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7/10/2017

Evidence for the "silver cord" from Australian Aboriginal knowledge

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Given our current technological limits, subtle phenomena such as out-of-body experiences, encounters with non-physical beings or the existence of other dimensions of life are not readily proven in ways that will satisfy skeptics who have not had their own experiential proof. Apart from pursuing our own experiences, for now all we can do is collect, compare and analyse the experiences of those who claim to have travelled beyond the body. Surely consistencies in a substantial body of personal records at some point counts as evidence for the veracity of the accounts.

One of the reasons I find corroborating evidence from Aboriginal Australian culture so compelling is that we know that Aboriginal people were largely isolated from other cultures for at least 10,000 years (since the last major ice age), and possibly much longer than that. Accounts by self-proclaimed multidimensional travellers from Europe, Asian and Africa may all have influenced each other, as pieces of the different esoteric religious traditions found across these continents were exchanged over the last two millennia or longer, and subsequently influenced more contemporary modes of spirituality. But Australian Aboriginal people had no such influence. So when their accounts of out-of-body travel corroborate what people from elsewhere in the world are saying, it suggests strongly that these diverse people are describing an objective reality, rather than a fantasy that coincidentally happens to be the same across the world.

In this article, I look at one particular and often elusive feature of the out-of-body experience, an energetic link between the physical body and the non-physical body known as the “silver cord” by contemporary OBE researchers. I present evidence relevant to this “silver cord” found in the records of anthropologists who worked with Australian Aboriginal people in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, I draw on the research assembled by A.P. Elkin in his classic Aboriginal Men of High Degree and on an ethnographic account collected by a German anthropologist called Helmut Petri in the Kimberley region of Australia in the 1930s and published in a book called The Australian Medicine Man. Both Petri and Elkin recorded a number of accounts of out-of-body travel, including references to some kind of cord that was used by people to leave their body and travel in the sky. This cord sounds much like the "silver cord".

The silver cord is the name given to the subtle energetic connection between our physical body (soma) and the body with which we manifest in non-physical dimensions (psychosoma or astral body). It is one of the more ambiguous features of out-of-body travel, because while some people report seeing it, there are many others who have had lucid out-of-body experiences but have never seen it. Nonetheless, the general consensus in the OBE community is that when we are projected outside of the physical body, the silver cord connects us back to that body. It acts as a kind of conduit of energy and sensory information between the two and, among other things, ensures that we always end up back in our body after an out-of-body experience. When we “die”, the silver cord breaks and our subtle body (psychosoma) loses its connection to the physical body.

Robert Monroe and Waldo Vieira were two prolific projectors who both left written accounts of their perceptions of the silver cord. In his classic Journeys out of the Body, Monroe writes the following:

I turned to look for the "cord" but it was not visible to me; either it was too dark or not there. Then I reached around my head to see if I could feel it coming out the front, top, or back of my head. As I reached the back of my head, my hand brushed against something and I felt behind me with both hands. Whatever it was extended out from a spot in my back directly between my shoulder blades, as nearly as I can determine, not from the head, as I expected. I felt the base, and it felt exactly like the spread out roots of a tree radiating out from the basic trunk. The roots slanted outward and into my back down as far as the middle of my torso, up to my neck, and into the shoulders on each side. I reached outward, and it formed into a "cord", if you can call a two-inch-thick cable a "cord". It was hanging loosely, and I could feel its texture very definitely. It was body-warm to the touch and seemed to be composed of hundreds (thousands?) of tendon-like strands packed neatly together, but not twisted or spiralled. It was flexible, and seemed to have no skin covering. Satisfied that it did exist, I took off and went. (p.175)

Vieira provides an account with some parallels and some subtle differences in his Projections of the Consciousness: A diary of Out-of-Body Experiences. After having examined his own psychosoma closely during a projection, Vieira writes:

To conclude the "physical" inspection of the psychosoma, I raised the right hand to my back, head and neck, and once again very closely examined the "skin" of the neck region and the silver cord. It again impressed me as being a combination of tiny, loose cords or fine, occasionally sparkling elastic strings, firmly attached to the psychosoma. The silver cord exhibits warmth, flexibility and the texture of human tissue. It has a structure and nature closer to that of the psychosoma than to that of the soma. The energetic filament does not seem to stop at the skin. it gives the impression of entering the soma and establishing a deep connection with one or more vital centres. Could one of them be the pineal gland? How can such an apparently fragile structure have such a powerful flow of energy? While I deeply pondered the fact, as if engaged in an internal monologue, I held the silver cord close to the soma and activated the return system by pulling on this appendage. In seconds, I was consciously diving into the physical body. (p.86-87)

The images below (courtesy of the International Academy of Consciousness) give you a sense of how the silver cord connects the physical body to the non-physical body (psychosoma). When we are close to the body, it is said to be quite thick and have a substantial pull, making it one of the obstacles of us leaving the body with full awareness. As we move further away it becomes very thin. Seemingly there is no limit to its stretch and reach as we project around the world, to other planets and other dimensions.

Used with permission of the International Academy of Consciousness www.iacworld.org

In Aboriginal Australia, the ability to leave the physical body consciously is usually grouped with other psychic abilities, such as clairvoyance, the ability to communicate with and influence non-physical beings and the ability to manipulate energies. Only some people develop these abilities and such people are often referred to as “clever” (see my blog piece on the use these clever men and women make of out of body travel). Clever people, men or women, are usually “made” through processes of initiation involving a range of spirit beings. In other words, there are culturally acknowledged steps by which a person comes to develop these psychic abilities.
In their respective books, both Elkin and Petri draw on their own field work from the 1930s and ‘40s, and survey earlier accounts from other researchers of the way clever people were made across Australia. When reading these accounts, it is important to be mindful of a number of factors likely to have impacted the way they were recorded: basic linguistic issues, i.e. the English language proficiency of the Aboriginal informants and the Aboriginal language proficiency of the anthropologists; the anthropologists’ ideas about reality and how that may have influenced how they heard their informants; the Aboriginal ideas of reality and how that lead them to express themselves, for example it has been my experience that Aboriginal people do not necessarily make an explicit distinction between the categories of physical and non-physical as most Europeans do, because they do not experience the two as separate.
I think it likely that all these factors played into the record of the following account documented by Elkin from New South Wales:

During their making in south-east Australia, a magic cord is slung into the doctors. This cord becomes a means of performing marvellous feats, such as sending fire from the medicine man's insides, like an electric wire. But even more interesting is the use made of the cord to travel up to the sky or to the tops of trees through space. At the display during initiation - a time of ceremonial excitement - the doctor lies on his back under a tree, sends his cord up, and climbs up it to a nest on top of the tree, then across to other trees, and at sunset, down to the ground again. Only men saw this performance, and it is preceded and followed by the swinging off the bull-roarers and other expressions of emotional excitement. In the descriptions of these performances recorded by R.M. Berndt and myself, the names of the doctors are given and such details as the following: Joe Dagan, a Wongaibon clever man, lying on his back at the foot of a tree, sent his cord directly up, and "climbed" up with his head well back, body outstretched, legs apart, and arms to his sides. Arriving at the top, 12 meters up, he waved his arms to those below, then came down in the same manner, and while still on his back the cord re-entered his body.
Apparently, in this case, his body floated up and down in the horizontal position with no movement of his hands or legs, and the explanation must be sought in group suggestion of a powerful nature. (Elkin 1977 p.54-55)

For someone who has studied the projection of consciousness and other psychic phenomena this account can be interpreted in ways that are unlikely to have occurred to Elkin. For example, from such studies we know that the silver cord is closely related to the energetic body (energosoma, pranic body), which is constituted of the subtle energy also known as Chi/Qui. When this energy is highly developed, it is often experienced as “fire” or electricity, leading to intense heat within the person’s body which can also be externalised to others.
Elkin seems to have interpreted the account of the person travelling up to the trees on the cord as if it was the person’s physical body that flew up to the top of the trees and then returned. However, it seems much more plausible and from a multidimensional perspective perfectly logical, that it was in fact the non-physical body (psychosoma, astral body) that flew up to the top of the tree while the physical body would have remained prone on the ground with the silver cord connecting the two. From that perspective, the doctor was showing off his skill of lucidly leaving his body, while the audience was able to see both the silver cord and the psychosoma; this was the fascinating bit and the part Elkin’s informant focused on in relating the event, without making explicit the distinction between physical and non-physical. This seems especially plausible to me, as I have never seen my own silver cord, but when running OBE workshops have seen other people’s silver cords and psychsomas as they projected and therefore have a sense of what that might look like.

