Gathering Threads

Five or six centuries ago the world was flat and the sun voyaged daily through the heavens. Later generations lived on a round planet which circled a stationary sun. Yesterday our round earth still orbited the sun at a measurable speed of thirty kilometres a second, but old father sun no longer stood still. Instead he travelled much faster than our medieval ancestors believed when they pictured his daily arc across the sky. Yesterday the sun orbited our galaxy at 220 kilometres a second, while the galaxy, being only one of many, itself orbited another centre which orbited another and perhaps another. Yesterday, our earth spun around the sun which spun around the galaxy which ever outward spun while we, with relative breathtaking speed here on our tiny planet, each felt oh so steadily unbreathtakingly still.

And what of today? And tomorrow? Will the incredulous remain numb to the implications of modern physics simply because they do not open their minds? Intellectually we understand the earth spins, but perceptually it stands still. Intellectually we know we human beings are largely composed of space and energy, but perceptually we are solid. Intellectually we may know time is relative and linked to space, but perceptually time ticks by, it flows, it passes and we all drift at the same rate in its steady, measurable stream. Intellectually we may know that time is not linear, that the future is already out there and is therefore a part of now, but perceptually it is untouchable, yet to come.

Intellectual knowledge is not the same as the 'thought' referred to throughout this book. Intellectual knowledge is information acquired through reasoning. We can reason without belief. Thought, which we are, is an energy form beyond mere information: it carries the emotional charge of belief. The more conditioned we are, consciously or unconsciously, to believe in the world we are taught to see, the stronger these thoughts become. With each strengthening we reinforce our concrete view of the world. As we think, so we are and so our world is.

We find it so difficult to align our perception of the world with the insights discovered by modern science because, at root, our conditioning is so heavily to the contrary. Our conditioned beliefs are so at odds with the reality of our being that we cannot shift the way we see the world to match. We cannot see a world where we are all interconnected as a pulsating ocean of thought existing in a timeless now because we cannot rid ourselves of our conditioned belief in a world driven by cause and effect and the unfolding of linear time. The moment we are successful in undoing that conditioning we see a different world: one which makes much more sense. Are you ready to break your conditioned thoughts of cause and effect, of past and future, of flowing time? Are you ready to move beyond a perception of time, beyond the question of precognition and into the light of a world ever mirroring the shape of your own thoughts? Look at today: it is yourself.

So what do we now see? Part One presented the evidence for precognition through precognitive dreams and visions, through the eyes of clairvoyants and through the experimental work of the hypnosis project. In terms of our everyday language, we proved that, as human beings, we frequently experience the 'future' before it happens - often in great detail.

Through Part Two we have taken the fact of precognition and allied it, via science and observation, to synchronicity. Discovering that the future was illusory, we realised that thinking about time was throwing us off course. Time, we saw, was a red herring in a world where scientific reality is an everlasting now. Instead we realised that precognition was a special case of synchronicity.

We considered ourselves primarily as thought energy which materialises into the physical matter of our bodies and our personal outer worlds, rather than as physical bodies producing thought. We saw ourselves and our worlds as being the material reflection of our strongest conscious and unconscious thoughts, and we acknowledged that our unconscious conditioned thoughts generally win the day. This process was compared to the formation of standing waves in a vibrating coffee cup: where the (thought) waves are strongest they resonate and materialise.

We observed synchronicity as an indicator of personal change and psychological development. We saw that under pressure of change our unconscious conditioning rumbles, shakes and shatters, releasing old patterning as new insight breaks through. We noted that these changed thoughts emerge with such strength that they materialise in the outer world, usually in symbolic form. These outer world synchronicities, we saw, usually involve change, travel, accident, death, birth and reunion, underlining their inner counterparts of transformation. Each person experiencing synchronicity, we understood, was witnessing a fragmenting and restructuring of their personal world view based on their changed perception. These, we realised, were also the main categories of precognition.

