 2001, “and I think quantum physics will help us understand its basic properties.”



A 1991 poll of members of the National Academy of Sciences found that only four percent believed in ESP (although 10 percent thought it was worth investigating). My guess is that many more scientists believe, at least tentatively, in paranormal phenomena, but they are loath to disclose their views for fear of harming their reputations—and even science as a whole.



As Turing noted, paranormal phenomena such as telepathy and telekinesis “seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.”

Should the fact that Turing et al. took psi seriously mean that the rest of us should, too? Not necessarily. Brilliant scientists believe in lots of things for which there is no evidence, like multiverses and superstrings and God. I’m a psi skeptic, because I think if psi was real, someone would surely have provided irrefutable proof of it by now. But how I wish that someone would find such proof! Unlike the boring, foregone conclusion of the Higgs boson, the discovery of telepathy or telekinesis would blow centuries of accumulated scientific dogma sky high. What could be more thrilling!



About the Author: Every week, John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A former staff writer at Scientific American, he is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's Books, January

The Pied Piper of Early Music.

Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science





The following is a recent article on David Munrow. He was a childhood hero of mine who opened up my eyes to the glories of Medieval, and Renaissance Music, or Early Music as it is generally called........
.....................


.....The great populariser of early music was a man (Munrow) of scarcely believable energy and productivity

'A ceaselessly energetic explorer of early music' …


What's happened to early music? Now we've got conductors such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt and John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics, it seems like these radical musicians, who shook up how we hear and how we play music from Monterverdi to Mozart, Bach to Beethoven, have now become part of the establishment, as if the revolution has been won: it's no longer about "early music" as a separate category opposed to the mainstream, but about an essential, questioning approach to music we thought we knew.


But hold on a minute: where has the radicalism gone, the spirit of adventure and discovery that catalysed musicians' imaginations and scandalised audiences and scholars in the 60s and 70s? On Saturday, as part of the Bath festival, there's a celebration of the life and legacy of one of the true pioneers of early music: David Munrow, who would have been 70 this year, had he not tragically taken his own life at the age of 33 in 1976. His career was one of scarcely believable energy and productivity: few musicians have ever played as many instruments as Munrow, from bassoon to shawm to crumhorn to recorder; he brought medieval and renaissance music to a wider audience in books, on television, and on radio; his Radio 3 show, Pied Piper, ran for five years, in which time he made an astonishing 655 editions, and covered music from monody to prog rock..


Munrow's music-making is simultaneously radical and urbane, as you can see and hear from his work on YouTube, or if you listen to any of the more than 50 albums he also managed to make. Born in Birmingham, Munrow's essential early-music inspiration came when he was at studying English at Cambridge, and discovered a crumhorn hanging on the wall of a friend's room. But Munrow's idea wasn't to create a dusty academic archaeology of early music, but rather to connect whatever he was playing to the world around him. The early woodwind instruments whose repertoires he revealed to the modern world sounded as modern, as new, and as strange, as anything contemporary composers were up to at the time, and connected with the living traditions and instruments of Peruvian folk music that he had studied in Lima when he was still a teenager.


There's more to the Munrow legacy: music for film scores for movies by Ken Russell and John Boorman, his time working as a musician for the Royal Shakespeare Company; oh, and the fact that his recording, with the Early Music Consort that he founded with Christopher Hogwood, of Holborne's Fairie Round, was chosen to be put on the golden disc that accompanied the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 as one of the crucial sounds that humanity has ever made. But more than any single recording or performance – but there are few better or more fun ways to experience centuries of musical history than in the company of Munrow and his musicians, performances whose sheer quality and passionate musicianship gives the lie to the idea that the pioneering years of the early music movement were all about out-of-tune instruments, the aural equivalent of a historically accurate hair-shirt – it's his example as populariser, proselytiser, and ceaselessly energetic explorer that makes him one of the greats of 20th century music. Music – early or late – needs more inspirational Munrows.