Later in his work, Elkin discusses that some of the seeming variation in the making and practices of doctors (or clever people) may actually be the result of incomplete data. Speaking about the “magic cord” he explains that,
… up to 1944, their use of cords, aerial rope, was reported only from Victoria and inland New South Wales, but since then I have recorded it from the north coast of the latter state, for the Gladstone and Cloncurry districts, respectively in coastal and far inland Queensland, and in this chapter for Dampier Land, southwest Kimberley, Western Australia. Possibly, it was also a psychic phenomenon displayed by members of the craft in tribes in between. (Elkin 1977 p.180)

In other words, this “magic cord” was reported from people across Aboriginal Australia as involved in people’s ability to fly.

An even clearer account of the silver cord in Aboriginal culture comes from Helmut Petri, a German anthropologist who first conducted fieldwork in the Kimberley region of Australia in 1938. Like Elkin he was interested in the social role and asserted abilities of the clever people, who he called medicine men. One of their abilities that he documented was to go on “dream journeys”:
During the dream journey the ya-yari roaming in the distance remains connected to the body by the thin, fine thread, and when it returns it is accompanied by the agula to just outside the doctor's camp. (Petri 2015 p.13)
In the language of the Unambal with whom Petri was working, the ya-yari is the psychosoma or non-physical body of a living person, while the agula is a deceased person. This suggests that what Petri here calls “dream journey” is really a visit to a non-physical dimension where the person who is projected during sleep meets deceased people, who in this case accompany him back to his body.

In analysing the differences and parallels of two kinds of “doctors” (ban-man, who are the classic doctors of the Unambal people, and “devil-doctors” who are a new kind of doctor who emerged since colonization through the introduction of new ceremonies), Petri again refers to the cord:
The Devil Doctor has in common with the genuine ban-man the gift of miriru, i.e. he can work himself into states of trance or vision and visit the realm of the spirits. He too releases his ya-yari from his body. The ya-yari then is said to go up a tree and travel along a thin, fine thread to the distant island of the dead, Dulugun, or into the celestial beyond on the other side of the Milky Way. Some agula will escort him and see to it that he returns safely again to this world. (Petri 2015 p.26)
The agula, or extraphysical consciousnesses mentioned here appear to be helpers, assisting the doctor in his projection. It seems clear from these brief accounts that the Unambal people knew of the silver cord that connects the psychosoma and the body.

Like Elkin, Petri also surveyed the literature relating to other parts of Australia and reproduced several other references to cords associated with extracorporeal travels.
There is a reference to the Mara tribe from the Gulf of Carpentaria, whose doctors “go on journeys to the sky. At night time and invisible to everybody, they will climb up into the sky on a rope in order to hold converse there with the people of the star world. (Petri 2015 p.104). And writing of the Kurnai people from New South Wales he said that Kurnai belief that doctors ascend to sky by aid of a rope and that their neighbours shared their beliefs that their doctors "climbed into the sky on threads, as thin as blades of grass " (Petri 2015:113).

In summary, it is in my view clear that Aboriginal people from across Australia have known about the energetic connection, the “silver cord”, between the physical body and our subtle body for thousands of years. This is important data, because Aboriginal culture has not received influences from other cultures for a very long time. As such the fact that Aboriginal people describe this connection in ways very similar to the accounts of more contemporary European researchers supports the objective reality of this energetic “body part”, or perhaps better “para-body part”. There seems to be, however, a cultural difference in the emphasis given to the cord. In the European esoteric traditions, the silver cord is emphasised as the connection that ensures our return to the physical body, whereas in the account collected from Aboriginal people the emphasis seems to be on it as a tool or mechanism that allows exploration away from the body. Given the many other cultural differences, this is hardly surprising.

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9/3/2017

Spiritual Guidance by a Deceased Father - a personal account of an out-of-body experience

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Introduction
by Kim McCaul

I am very grateful to have been given permission to published the below first-hand account of a conscious projection by Khaled Elomar. When I first read this account on Khaled’s Facebook page I was deeply moved. Khaled is a devout Muslim and his religion is an important part of his out-of-body experience, which is natural because it is an important part of his everyday life. I asked him if I could share his account on this blog, because I think it is important to hear voices like his during this time of increasing vilification of Islam in the western world.
Like any religion and spiritual tradition, Islam can be used as a tool of personal and social oppression and become subject to social and political uses that are far removed from its actual spiritual teachings. Yet it is this dysfunctional version of Islam that so many voices in the West currently emphasize, demonizing a large number of the world’s population seemingly without awareness or recognition that there is a very different side to Islam too.
At its best, the devotion to God emphasized in Islamic teaching and practice is a devotion to humanity and life itself. When practiced like that, Islam encourages selfless service and inspires devotees to demand the best of themselves, overcoming their own shortcomings to improve their ability to serve God by serving humanity. These are universal principles of all spiritual traditions. This love and compassion for humanity is very clear in Khaled’s account of his conscious projection with his deceased father.
As a cross-cultural researcher of out-of-body experiences, I am also happy to be able to publish this account because it alerts us to the important role this particular experience of consciousness plays in the Islamic tradition. Unlike in Europe, where centuries of religious repression drove our understanding of these kinds of experiences underground only emerging again over the past hundred years or so, projections of consciousness continued to be an integral and accepted part of the Islamic religious experience.
Finally, reading accounts like this from other cultures is a good reminder of the universality of these experiences, because whatever our religious and cultural background: we can all leave our physical body and experience non-physical realities while still physically alive, we all survive “death”, love connects us all with those who have left the physical dimension before us, and we all increase our ability to be of service to humanity (both in this and in other dimensions) by confronting our fears and insecurities and moving forward to the best of our ability.