We saw ourselves as thought, interconnected as one ocean, each hanging our individual hats on the different waves we call our bodies. Yet, we argued, unmaterialised thought knows no geographical bounds and where similar thoughts are shared, we resonate at the same frequency and tune in to each other's mirrored reflections of ourselves, like crystal glasses resonating at the same pitch. So it is that we can tune in to another person's thoughts, feelings and intentions: a phenomenon we usually define as telepathy. What we call precognition is exactly the same, since time is a red herring. In an everlasting now where time does not exist, we tune in to similar thoughts and, since we are thought, where thoughts coincide, we do too. We share thoughts, events, processes and information because we coincide.

Precognition involving another person is where, for a moment, our worlds overlap and one of us is conscious of it, whether through experiencing a vision or recalling a dream which recorded the shared resonating thought. It is therefore a kind of synchronicity as well as a kind of telepathy. Where we cross paths in resonating thought we sometimes remember. Since precognition is resonating thought we can only experience precognition of people and events that reflect our own strongest thoughts, conscious or unconscious. We considered the story of the car journey where Glen and I travelled together but each saw different things. Each person's outer world is a reflection of themselves. Each synchronicity, each precognition, is an outer world reflection of an inner world shared by two people: a world experienced where two inner paths cross.

We saw also saw that focussing our conscious thoughts under the right conditions (hypnosis, dream incubation or intense concentration) challenges our unconscious thoughts on the subject to resonate and produce synchronicity: to form material representations of the unconscious counterpart of our focussed thought. The synchronicity, we saw, may appear in symbolic form rather than as anticipated by the reasoning conscious self. We can carry out simple conscious thought processes, such as buying a bunch of orange and maroon flowers, or we can manifest the flowers through focussed thought via unconscious delivery; however these manifestations are more likely to reflect the unconscious version of the thought than the conscious intention. The more synchronicity matches our original conscious thought, the more accurate we believe our precognition to have been. If we were more adept at translating the language of our unconscious, we would discover our truly vast potential to predict our future manifestations.

This, then, is the Big Picture which explains 'how' precognition occurs, but there are still some loose threads to gather together and draw into the final tapestry:

Rather than viewing the visions of the earlier hypnosis sessions as glimpses of the future, let's consider them as manifestations of synchronicity. Following the sessions there appeared physical objects such as new shoes, images such as gold rings, concepts such as curtains meaning endings, events such as the band gig and location details such as the bar at the gig. Other people became involved as the actors in my unfolding visions including Steve, the film editor, and Sue who introduced the black and white film. Some things appeared in literal fashion, such as the shoes, while others were more symbolic, such as Steve's green jumper in the vision manifesting as his Irish accent in the outer world. Later sessions brought a wasp sting, a book, revelations, a French address, a leather satchel and, finally, the television documentary: all can be seen as near-fit symbolic versions of my original visions under hypnosis.

The scenes I saw while hypnotised had seemed dreamlike both in storyline and in symbolism. When I treated the visions as dreams and analysed them, they related to my life. I believed I was simply viewing some of my unconscious processing, much as I might in a dream, with the added benefit of alert conscious observation. This is the point, I think. Dreams are usually highly symbolic and we are rarely conscious of the fact that we are dreaming. Our dreams generally feel totally real and we have no idea that we have another life which seems to be 'the real one' too. Under hypnosis, however, I was focussing my conscious self on my unconscious dream process, so I had the magical intensive mix of conscious focus and symbolism which produces synchronicity in the shape of symbolic manifestation. The only difference between this process and the deliberate experiments aimed at manifesting items was that I was starting with the unconscious dream process and then focusing on its symbols through conscious observation and comment. In other words, the manifestation experiments used a focused conscious thought to resonate with and 'out' its unconscious counterpart, whereas the 'natural' hypnosis progressions involved consciously focussing on symbols already under consideration and reconstruction (dream processing) by my unconscious.