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About this article Remembering David MunrowThis article was published on guardian.co.uk at 16.29 BST on Friday 1 June 2012 
More from Tom Service on classical music on

20 Sep 2011

Birth Trauma...

By Robert Searle

Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science




Around the turn of the 1970s I re-experienced something of my birth...or "rebirth" into this world. It took place in Spain. I was a child, and I had curled up into the foetal position on the back seat of my parents car.

Whilst sleeping, I entered into a "low" "sub-normal" state of conciousness...I was aware of being unable to move. I was having trouble breathing. Infact, I felt I was "suffocating".I was trapped in a confined space (ie. the womb). I could see the exit of the birth canal. Instead of a hospital I could see the backs of my parents in the front seat of the car. I was feeling increasingly terrified because of my "immobilisation". I tried to scream out several times....but they were mental screams...and thus, my parents could not hear me...

As this was happening I could hear music. It could have come from the car radio but I do not know. It was like military music of the 18th Century. My late mater was doing some research for a Spanish friend on the life of Sir John Moore who was killed at one of the battles of the Peninsula War at La Corunna. All this may be just coincidence...I remember too that my mater had "seen" Sir John Moore but this was probably a mental projection...

Anyway, my birth trauma experience seemed to go on for awhile, and thankfully it stopped, and I awoke to normal conciousness....I entered the world via Caesarian section, and lived to "tell the tale" so to speak!!

Long after this happened I had a lady friend who claimed she could remember her birth into this world. Unfortunately, or fortunately, she did not give any detail...

I believe that my birth trauma experience affected the early part of my life. Indeed, I believe that it may have stunted my early mental development. At the sametime, as indicated in the Realization of the Psychic I believe it may have initiated my early psychic experiences which largely disappeared in my later life.

Since I believe in reincarnation I hope that next time (if necessary ofcourse)my entrance into this world would be less traumatic. Also, I hope to return in female form. Alot of research into hypnotic regression seem to indicate that we can change sex to experience life from a different angle. It might also be an explanation for homosexuality, and bisexuality.


PS. Ofcourse, the above description is clearly reminiscent of sleep paralysis. However, there are certain aspects of the experiences which I have not divulged which clearly suggested that I had been re-living the birth trauma..

More Light on the Two Inner Awakenings......

Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science






On an earlier blog post I attempted to describe something of my two inner awakening experiences with Dr. Sharma, and Sant Harjit Singh.

http://thoughtsandvisions-searle88.blogspot.com/2010/08/meeting-dr-sharma-in-london-1990.html

The following article by Andrew Cohen seems to give some confirmation of the genuineness of the above phenomenon. No doubt more corroboration may come from other sources as one continues ones research....

On a noted forum run by David Christopher Lane I gave the above link. I asked Lane whether he had similiar experiences to my own with Faqir Chand. He answered that he did not. I may reproduce what he wrote sometime in the future. Anyway, here is Cohens article which appears to be part of promotion for his new book entitled Evolutionary Enlightenment,A New Path to Spiritual Awakening. His website is as follow.

http://www.andrewcohen.com/



Spontaneous Revelation & Noble Effort

There are two ways that you can experience the intoxicating joy, profound peace, and ecstatic wakefulness of the Ground of Being: spontaneously or through effort.

Spontaneously, like an unexpected visit from God, for no particular reason the doors of perception can open, expanding your awareness to reveal a higher and deeper dimension of consciousness. This kind of event often happens in the company of an enlightened master who has access to this unmanifest ground, or in a group of dedicated individuals who have come together for a higher purpose. But you can also experience the ground of being simply through your own disciplined effort, through choosing to step beyond the conditioned mind.

A spontaneous experience is a source of tremendous inspiration because it proves something to you, directly. When you unexpectedly discover the shocking clarity of bliss consciousness, without having made any effort to attain it, it compels you to acknowledge the existence of a deeper, higher dimension of your own self. But extraordinary and miraculous as they are, spontaneous experiences are rarely enough to finally liberate us from an unenlightened relationship to the mind and emotions. More often, they will simply reveal how extraordinary our potential for liberation is, here and how, and simultaneously expose how deluded we are most of the time.