Spiritual Guidance by a Deceased Father
by Khaled Elomar

I laid in bed last night, put my head on my pillow and faced my gorgeous wife. Gave her a kiss and said good night baby. I closed my eyes and thought “if I die in my sleep, then it would be a perfect end to my life as the last face I would have seen, the last odour I would have smelt and that last skin I would have touched is that of the most beautiful person on earth…..
My dad walked into my room. Quietly but forcefully shook me to awaken me. I looked up at him in complete bewilderment only to see that he was gesturing me to remain quiet so that I did not wake anyone up. He was dressed in the traditional White Arabic attire. His face was shining as bright as the moon.
I walked out of the room while he was hovering. I whispered to him “I miss you Baba”…. He responded with “I know. I’ve always been here with you”….
He said “hold my hand tight. We’re going somewhere.” I grabbed his warm soft hand, raised it to my lips and kissed it. As I started asking where we are going, I found myself in a house of 5 people. A Mother, Father, Grand Mother and 2 boys lived in this barely lit house by a few candles. One of the boys was a teenager and the other was around 10 years of age. They spoke Arabic. Heavy Syrian accent.
I instantly felt ashamed for entering the house unannounced and uninvited. I looked at my dad and he knew that shameful feeling I had. He said, “Relax, they can’t see you” …. I said, “Where are we?” Dad answered, “Aleppo, Syria”
The mother was hurriedly preparing a rather small modest dinner using scraps, vegetables that had gone off and outdated ingredients. But nevertheless, the excitement on the family’s face of having “a dinner” as “a family” was immeasurable. As the dinner was placed on the copper tray and put on the floor in the middle of the living room, the family sat around the tray and the father, with a stuttering and almost crying voice, said “hurry up and eat before something happens”. The strange thing is that as they were eating and talking, their language would change to the languages of the different people being oppressed around the world, languages from Zimbabwe, West Papua, Myanmar and so on. Yet I knew exactly what they were saying, irrespective of the language they were speaking. I understood that these different languages were meant to remind me that the experience I was witnessing was not limited to this family or the people of Syria, but is shared by many who are suffering across the world.
With only a few minutes into the dinner, a whistle was strikingly increasing and getting louder and louder with each micro second. The father yelled out “DUCK YOUR HEADS”. And BANG. What seemed a modest poverty stricken yet grateful family dinner ended up a family massacre. Both the mother and grandmother were torn into pieces. The older son simply became non-existent. The father who barely had any strength could only see his youngest son. He got up and ran to the boy to pull him out from under the rubble. As soon as the father grabbed both hands and started to pull, he noticed that he was only dragging the top section of his young son. The father looked straight into my eyes and yelled out from the top of his voice “WHY?”. I stood and watched the father’s agony and trauma. Needless to say that I was, well, the feeling is indescribable.
I clinched onto my Dad’s hand tighter but felt my dad loosen his grip on me. I moved closer to my dad to seek fortification. The closer I tried to get to my dad, the further he moved away from me. I looked into his face only to see him crying. The shine on his face was dimmed by anger and sadness. My tongue was twisted. My stomach was knotted up and I felt sick to my core…
Words eventually came out of my mouth and I said to my dad “why me?”
Baba: “why not?”
Me: “why them?”
Baba: “it’s not only them. There are plenty more like them and even worse?”
Me: “did the father see me when he was looking into my eyes?”
Baba: “No. He was looking into Despair”.
Me: “Was I part of his Despair?”
Baba: “you holding tighter onto my hand and moving closer to me is part of that father’s misery. You’re not doing enough to help. I know you and I know who you are”.
Me: “what can I do?”
Baba whispered something that broke my heart and will continue to break my heart forever. He said “I raised a good decent man. You’re good enough to figure it out for yourself. Plus I have been dead for two and half years. Don’t give up for the love of Allah”.
And with the sound of the 3:30am alarm in my bedroom, he disappeared much the same way he did at 8:30am on that serene day 13th June 2013.
I opened my eyes and saw my wife gorgeously sleeping beside me. Her face is the first face I see each morning. Her odour is the first odour I smell each morning. And her skin is the first thing I touch each day. I walked into each of my boys bedrooms and saw them sleeping peacefully. I thought to myself, how blessed am I.
And there and then it hit me. My father wanted me to know that;
• I need to strive to make a good change in the world. Be a HOPE for Humanity
• Pray and supplicate for all the different people that are being oppressed and are experiencing Genocide and Oppression irrespective of colour, gender, age, faith, race culture and country
• Be thankful for what I have and remember that no matter how bad things are, there is always someone worse off than me
• Never take my family for granted. Cherish and love them forever. Even though I lost my dad and Yasmine, others have LOST EVERYTHING
• Let go of him and be the father to my boys much the same way as he was to me
Baba,
Even though your passing has created a void in my life, your presence in my heart has quadrupled. You’ve been dead for 2.5yrs and yet you are still teaching me. I will do everything in my power to prove to you that I am who you wanted me to be and that my boys will be brought up to be just like you Baba. I will do everything you expect of me. But I promise you I will NEVER let go off you as you haven’t let go of me yet.
LOVE YOU FATTI

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26/4/2016

Inception - Movie Review

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The blockbuster movie Inception combines breathtaking and highly innovative action with a complex psychological plot. Its focus is a team of mercenaries who specialise in entering people’s subconscious through ‘joint dreaming’ for the purpose of stealing valuable information – an advanced form of industrial espionage. This mental theft is called ‘extraction.’ Then, they are given a task most think is impossible. Rather than extract information from a subject’s mind, they are supposed to plant an idea that will lead to particular business decisions. This form of mental manipulation is what’s called ‘inception.’
The movie does not seek to make a particular psychological or spiritual point, but the subject matter is fascinating and the movie touches on many issues relevant to both psychology and spirituality. At one level, the approach of the film is purely materialistic. Dreams are the creations of people’s subconscious, and the many people who inhabit the places visited on dream journeys are merely ‘projections’ of the dreamers mind. They are not real, independent consciousnesses. This is good because they get slaughtered in large numbers. As the inceptors try and crack their target’s subconscious, the projections sense their intrusive presence and seek to defend their mental space by the fairly mundane means of guns and fists. Where the movie does move into the metaphysical is the way that dreamers increasingly question the nature of the real world. Is the waking state real or is it the dream state with all its creative potential?
The way in which it is possible for people to share each other’s dreams is not really explored. From a conscientiological perspective a ‘shared dream’ is never a dream, but a shared projection of consciousness. Projection, here of course, does not have the psychological meaning it has in Inception, but refers to consciousness projecting out of the physical body in another, more subtle body (also known as astral projection, out-of-body experience). Dreams are inter-neural events, and while we might be able to track them on CT-scans we cannot share them the same way we share going for a walk together. Projections of consciousness can be shared in just that way. They are extracorporeal events that take to us to non-physical dimensions, populated by real, non-physical, people. Interestingly, there are numerous parallels between the dream experiences of the characters in Inception and the extraphysical experiences of consciousness.
Just like the people representing subconscious projections in the movie, so the real non-physical people in the extraphysical dimensions may sense the difference of the person who is having an out-of-body experience and become curious about them. And just as the dreamers in the movie have the ability to create the dreamscape, and sometimes involuntarily introduce unresolved psychological issues, so when we are projected outside the body our thoughts can turn into tangible creations and our conditionings, beliefs and fantasies can influence our experience and distort our perception of the extraphysical reality in which we manifest. Just as some of the dreamers in Inception don’t realise that they are dreaming, so many of us don’t realise when we are projected.
A key premise of the movie is that inception, the planting of an idea in someone’s mind, is a highly difficult undertaking. Yet we know that this is not really the case. From a purely physical and psychological perspective there is an extensive literature on propaganda, advertising and brain-washing. Many of the ideas we might most closely identify with as our own were planted there by others: our parents, our peer-group, our culture. From a multidimensional perspective it goes further. It is possible, and indeed common for non-physical consciousnesses to give us ideas that then appear to us to be ours. This can happen while we are projected at night; we may wake up with new insights without realising where they come from (this is why people often like to sleep on things). It can also happen while we are awake, as most of us are unaware of the non-physical people who surround us at all times and may “whisper something into our ear” (telepathically). Such implanted ideas can be negative, or intrusive. But they can also be positive or assistential, such as when a depressed person suddenly glimpses a new mental vista of possibility and future that removes the haze of depression and instils new hope and optimism. Helpers can sow great seeds of inspiration.
I thoroughly enjoyed Inception, but the real world of multidimensional consciousness is much more elaborate and complex than that of the dreamscapes portrayed in the movie and yet awaits a film maker to truly tackle it.

