New Dawn – World's Most Unusual Magazine

Category: Paranormal

  • Who’s Afraid of the Paranormal?

    Who’s Afraid of the Paranormal?

    From New Dawn Special Issue 10 (Dec 2009)

    It usually goes something like this: average family live peaceful existence in house. Then one day, objects mysteriously relocate. The dog barks at unseen intruders. The tap that usually streams hot water now vomits a liquid the colour of blood. Strange noises are heard in the middle of the night; on the bed, the billowing duvet outlines the shape of a body that no one can see. The youngest child becomes fluent in a previously dead ancient language before scribbling cryptic words such as REDRUM all over the walls (hint: read in front of a mirror). The mother turns hysterical, the husband tries to rationalise the unusual hubbub only to succumb to paranoia followed by the sudden acquisition of otherworldly powers, such as freezing objects with his breath and fingernails that turn into meat cleavers whenever he loses his cool.

    Modern paranormal movies have come a long way from the halcyon days of grainy black and white film noir when a good fright involved a poor choice of short cut through the cemetery at midnight. Latter-day blockbusters such as Paranormal Activity, The Sixth Sense and X-Men not only leverage the visual baggage we carry in our cultural psyche, they also rely on cutting-edge special effects to bring these myths to life and peel several more micro-layers of skin off our collective hides. Just like zombies, they come crawling into our homes, hell-bent on scaring the living daylights out of the living. And we can’t get enough of it.

    Modern society seems obsessed with the paranormal, and yet our comfort level with it is 50-50: we are at the same time curious and repelled by that which we cannot see. This dichotomy is due in part to how we perceive the world around us. Or to be more precise, how we don’t.

    The human eye is an apparatus whose function is severely restricted. While our visual cortex offers a generous spectrum that is 400-790 Terahertz wide, it is nevertheless a very narrow window through which we can see the Universe; insects, for example, can see well beyond us into the ultraviolet. Still, reality is far wider in scope, with gamma and X-rays, infrared, and microwaves and so on. No wonder we are afraid of the dark, there’s so much more of it around. And it takes up much more space than we sometimes dare imagine.

    It’s not just paranormal movies that have progressed over time; our relationship with the unseen has evolved as well. In its modern connotation the adjective ‘paranormal’ denotes events or phenomena that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. However, had you been alive 5,000 years ago the paranormal would have been considered very normal. It was a subtle, yet integral part of the whole universal prism: an agreeable lodger cohabiting the same condominium whom you saw by appointment.

    Even flying Tibetan monks and other extraordinary feats by avatars who transformed water into wine and raised the dead were once considered ordinary achievements by extraordinary people in control of their full co-creative power. Shaman once levitated colossal stones into massive stone circles using nothing more than their guided will-power which, scientifically-speaking, is a series of electromagnetic impulses. Somewhere along the line we lost that knowledge and ability, and it’s taken 2,000 years and Princeton’s P.E.A.R. laboratory to prove that a correctly-applied frequency does indeed levitate rock. So if ordinary people are capable of such ‘paranormal’ feats then these powers are within reach of anyone who wishes to master them.

    All that is needed is an unshakable belief that it can be done. And lots of practise. And there’s the rub: our curiosity in the paranormal exists today because we see in it a seed of truth, that welling within us lies the ability to create whatever we so wish. We are gods in our own fashion, and there are days in our lives when our will manifests in such a way that we believe it. But something happened that made us frightened of wielding this awesome power.

    When the Supernatural Became Scary

    You could say that humans lost confidence in themselves, and in time we began to see the spook in everyday things. From that point on the incredible turned into superstition. Take the much-maligned ‘cemetery’, a word whose Greek origin means ‘a place of sleep’. Sleep equates to rest, hardly cause for alarm. So, how did we become such a frightened species of carbon units? Our recent history provides us with a good excuse.

    Much of the shift from normal to paranormal happened during the Dark Ages. Famine, pestilence, plague, slaughter, pillage, barbarian invasion, social decline, cultural collapse – there are good reasons why this era is so aptly named. These were times when humanity seriously lost the plot. And stirring this concoction of doom was the new kid on the block, the Roman Catholic Church, whose intolerant attitude to anything outside the confines of its orthodox view was in full zeal by the 7th century.