Now all the manifestations, all the precognitive visions seen under hypnosis, can be understood as synchronicities delivered by my unconscious mind which had been challenged (manifestation experiments) or reinforced (natural dream-processing sessions) by focused conscious thought. All these futures were cloaked in the language of the unconscious, just as synchronicities always are. We need to take great responsibility for our conscious thoughts because they can evoke resounding unconscious responses which take shape in our outer worlds.

And what of the Stevens, the Sues, the mobile phone company employees, the wasp, the market vendor who gave me the blouse and all the other people who played their parts in manifesting my future through synchronicity? Was I responsible for the roles they played in my life? The answer is simple. I was in their outer worlds too, so I was a reflection of their thoughts and synchronicities, just as much as they were a reflection of mine. They were a part of my world because we resonated to the same thought, like crystal glasses. All interactions are balanced unconsciously, even though they don't always appear to be so on the surface.

Dreams are snapshots of our conscious and unconscious thoughts on various issues usually pictured in symbolic form. As we are primarily thought, dreams really represent our true self, although this idea is a difficult one for people who identify themselves by their conscious thoughts and their physical forms alone. For those unacquainted with the language of the unconscious, the idea of really being a bundle of bizarre dreams seems outrageous!

Through symbolism our dreams work on integrating conflicting thoughts and experiences. They may reflect various stages of unresolved conflict before finally synthesising new insights. All the while the strongest thoughts, conscious or unconscious, manifest in our outer worlds. The weaker thoughts, or those 'under construction', form a blueprint of the possible shape of things to come. If they acquire the right degree of strength, they will materialise, perhaps heralded through synchronicity.

The question is, if dreams and visions seen under hypnosis 'come true' so easily, why are so few 'normal' dreams precognitive? The two key factors observed in the hypnosis project manifestations were, remember, conscious focus and symbolism. The manifestations, although symbolic, were obviously related to the consciously observed dreams and visions.

Normal dreams are not associated with the same degree of intense conscious focus and do not usually seem to manifest so obviously. However, a closer look, through the eyes of the language of dreams, reveals a different story. A common experience is to dream of the death of a child, and I am frequently contacted by people worried that such a dream is precognitive. Dreams of death generally symbolise aspects of our thoughts or our lives that are 'dying', or things we need to put an end to, depending on the nature of the dream. These 'deaths' may play out in our outer worlds as job loss, leaving a city, finally quitting an outdated attitude, overcoming an illness and so on. In these ways our strongest thoughts may be showing up in our dreams and manifesting in our lives, but because we don't understand the symbolism, we don't realise the dreams are precognitive.

Another common example is the tidal wave dream. Many people make predictions of turn of the century tidal waves because they have seen them in their dreams and believe their dreams to be literally precognitive. Instead they should be looking at their own lives where they have usually repressed huge emotions (water symbolises emotions) which will overwhelm them when they break through, heralding great turning points. The tidal wave dreams are potentially precognitive if the dreamer takes no preventative action, but because most people do not understand symbolism, they do not realise the fact. They await the world's doomsday instead of paying attention to defusing their own.

Our dreams can be seen, therefore, as symbolic blueprints of the shape of things to come, reflecting our inner worlds, our true selves. What we see in the mirror of life are our strongest thoughts manifested, while what we see in our dreams are the possibilities. Some will gather strength and materialise and some will fade out of the blueprint, depending on how our dreams eventually resolve the various issues.

I am often asked why we need to interpret our dreams if dreams are a natural process of integration anyway. Most people have at least one recurring dream or recurring dream-theme. These are dreams which are 'stuck' in trying to resolve an issue, so they endlessly repeat, going round and round the same old scenes getting nowhere. A good dream interpreter can take a more objective view of a recurring dream and interpret it to reveal the conflict the dreamer is stuck in. With the benefit of this insight the dreamer can usually consciously apply herself to resolving the conflict once and for all. Usually the recurring dream stops, along with its outer world reflection, as soon as the issue is addressed. Here we see again the importance of adding conscious focus to an unconscious process to 'out' it and become enlightened. This is the power of dream interpretation.