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25/4/2016

What Dreams May Come - Movie Review

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I watched What Dreams May Come in the cinema when it was first released in 1998. At the time I thought it was revolutionary. I had been studying life beyond the physical dimension for the previous two years or so, and the movie conveyed many powerful insights about death and consciousness beyond the physical that corresponded with my newly found understanding. In my youthful naivety I felt sure the movie was the beginning of a mainstream embrace of life after death, and I recall leaving the cinema feeling very exited about this inevitable enlightened future.
Almost 20 years later, the revolution has not come; understanding or even acceptance of life after death is still not commonplace. But there have been definite shifts in the mainstream approach to spiritual matters, with people moving away from conventional religious dogmas and instead exploring experience-based understandings of multidimensional life. And I can only imagine popular movies like What Dreams May Come and others since (e.g. Sixth Sense, Ghost Town, Passengers, The Others) have played some role in getting us thinking and talking about what might lie beyond our current life.
Recently I shared this movie with my children. I still enjoyed it, but I now notice some aspects that leave me feeling a bit uncomfortable and that is what prompted this review. Before I get to that here is a quick synopsis.
Robin Williams plays Chris, a medical doctor who falls in love with Annie (Annabella Sciorra) against the romantic backdrop of the Alps. A jump in time takes us to the US with Chris and Annie now married with a teenage son and daughter. Tragically their children are killed in a car crash. Some years later Chris too dies in an accident. And this is where the story introduces us to the non-physical dimensions of experience.
Chris’s difficulties in adjusting to life after death are powerfully and tangibly conveyed. He struggles to accept that he has died and does not want to let go of Annie who is in deep mourning. So he remains close to home trying to make her notice him. Even though she cannot see him, she senses his energies. But not having an understanding of the survival of consciousness this does not comfort her, as Chris would wish, but only increases her grief and makes her feel like she is going crazy. Supported by his helper Albert (Cuba Gooding Jnr), Chris eventually leaves her and finally finds himself in the actual extraphysical dimension. At first he is in his own personal dimension, created by his thoughts. This, Albert explains, is to allow him to adjust. Slowly he learns that physical laws don't apply to him anymore, that he can fly and travel at the speed of his thoughts. Eventually, Albert helps Chris to go beyond and meet some other old friends who had died before him. None of these people appear as they did on earth, a fact that accurately reflects the ability of our extraphysical body (psychosoma) to assume forms based on our intentions, and is cleverly used to dramatic effect in the movie.
Meanwhile the trauma of losing both children and husband has become too great for Annie and she kills herself. When Albert informs Chris of this he is excited, believing that he will now get to see her. He is outraged to learn that suicides do not come to the same dimensions as everybody else. Instead, Albert informs him, they end up in their own private hells, created by their self-centred obsessive thoughts that cut them off from contact with others for an eternity.
Inspired by his love for Annie, Chris is determined to track her done in this hell of hers and bring her back to the shared extraphysical reality.
It is this key part of the story line, the rescue of Annie, that misrepresents extraphysical reality enough to have inspired this review. In the movie, Albert explains emphatically that suicides are different, they cannot be saved. No one has ever brought one back. Chris stubbornly responds that no one has ever shared the bond that he and Annie share. Ultimately the rescue only takes place because of Chris’s insistence, against the advice of not only Albert but another helper he meets, and because Chris is prepared to sacrifice himself to meet Annie, that is he is ready to fully enter into her hellish mental states, to lose himself so he can stay with her for ever. This act of deep compassion is a powerful part of the story and a moving example of self-less service by meeting another in their deepest suffering. But the focus on this deeply personal and individualised love does a disservice to the profound system of love and support that exists in the extraphysical dimensions. This system is completely independent of personal romantic attachments. There are many extraphysical dimensions set up entirely to provide support to extraphysical consciousnesses in deep suffering and myriads of non-physical consciousnesses who dedicate their energies to retrieving “suicides” and others caught in their own mental hells. What drives them is not personalised romantic love, but the more impersonal love that is inspired by an awareness of the unity of consciousness and a deep yearning to contribute to the evolutionary processes that guide all actions in the more evolved dimensions of existence.
Perhaps by focusing on the romantic connection between Chris and Annie, What Dreams May Come is using a relationship dynamic that many can relate to and therefore makes the story more accessible. But in doing so the movie short-changes the audience by depriving them of connecting with the extensive network of love and support that exists in the extraphysical dimensions. This network acts ceaselessly to try and support every single consciousness however lost they might seem at a given moment and what ever dimension they may find themselves in. The intricacies and compassion of this network, to me, are far more inspiring than reliance on individualised and “special” romantic love. It is something that encourages my active participation and at the same time leaves me feeling supported and motivates to become a better person so I can make my own contribution to this multidimensional system of service.
On the other hand, The movie’s presentation of suicides as largely “lost causes” unfairly stigmatises a section of the multidimensional population that is already caught in deep suffering.
The depiction of the personalised hells experienced by suicides, but also by many others caught in torturous processes created by their own minds, corresponds closely with eye witness accounts of those who have visited non-physical dimensions through projections of consciousness. But the suggestion that those people are doomed forever, or only retrievable if they are the beneficiaries of exceptionally powerful romantic love is misleading.
Far from being “lost causes”, suicides and others who have experienced exceptional suffering are likely candidates for future roles as unusually insightful healers and helpers, because they have delved deeply into the suffering we can experience and for that reason are capable of great compassion and understanding of the suffering of others. As such they can be assured of the tireless commitment by helpers to “retrieve them from hell”.
I still consider What Dreams May come a good movie, with many moving and enlightening depictions of human interconnections and their persistence beyond this single life-time. But it could have been a great movie had it broadened its approach to the dynamics of multidimensional assistance, avoided further stigmatising suicide and not bought into the cliché of soul mates at the expense of universal love.

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8/2/2015

The existential program - our path of evolution

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This is an edited extract from the final chapter of my book Multidimensional Evolution: Personal Explorations of Consciousness

One way of looking at the evolution of consciousness is that it moves ahead in units we call “lifetimes”. Each of our physical lives is a new chapter in the journey, and with each physical lifetime, we start with a new game plan and a new set of targets and goals to achieve. In conscientiology, we call this game plan our “existential program”. This existential program is what we designed during our intermissive period prior to this current life, when our awareness was greater and we had a clearer perspective of where we came from and what we wanted to accomplish in the next physical life. We all have an existential program that is tailor-made to our circumstances, needs and abilities, and whatever your existential program may be, it is perfectly achievable by you.

The important thing to remember is that our existential programs are highly personal. What is right for one person may not be right for the next. We really need to go into ourselves and find our own answers for what is right for each of us. But there are some key principles that generally apply. Our existential program will involve overcoming or transforming at least some of our weak traits. These are aspects of ourselves that we have neglected in our evolutionary journeys so far and that we now need to address. In my case, this includes being closely and intimately involved with other people, such as my family. In most of my retrocognitions (memories of past lives), I saw myself as somewhat detached from others: aloof, distant, self-absorbed, sometimes downright cruel. In this lifetime, it has taken ongoing work both by me and my partner to maintain my emotional and mental presence within the relationship and my family life. That is my story. The things you will need to address will be different.

Another aspect of our existential programs, to one degree or another, is making a difference in the lives of others. Again, how this looks in practice will be highly individual. Just consider the contributions of the three main teachers I discuss in this book. For Waldo, helping others has meant creating landmark publications and innovative methodologies that have given rise to new ways of understanding and conceptualizing consciousness, and then establishing organizations through which to make this understanding available around the world. Leia and Pak Suyono have made less obvious of an external impact, but all three have provided direct assistance through words and energies both within and outside the body to countless numbers of people. Then there are people like Mandela and Ghandi, whose actions changed the course of nations, or like Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of the bus heralded the end of racial segregation in the USA. But actions do not have to be on that scale. For one person, raising children in a loving and supportive family home may be the main focus; for another, it might be bringing neighbors together in communal action or working with disadvantaged youth, the elderly, indigenous peoples or some other group of people in need of support. The scale and nature of our work is highly personal, but some form of reaching out beyond our individual egos to support other evolving consciousnesses will be an aspect of our existential program. Again, for some running a soup kitchen for homeless people might be part of their existential program, while for others that would be a deviation from their program, because really their task was the creation of high-level policies or systems aimed at addressing the more fundamental causes of homelessness. Only you and your helpers can know what is right for you and what is an accommodation or even a downright deviation.

Our existential programs are unlikely to involve Hollywood-style heroics, but they will involve a kind of internal heroism, of confronting ourselves and standing up for things we believe are important, even if they challenge general community standards or social expectations. There is really nothing more important in our physical lives than completing our existential program. It is the whole point of why we are here. When we eventually deactivate our current bodies, we alone will be measuring our own success. There will be no external judgment. We will judge ourselves, and we will naturally respond by either feeling very content with our achievements or by being deeply frustrated and unhappy at a job poorly done.