    Following the first ecumenical council in Nicea in 325 CE, it was agreed by the bishops in attendance that only a select number of Christian gospels should be included in the official church canon. What was removed (or covered up) were such esoteric writings as the gospels of Thomas and of Mary Magdalene. In so doing the Church began its systematic dismantling of feminine power throughout the known world. The low point culminated with the burning of millions of women falsely accused of witchcraft. But we are getting ahead of our selves.

    Of importance to our discussion is the preoccupation by the Church fathers of all things evil. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of conflicting ‘barbarian’ hordes, all of Europe was awash in blood – literally. The emerging Church saw this time as an opportunity to flex its muscle upon a largely illiterate society, and fear would become its most useful tool. And what better way to bring people to the protective bosom of the Church by making evil the culprit in every situation. Evil brought the plague to your town, evil took your wife to hell; evil, not malaria, consumed your children, evil was the vermin behind your failed harvest.

    By the 11th century evil was the stranger skulking on every corner. And who better to personify this unseen danger than some misshapen character called the devil. With the Church pushing God as the supreme light, a mirror-character was required to personify everything that was outside orthodox scripture, or ‘good’. Let us remember that the success of any conflict has always been defined by who we chose to accept as the scapegoat, and in this grab for the control of human souls, ‘Lucifer’ became it.

    ‘Devil’ stems from the Greek diavolos, meaning “one who throws across.” So far, nothing too malicious or paranormal about that. But given the Church’s disposition towards pagans (whom the church also considered evil, even if pagan simply means “one who lives in the country”) it was not long before Pan, the pagan god of fecundity and nature, was retrofitted to become the horned, half-man half-fawn creature and the Church’s best recruitment officer. Thus, our irrational fear of the devil, the central protagonist in the land of the paranormal, is nothing more than a misplaced belief: fear of the very force that gives birth to everything in life, including ourselves: nature.

    The Origins of Our Irrational Fears

    Strictly speaking, to fear the paranormal is to fear the unknown, and in today’s societies that means the fear of evil. But what is evil? There are several schools of thought on this. The origin of the word comes from the old English yfel, whose roots are linked to eve, the primordial woman. Given the Church’s position on the divine feminine, the connection seems very plausible. After all, we have been brainwashed to believe that it was this luckless woman (whose Hebrew origin havva and hayya means ‘living’) took a bite of the apple of knowledge which led to her expulsion from Paradise, along with that of her husband Adam. Since then, all patriarchal societies have had a green light to blame, nay, persecute women for any ill that befalls them. So far this is in complete concordance with the patriarchal position of the Church.

    But wait. That apple: wasn’t it a serpent who whispered bons mots into Eve’s ear and made her partake of the forbidden fruit? And isn’t the serpent one of the many disguises worn by the devil?

    So we are made to believe. The devil, of course, also went on to inherit other roles such as the vampire bat, the goat, the rooster, flies, even the black pussycat. Yet despite the obvious brainwashing, our heart rate revs closer to red whenever we see the image of the goat superimposed on an inverted pentagram. This was yet another concoction by the Church. People have an equally irrational fear of snakes, quite possibly for the same reason (myself included, and yes, I was raised as a Catholic). If you doubt any of this, watch people on the street give a very, very wide berth to any passing black cat.

    Such associations, once ingrained in the subconscious, particularly by seemingly trustworthy political and religious offices, can take generations to overcome. Take for example the paranormal connotations surrounding the number 13. To this day many prominent buildings in the western world have no 13th floor – a supernatural feat in itself, when you think about it, because the 14th floor IS the 13th, the upper part of a building doesn’t float in mid-air!

    Collective fear of the number 13 is such that it even has its own adjective: paraskevidekatriaphobia. In America up to 21 million people are negatively affected by this number whenever it occurs on a Friday, costing the economy an estimated $800 million in lost revenue. It can be argued that such a mass belief inevitably becomes self-fulfilling, and yet in Holland accidents, fires and thefts occur at a lower rate on this day because people are generally more vigilant of the forces of evil.

    Thirteen’s drawing of the short straw can be traced back to two pivotal events in history. The first occurred on Friday, 13 October 1307. On this most infamous of days, orders from the Vatican enforced to exterminate the entire order of the Knights Templars. The original Templars – along with related Orders such as Cathars, Albigensians and Bogomils – pledged allegiance to the divine feminine, not to Rome. They served Isis, Mary Magdalene, and honoured the rising of Sirius, whom ancient societies equated with universal wisdom and truth.