Most of your dreams will naturally resolve your inner conflicts in time, but if you learn to interpret your dreams immediately and act upon them by applying conscious focus, you will accelerate resolution and all the good things that come with it. Dream interpretation helps you to know your true self more fully and to work towards your best expression.

Interpreting your dreams and acting upon them speeds up your personal development and the expression of your best blueprints, so more of your best dreams will 'come true' while your warning dreams will be defused. Learning symbolism will also help you to realise just how many of your dreams are precognitive in a symbolic way. You can also play the game backwards and interpret the symbolism in the mirror of your daily life to understand the inner conflicts you need to attend to.

The dreams which seem to be more literally precognitive are mostly those resulting from tuning in to others. These also seem to be the most obvious precognitive dreams and the easier ones to discuss since they need little understanding of symbolism. The important point is not to get so carried away with the excitement of having tuned in to someone else's life (with real proof!) that you overlook the fact that the tuning in says something about your own inner world. You were only there because you resonated in thought, so you need to take the time to identify those thoughts and still interpret the dream! Imagine, for example, the excitement I felt with my Lotto dream (Chapter 1). I had my dream journal in one hand and the lotto results in the other: the proof of precognitive dreaming! When I later interpreted the dream and the event I realised that I was conditioned, at that time, to believe that 'I always get so near, but never near enough'. Learn from your precognitive dreams and move on.

There are plenty of well-meaning but incompetent clairvoyants advertising their services alongside the charlatans that inevitably are out to make a buck out of people's gullibility in times of despair, but there are also those whose skills seem to be genuine. This section discusses precognition in relation to genuine clairvoyants.

The four clairvoyants interviewed in this book generally agreed that time is irrelevant: either there is 'no time' or 'the only time is now', which fits with the notion of the ever-reflecting now presented in this book. They also agreed that they predict probable, possible or likely future outcomes, which is in alignment with the blueprint shape of possible things to come. They all saw the necessity for their clients to take responsibility for their own futures, which accords with the perception of our outer worlds as the material form of our strongest thoughts.

Their additional contribution towards the study of precognition was that they all believed some form of spirit (either Spirit, spirit guide or deceased person) helps with their readings. This is a dimension which has not entered our discussion so far.

The picture I have painted until now portrays us all as interconnected thought energy materialising in parts into physical form. Each person that exists in physical form was shown as the manifestation of their true self's strongest thoughts. No doubt you therefore imagined that each true self materialises into a body. But need this be the case? If we choose not to materialise, do we still perceive of ourselves as individual people without form, or do we diffuse more into the flow of the ocean of oneness? I do not intend to give answers here, but merely wish to make sure you give yourself a perception check. Reality, remember, is thought energy manifesting as matter, not the other way around!

My personal feeling sways towards a notion that since all thought is accessible through the interconnected ocean, and since time is a red herring, all thought, 'past, present or future', exists now. People whose physical form has faded and passed from view remain, as impregnated thought, within the ocean. We can play all sorts of labelling games from this point. We can talk spirits, ghosts, guides, angels, fairies, divas, dissociated parts of the self, aliens from outer space or pink elephants - but if all thought is interconnected, the labelling truly becomes redundant. In tuning in to invisible help, we are tuning in to all that is, of which we are both a part and the whole.

To this extent I believe genuine clairvoyants have a better developed system of access to the ocean of thought, Jung's collective unconscious, our dream images, our blueprints. Nonprofessional seers in this book explained that their visions tended to occur unbidden and that they could not control them or summon them up at will, yet clairvoyants seem to be able to do this. Some say, 'I can only tell you what I see,' but even this indicates they don't have to sit around waiting for the unbidden moment: they can perform within the time frame of the reading.

I have described precognition as an experience related to tuning in to another person because their inner thoughts resonate with ours, or as synchronicity due to emerging insights which manifest in our lives, or as an extension of our dream process gathering strength and reflecting our strongest thoughts into outer world materialisation. In summary, precognition for the nonprofessional has been portrayed as inescapably bound up with their own inner personal development and thoughts. Yet a professional clairvoyant is expected to read for anyone, regardless of whether the client's inner thoughts have any overlap with the clairvoyant's own personal world. How can they do this?