It is not hard to relate this to our everyday experiences. Think of how you feel when you are aware of things that you need to do but so far have left undone. What might start with a subtle sense of gnawing dissatisfaction can easily grow into negative self-talk and a sense of frustration. Contrast this with how you feel after you have completed something. In my experience, there is an inner sense of satisfaction, and if it was something really important, even passing euphoria. Now multiply those feelings a hundredfold. If we complete our life task we are utterly euphoric, on a profound inner level. If we don’t, we become depressed, melancholy, and regretful. Those states of mind will then accompany us beyond this current life, and will not only influence our subsequent experience of the extraphysical dimension but can also impact on our next physical existence. And self-mimicry applies even here! All the choices and habits that led us to not complete our existential program in one lifetime are just as likely to catch up with us again, as are the choices and habits that helped us to complete our program.

If a physical lifetime is a unit in the evolution of consciousness, a day is a unit in the execution of our existential program. The only time to adjust our course and make sure that we are on track is now, the most fundamental evolutionary moment of all. Right now is the time to work with energy, to learn something new, to deepen our understanding through research and writing, to make sure we address something we have left undone, to confront an inner weakness or make a difference in the life of another. If we do all we can every day, we can be sure to leave this life with a smile on our face.

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29/1/2015

The benefits of contemplating life after death

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Our journey through physical life will invariably end and our focus of awareness will shift to other dimensions. Commonly we call this transition "death" and most of us hold a range of fears regarding this experience, including fearing the unknown, fearing the loss of everything that is known and that is important to us, and fearing the actual process itself. To free us from these deep seated fears, meditating on death is a fundamental practice in Buddhism and other more experiential religious traditions. Contemplating death is the ultimate way of confronting the reality of impermanence; that everything changes and comes to an end. Confronting the impermanence of our body can also be a great incentive to connect with our real essence and ask ourselves: Who am I when my body dies? Who am I beyond the body? Simply holding that question in mind can expand our consciousness as we strip away the illusory parts of our current personality: our body, name, profession, accomplishments and so on. Truly embracing the reality of death can paradoxically greatly enhance our involvement in life, as we cease to be held back by our fears and insecurities and seek to make the most of the limited time we have in this life.

Here I would like to suggest another productive angle on contemplating death, namely to consider what comes afterwards. What will my life after death be like?

A common misconception is that life after death is the great unknown. Actually there are some very consistent and reliable sources that give us an insight into the reality that awaits us: accounts from those who have had out-of-body and near-death experiences and those from mediums who relay descriptions from people already on the other side. The book Projectiology by veteran projector Waldo Vieira provides a broad outline of the experiences of consciousness based on the author's personal projections and the evaluation of thousands of accounts by other researchers.

The following are some of the well established features of life in the extraphysical dimensions that I have found it beneficial to reflect on at different times.

It is quite literally breathless. After death we will no longer be breathing. As you focus your awareness on your breath right now, realize that YOU do not breath. The part of you that is thinking and feeling does not need breath. Your body is "the breather", a term that according to Waldo Vieira is used as a slang expression for intraphysical consciousnesses in some non-physical dimensions. Resting your awareness in your breathless self can be a mind expanding and joyous experience and is something you can do while engaged in formal meditation or while walking along or simply sitting at your desk or on your couch.

Thoughts cause immediate action. One of the challenges of studying projections of consciousness (out-of-body experiences) to standards acceptable to hard science is the difficulty of obtaining replicable and consistent data. Two projectors aiming for the same target location rarely report it identically and a single projector can rarely repeat multiple visits to defined targets. A key factor for this seems to be the impact of people's thoughts and emotions on their actions while projected. As they are moving towards their target something takes their attention or comes to their mind and off they go towards that new "goal". Imagine your whole self actually responding to all your passing thoughts and emotions (“I think I am going to go to the kitchen and have something to eat”, “man that guy was so annoying, I want to give him a piece of my mind”, “I am bored, I want to be at the beach”, “that girl is hot”, “God I hate this job, I wish I could be in the pub”, “she is such a bitch”, “he is cute”, and so on). Or imagine yourself fixated on a singular thought, as often happens to people who are stuck on anger, revenge or resentment for people in their lives. People who die with these unresolved fixations often continue with those fixations for long periods outside of the body, possibly even turning themselves into extraphysical intruders of the people they feel the resentment and hatred for. Taking regular stock of our state of mind while still alive, working towards a calmed and controlled mind and resolving our difficult relationships, even if only in our own mind, are invaluable in preparing us for the other side.

Thoughts can interfere with perceptions. There are other reasons why paying attention to our mind is important in preparing us for the extraphysical dimension. The extraphysical environment is highly plastic, i.e. it responds to people's thoughts. In the extraphysical dimensions our thoughts literally create realities. Assume you are outside of the body and meet someone who reminds you of an old friend, you may overlay an image of the old friend over the person you are actually meeting, or introduce things that you associate with your friend, perhaps their car, or their pet into the environment. They are not really there, but to your mind they are. The movie What Dreams May Come contains some powerful representations of people who have died and are caught in their own minds. During our nightly projections to the extraphysical dimensions, usually unconscious, many of us are literally sleep walking, wondering around in creations of our own minds (we call them "dreams") and quite unconscious to the extraphysical reality in which we are moving about. Again a great incentive to pay attention to the wanderings of our mind.

Like minded consciousnesses group together, i.e. dimensions are composed of groups of people who share the same fundamental frequency, which is determined by their underlying patterns of thoughts and emotions. All the hells and heavens we can possibly imagine, and everything in between, exists in the form of extraphysical dimensions. Because these environments are created through the collective patterns of thoughts and emotions of their inhabitants, it is more precise to think of extraphysical dimensions as states of consciousness rather that places. In other words, a hell is a dimension occupied by consciousnesses caught in their own suffering and the heavens are only as exalted as our state of consciousness allows. People with fixed beliefs, about what to expect when they die will often find just that. This may seem appealing to the faithful, but from the perspective of the evolution of consciousness it is very limiting, because such consciousnesses often spend very long periods in their "heavenly" consensus realities. These environments are very conservative, with any deviance of the accepted norms frowned upon and inhibited by the inhabitants, perpetuating the mental fossilisation that was inculcated during physical life. And of course this does not only affect those of us with religious indoctrination. The more wide-spread materialist indoctrination means that vast numbers of extraphysical consciousnesses continue to live as if they had a body, "eating" and "drinking", sleeping, and moving about like humans, rather than flying and enjoying the full extent of options on offer in extraphysical life. Our state of consciousness will determine our extraphysical destination, and so we can change our destination by changing our state of consciousness. The preparation for a rich and joyous extraphysical life starts now, while still in the body, by doing all we can to expand our mind, by challenging our fixed beliefs and preconceived ideas, by engaging with new and transcendental ideas and by looking beyond human conventions and beliefs.

The period after death will be a stage in our preparation for the following life. The cycle of rebirth is not a period of toil in the physical dimension followed by a holiday in the extraphysical dimension. Nor will our subsequent existence merely consist of some kind of blissed out heavenly enlightenment. We may celebrate our reconnection with old friends and loved ones, but we will also be busy taking stock of our past physical existence: what mistakes can we learn from? What did we do splendidly? What did we forget to do altogether? And so on. And then we will be planning the next existence, which will in some way be connected with our current one. If we make lots of mistakes now we will try to do better next time and make up for our stuff ups. If we are highly "productive" in the sense of dealing with our baggage and working towards a goal that is bigger than our self, we will be working towards a bigger goal next time. So why wait for death to plan the next life. We can start now and work towards goals that transcend our one physical life, goals that we can work towards now, continue with in the extraphysical dimension and reconnect with once we return to the physical dimension. From this perspective it becomes clear that it is never too late to start something new. It is never too late, because at whatever point we start something, we are setting an intention that will continue beyond this physical life. It is much better to spend the last few years of our life taking actions on something or starting to learn something new, then to regret never having done it. If we do the latter we are likely to die depressed and frustrated at ourselves and take that reality into the next dimension, but if we start taking actions now this drive is equally likely to carry forward and leave us feeling much more positive. Many of us have spent innumerable life-times drifting through the cycle of rebirth passively following the karmic currents we generate. Once we begin to see the connection between our current life and our own future existences we are truly starting to live life from a multidimensional perspective and take a proactive approach to both our current life and those to follow, in this and other dimensions.