A spontaneous experience of higher consciousness is like a free ride to heaven. But to stay there we have to be willing to pay the price. That means that at a moment’s notice, we have to be willing to do battle with the demons of fear and doubt. True liberation is something we all have to be willing to fight for. Sometimes it may be easy, but at other times you will find yourself overwhelmed by fear, doubt, confusion, narcissistic concerns and materialistic desires. So the willingness to make effort has to be unconditional in relationship to your own mind. That willingness is what creates receptivity to higher consciousness in each and every one of us. When you are willing to make the noble effort to liberate yourself, to consistently struggle to make the right choices for the right reasons, it creates a receptive inner atmosphere. Through the disciplined practice of meditation, the conscious, consistent renunciation of the mind and emotions, you create a fertile ground within you for higher consciousness.

In the end, no matter how profound your experience of revelation, the only question that matters is “Am I going to be ready to change, based on what I have seen, or not?” Only if you are ready to change will the spontaneous experience of liberating insight become the initiation that leads to lasting transformation. If not, it will soon fade into nothing more than an inspiring memory. When you fall back into a state of unenlightenment, in an instant the fears and desires of the ego overwhelm you once again. This is why it is so essential to cultivate the habit of making noble effort. You need to assume an inner posture that is going to ensure your victory. If you are not deadly serious about this, you are not going to make it. That’s guaranteed.

Andrew Cohen

2011.

Psychic Encounters of a Friend.

By Robert Searle


Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science






Since 1980, or thereabouts I used to know an Australian friend. I will call him by his first name which is Chris. He is somewhat eccentric. He used to, and still does collect rubbish. He is a great believer in "recycling" where possible.
Anyway, when I first met him he was well-dressed, and had a thin elderly Indian friend who referred to himself as the Universalist, or words to that effect. The latter claimed he could not see in one eye due to an operation by a "fake doctor" as he put it. He lived with some Muslims which he did not like as he recalled the appalling smell of spiced meat ascending from their kitchen (An unpleasant experience which I had as I, like him am vegetarian, and the way the meat smelt was frankly horrible!). He also like Chris used to give me free things notably food. He was a very kind soul, and I expect he no longer physically exists.
To return to Chris per se. Back in July 1997 he had an "extraordinary" experience. It occured very late at night. He was in Langley Memorial Park, and was staring at what might be termed a "UFO". It was erractically circling anti-clockwise a "star", or "planet" which was gradually moving across the sky. Chris described the "craft" as being red, and triangular with a flashing light on it. He stood transfixed by it for sometime. Then, the "UFO" slowly descended towards him, and then, shone a light at him. This "light" seemed to make Chris very peaceful, and unafraid. It was also trying to make him fall asleep as it was now very early morning. As the "light" and "craft" descended more, and more towards him he suddenly took fright, and dashed off to his friends house which was nearby.He feared that he might be abducted...
I questioned Chris on a number of times about the above, and he always came up with the same story without any elaboration. Attempts were even made to try, and trace independent witnesses who may have seen the same thing but to no avail.A week, or so after all this I had my own personal "UFO" experience. I saw something late at night which was suprising. Whether it was something genuine is quite another matter. Anyway, I saw two "UFOs" going around the moon! Then, they both went off in different directions, and were seen no more. Their appearance tallied with the description given by Chris.
In the late 1990s I was for whatever reason fascinated by the alleged UFO phenomena. Most sightings ofcourse turn out to have a rational explanation. At this time there were a number of glossy magazines on the subject, and one of them I came across mentioned the experience of electricity in the air when a "sighting" was made. This apparently was the case with Chris. Personally, I do not believe that his experience was objectively real in the "physical" sense. It was simply an "opening" into a psychic reality which only Chris could experience. The same I feel is true about my own experience. Ofcourse, critics would dismiss this all as merely a form of hallucination. In a sense, this is true at a deeper level of understanding.
What amused me was that Chris came up with another "story". He said that one night he was walking in Tescos car park...and was being followed by a "UFO" up in the sky. Every time he stopped to look round the "craft" would suddenly stop! As I explained to Chris most "UFOs" are really psychic phenomena as the evidence clearly indicates. For example, so-called alien abuductions can involve people being taken through the walls of their home suggesting that it is form of lucid dreaming, or out-of-body experience.
Among other things, Chris had an interest in spiritualism. He once told me that he went to a seance in Langley. The use of Quija Board was the order of the day...or rather the night!! In it he mentioned how he felt a power move the glass to spell out a message from the "Spirit World". Nothing as far I known went seriously untoward even though I recall listening to a phone-in programme in which hundreds of people complained about their experiences with the Quija Board.
Chris used to, or still has a married lady friend called B. He stayed with her at her mothers home in Norfolk. There, they both experienced mild forms of poltergeist activity. It was claimed that Bs late brother was trying to attract attention so to speak! Apparently, he was very attached to his mother. However, when the latter died the poltergeist activity suddenly stopped. The late brother was at last reunited with his late mother!!
Another lady friend of Chris was someone who was into vampires. She even tried to draw blood from him with a knife so that she could suck it out!
In many respects, Chris is not the ideal witness of alleged phenomena. But that does not mean he is exagerating, or fibbing. On the contrary, he comes across as someone who is very pleasant,trusting,transparent, but "gullible". For example, he seems to naively regard everything about the "power" of "magic rituals" found in books notably published by Finbarr as "gospel truth"