Perhaps they are incredibly evolved beings whose inner world experience is so vast that they can find resonance with anyone. I don't think so. My suggestion is that they have learned how to connect through the ocean of thought with the reservoir of all inner experience and use this, without necessarily understanding how, as a tuning fork which vibrates with their clients’ strongest or emerging thoughts. This leaves the clairvoyant as the intermediary, relaying and interpreting the points of resonance to identify their clients' blueprints. This also fits in with two of our clairvoyants' description of the process as being the ‘courier’ or the 'messenger' only. As human beings I guess they perceive a sensation of tuning in through a 'person', a spirit rather than a giant tuning fork! As they home in on areas of their clients' blueprints which resonate with family, friends and spouses, they find it easy to paint the physical, bodily expression of the thought forms. Hence they genuinely 'see' and can describe people, alive or dead, who are important to us.

By alerting us to our blueprints and our emerging thoughts clairvoyants can predict the possibilities ahead. It is then up to us whether we go with the flow or take actions to accelerate or diffuse what the psychic sees. Free will remains ours.

Clairvoyants may also, I believe, influence the way we deal with our life through unwitting hypnosis or neurolinguistic programming (Chapter 4). We have already seen how, under certain conditions, focused conscious thought frequently challenges the unconscious to manifest itself through synchronicity (Chapter 11). I firmly believe that along with their natural talents of reading our blueprints and predicting the chain of events to come, clairvoyants also create the ideal conditions, through a reading, for the client's focused conscious thoughts to stir the unconscious to manifest in material form according to a changed agenda.

Yet throughout this discussion of possible futures and personal responsibility, the clairvoyants interviewed here still had a suspicion that some form of pre-determined destiny operates. How can we account for this? Are some thoughts irreversible and therefore destined to materialise? This leads us to the final thread to be gathered into our picture: 'The Wright Brothers' documentary!

Under hypnosis I was asked to describe a predetermined event which would take place on 2 January 1997. I saw several scenes which turned out to be an accurate symbolic version of a televised documentary on the Wright Brothers on the prescribed day. (See full details and discussion, Chapter 4). In summary I was confused: did I indeed foresee a predetermined event, and if I did, was it the screening of the documentary or the Wright Brothers' invention of the plane that was predetermined? Did I tune in to find a resonating thought which matched my interest in 2 January (the television programmer perhaps)? Did I find the documentary on the big tuning fork of the collective ocean of thought, like a real professional? Or did I, in accordance with all the other hypnosis project results, focus my conscious thoughts on the dream material of my unconscious, stirring it up and producing the outer world synchronicity, the manifestation in the shape of the television documentary? Just think about it: if I apply the results of the rest of hypnosis project, then I created the screening of the television programme that you might have watched on that same night too. To test this out, I took a closer look at the symbolism of the television documentary to see if it matched my inner personal development at the time. Hold your hat, believe in the paradox fairy, as science does, and read on!

The documentary concerned mankind's breakthrough into mastery of the air through the invention of the plane. On a personal level I was experiencing my final hypnosis experiment and I was on the verge of making my own personal breakthrough into mastery of the mind (air symbolises the mind). Until that point in history, mankind had conquered the land (physical self), the water (emotional self) but not the air (the mind). Now that I have put the final touches to the last chapters in this book, I can clearly see the reflections of my own inner mastery of the mind. I take confidence from the fact that it was the Wright (right) Brothers who achieved this in the outer world television show that reflected my inner progress back to me!

I saw sufficient symbolic connections (too complex to relate) between the documentary and my inner thoughts and progress to satisfy me that I may easily have manifested the event of sitting on the sofa and switching on the television, perhaps even of creating the screening of the show on that date. This is the result of reasoning according to theory and experience, but I realise it may seem incredible.