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31/8/2014

Third-eye pulsations and the vibrational state

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If you have come to his article because you have experienced either of the sensations referred to in the title and you were worried about them, the first thing to know is that they are perfectly natural. The trail blazing OBE researcher Robert Monroe spontaneously began experiencing unusual vibrations when he laid down to rest or sleep. He spent some time worrying about his health, both physical and mental, until he realized that the vibrations simply related to the process of separation from his physical body. If you are in that position, you can stop worrying and start exploring the subtle dimensions of life that these sensations relate to.

I started meditating without any desire to explore multidimensionality. I didn’t even realize life was multidimensional. I just wanted to calm my mind. Yet within a very short period of time I experienced vibrations all over my body while in meditation, and developed a pulsation around my third eye that persisted even when I was just going about my daily business.

Eventually I came to understand that both those sensations relate to our energetic body. This body is comprised of the energy Eastern traditions refer to as Chi / Qui / Ki. It permeates our physical body, and extends just a bit beyond the limits of our skin. It comprises a complex system that includes channels, like the veins in our body, and distribution or circulation centers known as chakras.

Like air this energy is essential to our survival, it is our life force. It has been given a range of English names such as vital energy and etheric energy; in conscientiology it is called bioenergy, the energy of life. Because it is so much subtler than our physical body, we are rarely aware of this part of us. But when we become still and tune into it, or when we take actions to move and develop that body, then we can start to perceive it in a range of ways, including as intense vibrations and pulsations, or subtle tinglings and pinpricks.

When I started to study conscientiology, I learned a technique by which to deliberately induce the vibrational state even when I wasn’t meditating. This technique, called the closed circulation of energy, is essentially an exercise of the mind and involves mentally inducing ever-accelerating movement of the energetic body. You start at the top of your head and move the energy all the way down to your feet before returning back to the top, continuing and accelerating that cycle until reaching the vibrational state (you can find a nice illustration of this here). You can do this while laying in your bed, sitting in a restaurant or standing in a cue.

I have now practiced this technique for years. Throughout that period my third eye kept pulsating most of time, regardless as to whether I was doing the closed circulation regularly or not. I could be sitting at my desk working, playing in the park with my kids or practicing a meditation, the pulsation of energy around my third eye remained an almost constant companion. Initially I thought it was something really significant, an opening of clairvoyance for example and that any time soon I would become permanently attuned to non-physical dimensions. But a decade and a half later it appears that these pulsations have nothing to do with clairvoyance, and my abilities in that regard remain as haphazard as they ever were.

However, I have recently begun to gain a new appreciation of the role of the third eye chakra in our wider energetic system. A meditation technique taught by the Clairvision School works very deliberately with the third-eye chakra, using it as a focus point in exploring our inner world of consciousness. In the course of my still fledgling studies of the Clairvision School’s approach, I decided to combine the focus on the third-eye with the deliberate induction of the vibrational state. Instead of moving energy up and down through my energetic system in the broad sweep of the closed circulation of energies, I have started focusing my full awareness on the pulsations of my third-eye chakra and then extending that pulsation throughout my energetic body. It appears to be a very effective way of inducing the vibrational state. Before long I start to perceive the pulsation in the crown chakra at the top of my head, and the planto-chakras at the centers of my feet and then my entire energetic system enters a subtle but tangible vibrational state. The third-eye chakra has become a switch with which to crank up the volume of the whole energetic body.

And if you are wondering why you may want to do that, there are many reasons. If you are an energetically sensitive person, the vibrational state is an excellent technique to balance yourself when you have to deal with dense or challenging environments. It is a technique that helps you reclaim your energetic space and thereby also your mental and emotional space. If you are pursuing out-of-body travels, inducing the vibrational state while lying down in a relaxed position can cause the separation of your subtle psychosoma (astral body) from the physical body. And if you are interested in working more closely with non-physical helpers, regular vibrational states will help you develop an energetic micro-climate in which helpers can provide greater assistance to both physical and non-physical people in need who cross your path.

So if you are already experiencing the subtle sensations of your energetic body I encourage you to explore and develop them. And if all of this seems very abstract to you because you don’t think you have ever experienced any of the things I am talking about, but you are still reading this, I encourage you to try working with your energy and experience it for yourself.

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17/2/2014

The therapeutic use of the projection of consciousness and other psychic phenomena among the shamans of Central Australia

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The texts below are direct translations of accounts provided in their own language by three Central Australian shamans, referred to commonly as “traditional healers” or “clever people” in Aboriginal English and as ngangkari in the native Pitjantjatjara of the authors. In these accounts the three healers explain their conscious use of the projection of consciousness and clairvoyance in their healing work. They explain the multidimensional aspects of their healing work; how they fly around at night (OBEs) helping their community, and how much of their work focuses on the spirit (psychosoma) of their patient.

Australian Aboriginal culture is often described as the oldest living culture on Earth. Before European colonization 200 years ago, the people on the continent had been largely isolated from other cultures for thousands of years. The archaeological record agrees conservatively that Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for at least 50,000 years, seemingly with little cultural change. In most parts, the last 200 years of colonization have caused substantial cultural loss. But in some of the more remote areas, English is still a second (or third or fourth) language and people still live in accordance with their own cultural priorities.

The Pitjantjatjara people of the central deserts of Australia are one such remote group. The texts give us a glimpse into a multidimensional understanding that has existed for thousands of years, long before the canonical texts of the Judeo-Christian religions, the European esoteric traditions, the “New Age” movement, or the technical explorations of OBEs that started last century. As such they are a powerful piece of evidence for the universal nature of the projection of consciousness.

The texts originally appeared in The Australian newspaper and are extracts from a book about the ngangkari called Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari published by the NPY Women’s Council.

FLYING spirits, sacred tools, treatment by touch ... the traditional healers of central australia explain their extraordinary skills.

NAOMI KANTJURINY

I was only a teenager when I received the gift, which initially scared me! This power just came to me alone. I'd wander around at night with my powers, and return to my camp early in the morning. All I could think was that I must have become a ngangkari [traditional healer] for some reason. I asked my mother, "Mother, why do I drift around at night so much?" and she replied, "You must be a ngangkari then." My reaction was, "What?" and she said, "Yes, it seems that you have become a ngangkari all by yourself!"

We say wirunymankula waninyi - which means, to declare someone well and to banish the illness. The illness, or pain, can take the form of phlegm, or back pain, and this is what I specialise in. My work was as a healer, mostly helping women and children. Very often they didn't need to tell me what was going on, because I'd know already. So I'd give the appropriate treatment and I know they were good. Women and children were healed by me countless times, especially children.

In Ernabella [mission, in far northwest South Australia], people would go and see the white doctors after they'd seen a ngangkari. They'd tell the doctor they'd seen a ngangkari already and the doctors encouraged this, because it made people stronger. The white nurses would be happy as well. The only difference was, they were on a salary and I was not. I would tell them that I didn't get paid for my work. Ngangkari have always worked for free.

The touch of my hands has a healing effect. I give a firm, strong touch, and remove the pain and sickness, and throw it away from the sufferer. After their treatment they will stand up and tell me how they feel and, of course, there is always an improvement.

At night I see spirits. The kurunpa spirits talk to me. Spirits separate from the body when someone is unwell or suffering and I see them. This is how I find out they are not well. I have dog friends that help me, as well. These dogs are my friends. At night I travel around by myself to make sure the women are all right. I see everyone at night, how they are, if they are all right. Sometimes it scares me but it is my work, I have to do it. I travel alone and that is what I do.

Depressed people can feel a lot better within themselves after a ngangkari treatment. That's one of our specialities. Their spirits are out-of-sorts, and not positioned correctly within their bodies. The ngangkari's job is to reposition their spirits and to reinstate it to where it is happiest.

Some people ask me how I do the treatments that I do. I tell them that I have unique skills that are not easily explained, which I developed by myself. After a treatment, it is our task to ensure the sickness doesn't return and pain doesn't return. So we have to dispose of the pain in our special way. Ngangkari know how to do this. We have special powers in our hands. Our work is to mould the shape of the body so that it can accommodate the spirit properly. In that way, people are well. I ask people afterwards, "Are you feeling better now?" and they tell me, "Yes, I am feeling great!" Ngangkari touch people. We touch, and that is our special art and our skill.