Anatomy of Thoughts...

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Back in the early 1980s I used to attend the Slough Writers Group. I would on occassion read out some of my manuscripts which notably included a historical novel called Hearts in Thorns (formerly entitled The Devils Dance), and a comedy about psychic research...which caused some merriment. The former was about a power struggle saga between rich nobles in late 14th Century England. It was purely fictional but with accurate period detail based on research which I had been undertaking. This novel opened with a dramatic duel which held my small audience in thrall.

The SWG attracted a small range of interesting people which included Chris Webb the poet postman who published his stuff in the local paper. Another notable was Alan Taylor a charming old boy type who had published books on DIY. He even gave me a signed copy of his paperback opus on Garden Construction. Arthur Nicklin was a prolific freelance writer for various magazines including Prediction as he had some interest in occult matters. He was a fascinating man, and I used to drive him back home after a SWG meeting. The last time I saw him in the flesh was in the high street in Slough. He was gathering information about healers by interviewing them for a book. Whether this opus came to anything is another matter. However, one of the SWG group a lawyer by trade had published a book on witchcraft in the local area if my memory serves me correctly.

Anyway, enough nostalgic rambling!

It was around this time that I began to develop a questionaire about thought structure, and contents of the human mind. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of it. But I can give some idea of the questions presented....

1. Do your thoughts appear visual most of the time?

2. If you close your eyes, and see an image what is the appearance of its surrounds. Is it fuzzy? Is it grainy? Is it firelike? etc

3. Does the surround of your image change, or not? If so, what shape manifests itself?

4. Do you feel thoughts as images enter different points of the human body? Do your thoughts of love for example enter the heart area? Do mainly intellectual
thoughts enter the top the head....et cetera.

5. Do you sense thoughts sometimes enter your head as if they were "disembodied" energies? (Here, the notion is like question 4) For example, people sometimes say that a thought just struck them, or it just came into their mind out of the blue...and so on.

The above are just some examples of the thoughts questionaire.

A member of the SWG called Miss Portsmouth actually undertook answering the questions. She found it very interesting, and incidently, she was studying psychology! She gave some intriguing answers but unfortunately I do not have a record of it.

In occult circles "thoughts are things". I recall once doing a telepathic experiment with a friend. The latters thought with the actual word sent was seen by my minds eye as it flashed into my head.

I recall too when I was in a watch repair workshop which was close to East Berks College in Windsor that I was gaining a strong mental rapport with a friend, Steven Stroud. All of a sudden I was aware for a few seconds of a coloured "field" of energy connecting me with him in a kind of telepathic link.