Or was it, after all, a predetermined event? Under hypnosis I reported both predetermined and nonpredetermined aspects. Only the following elements were seen as being predetermined: camera, planes, famous race, metal frame construction and bright blue breaking through from under the ground (thought to be the vision of sky from the flying position). In other words, translating the symbolism, the predetermined elements were seen as the use of the camera, a race (i.e. several groups involved in competition), the development of metal-framed planes and a breakthrough in the form of an idea.

On my inner level my breakthrough was from the unconscious (underground) into the conscious mind (blue sky: air) to achieve mastery of the mental plane. On my outer level I saw a television documentary reflecting my own breakthrough. In accordance with the laws of synchronicity, the outer world frequently reflects what is still breaking through, which explains why it took me another week to recognise the fact consciously.

In historical terms I can only assume the Wright Brothers were going through their own processes of mental breakthrough which their outer world achievements mirrored.

Of much greater significance than the Wright Brothers or myself, however, was the evolution of mankind's mental processes. Man's evolution, according to biology and geology, progressed from a soup of wayward chemicals floating in the primordial sea, through to creatures with basic brains capable of maintaining the physical side of life, through to animals with emotional centres in their brains, through to the evolution of our brains today, complete with their capacity for higher mental processing and reasoning. According to my theory, of course, these are progressive manifestations of our strongest thoughts: mere reflections of our true being. Perhaps these stages represent the materialisation of our mass conditioned perception of life. It may take just as many millennia to undo the perception, but perhaps we have to evolve to a point of conscious understanding before we can see the folly of our beliefs, of our fabricated illusion of a world.

Mankind's evolution can therefore be seen as an evolution of consciousness, an enlightenment which, as a process, will finally reveal the ultimate reality of our being. While each of us in our own individual way is personally evolving, we also, as part of the whole human race, contribute to the overall evolution of our mass consciousness. Since synchronicity heralds what is about to break through, perhaps the fact that several countries were simultaneously working on developing a flying machine symbolised a forthcoming mass insight into the nature of mind and how to gain mastery of it. Compared to the time span of mankind's evolution this mastery may well be imminent. In evolutionary terms, I am suggesting that this process has been approaching inevitability, and therefore perhaps predetermination, for millennia. Perhaps that is what I touched during this hypnosis session.

Coming down to earth, I feel free will is our individual right of expression, but that the hint of predetermined destiny, which the clairvoyants sense may be the overriding current of the evolution of mass consciousness, the strength of which can sometimes topple the strongest free will and carry it along in its tide.

I cannot tell you scientifically how, as thought, we began. I can only tell you about the overlaps between my experiences, my experiments and the advances of modern science and how I explain these. I can only tell you that what we see is what we truly and emotionally believe, consciously and unconsciously, and that the mirror of life reflects those thoughts back to us, moment by moment. I can tell you that riding with the paradoxes, as science does, is the gateway to a new level of understanding. I can tell you that change exists in a timeless world, for timeless does not mean no time. It is rather a moment of layered simultaneous possibilities, those which you see in the outer world being those reflecting your strongest beliefs. All is out there and all is potential. All is in the same moment and the gap between the ultimate reality of what is and what we actually see is the reflection of the gap in our understanding. We live an illusion according to our strongest beliefs, but we are, in the same moment, all belief, so all reflections, all possibilities are ready to fall into focus depending on our moment of choice.

Have you seen the Magic Eye pictures which, at first glance, are simply two-dimensional colourful, repetitive patterns? As you look more deeply and focus your eyes beyond the surface of the picture, a three-dimensional world jumps into view. Reality is a three dimensional Magic Eye picture containing, at a deeper level, an infinity of all possible worlds, four dimensional and perhaps beyond. Whichever one we focus on through belief is the one we see. With faith, all should be accessible. The picture and all possibilities within it exist in the one moment. The choice of depth of focus and belief also exist in the same moment. Is life simply reducible to a scientific mechanism, a kind of giant Magic Eye, with no greater purpose than existence? Or is there meaning behind the mirror?