ANDY TJILARI

When I was growing up I had three grandfathers who were all ngangkari: my mother's father, my father's father and my grandfather's brother. So I lived with these three ngangkari. Well, actually there were four, because my father was a ngangkari as well. One day my grandfather asked me, "Do you want us to give you ngangkari power, so that you can live your life as a ngangkari? You'll have to help sick people, and heal them, whether they are men, women or children. If you do become a ngangkari, the power will stay with you all your life and you'll never lose it, or be able to throw it away."

My father was observing all of this. He told me that the way I would have to heal people would be to pull the sickness out of their bodies in the form of pieces of wood, or sticks, or stones, things like that. This is so that people can actually see with their own eyes the sickness that is removed from their bodies. This is the commonly accepted way we ngangkari do our work. It is so that people can see us taking their sickness away from their bodies, which gives them a sense of removal. My father told me I'd have to make sure I showed them what I took out, so they could see it, before I disposed of it.

I said to my father, "But how? How am I supposed to do that? I don't understand how ngangkari work. How could I ever be able to do that?" He replied, "Don't worry, we'll show you. It won't be hard once you know how." So I was shown. I was given the power of a ngangkari by all my grandfathers, and I still have that power today. They taught me everything I know. They didn't tell me how to do it. They showed me. They also placed inside me the sacred objects I would need to be my tools for working as a ngangkari. These are called mapanpa.

In the past, many children became ngangkari at a very early age. Children who took an interest in the healing arts often asked to be given power and to receive training. Often this training took place, as it did for me, at a distance from camp. The ngangkari would light fires at a separate camp and they would wait for the spirits to bring them special powerful tools. During the night, when they were all asleep, all the ngangkari people's spirit bodies would start to rise up from their sleeping bodies and soar upwards. Now you know how people fly around in aeroplanes and drive around in cars? Well, for Anangu [people of the Western Desert], and for ngangkari, when they are asleep at night, their spirits move around in a similar kind of way. The ngangkaris' spirit bodies begin to fly around and to visit the sleeping spirits of other people to make sure all is well.

The spirit of a sick person is usually too sick to fly properly, and often crashes into trees. This is when the ngangkari's night time work is very useful, because they will see the injured spirit holding onto the trunk of the tree, or fallen on the ground. The ngangkari will rescue the spirit. In doing so, he is able to recognise who it is and will say, "Oh, this is such-and-such. He is not well. Poor thing, he needs help here." So he'll pick up the spirit and take him to the body and ask the sleeping person to wake up. "Wake up. Your spirit is not well. Sit up and I'll put you to rights." The person will sit up, the ngangkari will replace the stricken spirit, and all will be well again very soon. By the next day, he will be quite better. This is a very special skill which we ngangkari alone have.

While all the ngangkari are gathered in the special camps, hundreds of mapanpa will come flying in. Mapanpa are special, powerful tools. They hit the ground with small explosions, "boom, boom, boom!" The ngangkari dash around collecting up the objects: kanti that look like sharp stone blades, kuuti that resemble black shiny round tektites, and tarka - slivers of bone. Each ngangkari gathers up the pieces he wants. These pieces become his own property.

I realise all this sounds very different to all you doctors and nurses who worked so hard at university to get where you are today. You have studied so many books. But we are working towards the same goal of healing sick people and making them feel better in themselves, as you are. In that way we are equal.

MARINGKA BURTON

My father had been a ngangkari his whole life, and his mapanpa had been given to him by his father. When he finally did give me the mapanpa, I became mara ala - meaning, my hands became open, my forehead became open, and I could see everything differently. I was able to travel into the skies with other ngangkari, soaring around in the sky, travelling great distances, and coming back home in time for breakfast. Ngangkari travel around in the sky, just our spirits travelling, while our bodies remain sleeping on earth. My father taught me that. He taught me everything, carefully and slowly.

We used to go for holidays a long way from the communities, and the white people used to follow us with the ration truck to give us our food ration in exchange for dingo scalps. All that flour and food! Sugar, sweet tinned milk, golden syrup and tins of meat. I know that a lot of our people are on dialysis now. It is from that sugar we ate back then. We all know this now. It is a shame because we have always had wonderful traditional bush foods. We had all the bush medicines that were used by everybody, it wasn't part of the ngangkari's specialised work. We used the bark on the roots of the wakalpuka bush for a splint if a child broke their leg or arm. We'd put the skin of the nest of the itchy caterpillar onto burns and itchy sores; you take the nest and remove all of the droppings from the inside of the nest and wash it and then you put it on the skin. It was a fantastically good treatment for burns, rather like doing a skin graft! If somebody scratched and itched, we'd put it on that as well.

My mapanpa live in my body. I am a painter, and when I paint, my mapanpa move right up into my shoulder and sit up there, out of the way. If somebody comes to me, needing help, I would have to ease my mapanpa back into my hands again. Sometimes I would push them from one arm to the other. When I am giving a healing treatment, I push with my left hand and I extract with my right.

I work on the head a lot and I heal people if they've got a headache. If there is something serious like a car accident and we are called to attend, we go straight there without delay. People have been hurt and the terrible shock of an accident shakes the kurunpa [spirit] out of a person and so we go there to find the kurunpa and we bring it back and replace it. Without the spirit any bodily healing takes much longer. Afterwards we attend the clinics, and when they call us, we do our work courageously without fear.

In the past non-Aboriginal doctors would do their work, yet they didn't know about us traditional healers. Our traditional healers were always busy healing people at home, looking after the entire community, while the doctors did their work in their clinics. But neither knew how the other one worked. We are unable to do too much work with renal patients; we never touch their kidneys, they are too vulnerable. But we do help with pain and discomfort.

Dealing with the deceased, sometimes we can capture the spirit of the deceased and place it into the living spouse, which is a really caring and strengthening thing to do. Sometimes if a son passes away, and the mother is really sick and bereaved, the dead son's spirit is placed inside the mother. In that way everybody is happier and it ensures that they get back to their normal health more quickly and are happier and healthier during their time of grief, because it is really terrible if somebody is too sad for too long.

Sometimes I can call a spirit with a branch. Using the branch I can usher it along, into the burial place, where the spirit should be. Sometimes the spirit will leave the body and leave the burial ceremony and travel around and make people sick. Sometimes, if I see that, I use a branch to brush it along, to brush it along so it goes back to the cemetery.

See here on my elbow? That's where my mapanpa sits. I've got openings in my hand and an opening in the forehead. We say that ngangkari people are mara ala and ngalya ala, which means open hands and open mind. When you hear someone say, "Oh, he's mara ala," that just tells you instantly that she's a healer, a traditional healer, a ngangkari.

Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari (NPY Women's Council) is out now, $49.95.

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17/11/2013

Lucid dreaming and projections of consciousness

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There seems to be a range of ways in which people use the concepts of lucid dreaming and what I call “projection of consciousness” but others may refer to as “astral projection” or “out-of-body experience” (OBE). In this post I explain how those terms are used from the perspective of projectiology (the study of the projection of consciousness).

First, it is good to be aware that there are two fundamentally different approaches to understanding these kinds of experiences. One is the “psychological model”. According to this model any experiences we have, whether we call them “lucid dream” or “astral projection”, are only taking place within our own psyche. Basically, this model has the underlying assumption that consciousness is a product of matter and all our experiences take place in the brain. This model dominates most mainstream scientific research into dreams and is also the starting point for some lucid dream researchers. The other is the “projection model”. This model assumes that we can actually leave the physical body in some other body and experience ourselves on another dimension of manifestation. According to this model, consciousness is something beyond matter; consciousness is not created by matter, it simply uses matter to manifest in this dimension.

If our basic starting point is the psychological model then it makes sense to use the term “lucid dreaming” for any conscious experience that we have during our sleep state. After all, no matter how aware we are the experience has to be a subjective dream of sorts, because in our model it is not possible to have experiences beyond our physical body during sleep. From the view point of the psychological model there is no such thing as a projection of consciousness (astral projection etc.).

If our basic starting point is the projective model, however, we can start to think more carefully about the range of experiences that we can have while our body is asleep. From the perspective of projectiology, leaving the physical body happens to all of us every night. It is simply a result of our multidimensional physiology (para-physiology). As our physical body goes to sleep, our subtle body (the psychosoma in projectiology) floats out. But that does not mean that we all then have out-of-body experiences, because most of us don’t experience anything. We sleep in our psychosoma (astral body). There is no lucidity. In the projective model, the lucid dream is a particular state of consciousness that sits between an unconscious or sleep state on the one hand and the fully lucid projection of consciousness on the other.

Once we realize that every human being projects every night, we come to understand that the challenge of the out-of-body experience is not getting “out of” the body. It is maintaining our consciousness in a state of awareness during our regular slip into multidimensionality. We leave the physical body, but we sleep and dream in our extraphysical, subtle body. To paraphrase from Waldo Vieira’s comprehensive Projectiology treatise: Many people are awake in the extraphysical dimension, but most are not awake to the extraphysical dimension.

Lucid projectors regularly report encountering friends and family out of the body who are sleeping or “sleep walking” in their psychosoma.

The movie What Dreams May Come provides a great illustration of the process by which a consciousness can be in the extraphysical dimensions, but essentially confined to a world of its own creation. After the main character, played by Robin Williams, “dies” he finds himself in a beautiful world of paintings. These are paintings like those his wife used to produce. It is a familiar comforting space and he remains there until his helper (or extraphysical guide) decides that he has adjusted well enough to confront the extraphysical reality. At that point the paintings fall away and a whole world shared with many other consciousnesses becomes apparent (what William Buhlman calls a “consensus reality”). The vast majority of us move through our natural nightly projections in the same way that Robin Williams’ character did after his death; surrounded by images of our own creation.

But as we look more carefully we realize that our dreams can have different qualities to them. Some are purely psychological. For example, we may be floating just centimeters above our physical body while having a dream based purely on the inner content of our mind (fears, desires, unexpressed emotions etc.), without any external influences. In other cases we are actually projected some distance from our body, floating along and our dream involves us flying as our mind taps into the external experience and incorporates it into the dream. Such a subtle, extraphysical stimulus can be incorporated in the same way that that external physical stimuli sometimes are. For example, when the blanket has fallen off and our feet start getting cold, or when birds begin to sing early in the morning these things can become woven into our dreams as well. Clearly, the physical and extraphysical are not completely separate, as is also apparent from the fact that there appears to be a correlation between dreaming and certain physiological changes (Rapid-Eye-Movement, particular brain wave activity, etc.). From a bioenergetic perspective we know that the physical body and the psychosoma are in continuous connection through the so-called silver cord of energy. This connection appears to involve the transmission of information between the two vehicles in ways that we do not yet fully understand.

From this multidimensional perspective, a lucid dream is still a dream, i.e. an experience dominated by images created by our own mind, but one in which we become aware that we are dreaming. Something triggers our awareness, whether it is the absurdity of a given scenario – “Hang on, why am I walking around in a video game?”, or a sudden recall of our actual situation – “Hey why am I in my office? I am in bed sleeping!” Or perhaps it is simply something we have willed ourselves to do prior to going to sleep. Whatever the trigger, we become aware of the fact that we are dreaming; we become lucid in our dream. But if this is all that happens we are still dreaming. We may realize that we can create our own environment, for example by changing an unpleasant scenario into something more appealing, and start taking conscious control over our actions, but our experience is still dominated by our own thought-form creations (called morphothosenes in projectiology). In other words, we are still cut off from the extraphysical reality that surrounds us, moving about in a mental world of our creation. If we do not accept the possibility of multidimensional life, it is entirely possible that this is where we will leave it.

Being lucid in our dreams is already a great accomplishment. It feels good and can have psychological benefits and we may think that we have reached the pinnacle of our nocturnal awareness. But from a multidimensional point of view, the next step is that we break through our own mental creations and start to see the more objective aspects of extraphysical life; the next step it to actually awaken to the extraphysical dimensions. It is at this point that we start talking about a projection of consciousness. If we are open to the existence of other dimensions, then the lucid dream can represent a great springboard for our exploration. Once we gain awareness of the fact that we are dreaming, rather than focusing on creating more dream images, we can set our intention on gaining awareness of the underlying extraphysical reality (e.g. through affirmations such as “Awareness now” or “See reality now”, but also through ongoing practice and conditioning of our mind in our daily life).

So in summary, lucid dreams and conscious projections are distinct experiences. They are both on a continuum that begins with complete unconsciousness and ends with the incredible expansion of cosmic consciousness. Lucid dreams still see us essentially caught within our own mental creations, but they represent a final threshold between our own subjective inner world and potential entry into the vastness of extraphysical life. While lucid dreaming can teach us about our creative potential in all areas of our life, and thereby be of great psychological benefit, the conscious projection connects us to our sense of immortality and can be the portal to deep self-knowledge and understanding of our evolutionary journey.

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10/11/2013

0.99 Promotion on ebook version of Multidimensional Evolution

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Read Now

My publisher will be running a promotion on the ebook version of Multidimensional Evolution, which will be available for 0.99 (in any currency) for the last two weeks of November. This is a great opportunity to check out this book. I am told that this price will apply to all ebook outlets in any country although the exact date at which the promotion becomes available may vary.

I had a number of goals for this book. I wanted it to be accessible to people who are new to exploring multidimensional aspects of their being and are perhaps struggling to understand some of the things that are happening to them. At the same time, I did not just want to focus on phenomena, but explore what these phenomena mean to us on our evolutionary journey. As a result it should be of interest to those with lots of experience in these matters, but who like to keep exploring and thinking about the bigger picture of our evolution.

I wanted it to be clear and logical in its approach, but also warm, personal and accessible. That is why it is largely autobiographical rather than a more abstract “text book”, which at times would have seemed a much safer option.

The book includes some techniques: a meditation technique, a guided visualization, and a set of energy techniques. It includes accounts of projections of consciousness, of managing past-life influences and of the impact non-physical people can have on us right here and now. It also touches on the use of entheogens (or hallucinogens), on extraterrestrial consciousness and on the spiritual hierarchies that seem to have a significant influence on life on planet earth. Ultimately, it explores how we as individuals can contribute to the evolution of this planet, regardless of where we are at right now, by becoming more conscious of ourselves as multidimensional beings.

So if you are interested in any of these topics, the last 2 weeks of November 2013 are a great time to pick up this book at a bargain. (If you are reading this after that date you may have to fork out a few extra dollars, but it’s still not going to break the bank .)

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MULTIDIMENSIONAL EVOLUTION BLOG

Evidence for the "silver cord" from Australian Aboriginal knowledge

Spiritual Guidance by a Deceased Father - a personal account of an out-of-body experience

Introduction
by Kim McCaul

Spiritual Guidance by a Deceased Father
by Khaled Elomar

Inception - Movie Review

What Dreams May Come - Movie Review

The existential program - our path of evolution

The benefits of contemplating life after death

Third-eye pulsations and the vibrational state

The therapeutic use of the projection of consciousness and other psychic phenomena among the shamans of Central Australia

FLYING spirits, sacred tools, treatment by touch ... the traditional healers of central australia explain their extraordinary skills.

Lucid dreaming and projections of consciousness

0.99 Promotion on ebook version of Multidimensional Evolution

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MULTIDIMENSIONAL EVOLUTION BLOG

Introductionby Kim McCaul

Spiritual Guidance by a Deceased Fatherby Khaled Elomar

FLYING spirits, sacred tools, treatment by touch ... the traditional healers of central australia explain their extraordinary skills.

Author

About this blog

Have some input

Support my work

Archives

Categories

​About Kim McCaul

Contactmultidimensional.info@gmail.com

Introduction
by Kim McCaul

Spiritual Guidance by a Deceased Father
by Khaled Elomar

About Kim McCaul

Contact
multidimensional.info@gmail.com