    The second event goes back to the negation of the divine feminine in everyday life by an encroaching patriarchal society through such things as the superseding of the 13-month lunar calendar by the 12-month solar cycle. In ancient traditions, lunar is equated with feminine, due to the Moon’s influence on water and fertility cycles; and solar with masculine, due to its explosive ferocity. This change started as far back as 1300 BCE; it was further implemented by the Romans and later enforced by its secular arm at the Vatican.

    It only takes a small effort to understand how such concepts can alter our perception of reality, and yet to this day the association between things evil or paranormal and the 13th and/or Friday continue to be reaffirmed, albeit for commercial exploitation: films such as Resident Evil 5 and Friday the 13th were released on… you guessed it; not to mention one of my favourite albums, Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut LP. Even 2012 was released on Friday, 13 November 2009. While marketers see such associations as harmless fun, all it does is help reinforce and prolong an institutional belief system.

    Our Bonds With the Unseen Universe Were Severed

    Our relationship with the paranormal is to a large degree shaped by lingering superstition. Superstition is what remains after the underlying understanding behind a fact has been distorted or lost. Take the devil-serpent association: the serpent or dragon has forever been a symbolic representation of one of nature’s fundamental motions of energy, the meandering pathways of magnetism that slide along the Earth. These are the same energy pathways upon which sit countless sacred sites – the temples once designed to help you reconnect with the invisible world.

    In the old days you did not need a bishop to act as intermediary (and an unreliable one at that) to help you speak to God. You could do it all by yourself by visiting a pyramid or a stone circle. Back then it was perfectly acceptable to eat the apple of knowledge, because with total knowledge comes total understanding, and with understanding comes a lack of fear. And without fear all that you don’t see suddenly becomes your friend. As Jesus once taught, “Know Thyself.” But such self-awareness did not allow room for the rising class of religious middle men aiming to keep a safe distance between you and God. There’s a strange irony here, for in Latin, the origin of the word ‘religion’ is religio, which means ‘reconnecting’. Yet by painting a supreme creative force as external rather than internal, religion is designed to do the very opposite. And what lies beyond the physical and the rational belongs to God; and the rest, to some seemingly very unpleasant and ugly entities.

    Our symbiotic relationship with the paranormal has shifted over the course of time, and demonstrates how far, as a global society, we have shifted from total understanding to ignorance.

    It also makes for a gripping script. Mass consciousness evolves in periods of roughly 4,320 years. During each period humanity strives to have a collective experience. Between 6628-2308 BCE cultures such as those in Europe worked with the feminine principles of nature: cooperation, nurturing, the greater good of the tribe, and the implementation of a lunar-based culture.

    By working with the life-affirming laws of nature, people were more sensitive to the forces that surround and permeate the tangible world, and were thus far better attuned to its subtleties. They sourced locations rich in magnetism, where even the force of gravity is lessened. In harnessing these basic principles they forged a closer bond with the unseen universe. The payback for such a relationship was the maintaining for thousands of years of a society that flowed in perpetual rhythm with all life. Some native cultures, such as the Aborigines, to some extent, still maintain such abilities of psychic perception.

    Many of our ancestors’ shamanic experiences of the otherworld were carved in stone – from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Asian temple reliefs. Myths were constructed in which the acts of the gods would be memorialised for times to come, and many of their stories describe the physics of the universe. In the Rig Vedas there exist descriptions of nuclear processes now familiar to particle physicists.

    Several of the parables in the New Testament of the life of Jesus are paranormal events in themselves, and they are brimming with esoteric wisdom and hidden information. The story of the miraculous catch of precisely 153 fish which occurs in the last chapter of St. John can be deconstructed to reveal a geometric framework revealing the Kabalistic Tree of Life as well as numeric values of great cosmological significance.

    That great temples should be constructed at locations rich in magnetism became an extension of this relationship with the paranormal. The practise was also an insurance policy for later times: should people ever become too immersed in the physical world and lose the ability to see the subtle one, they at least know where to go to reconnect. To help communication with the invisible, names were ascribed to entities who provided humanity with specific things, such as agriculture, the arts, or weather forecasting. These would in time be honoured – not worshipped – as gods, and visiting a temple would be like attending a meeting with family, such was the close relationship with otherworldly forces. And because there was no need for competition, the relationship between worlds benefited everybody. Indeed, this was Paradise.

    The act of dying was regarded merely as a stage one goes through in the bigger scheme of things, a boat trip of the soul to ports on the sea of Infinity. As the Pyramid Texts assert, Egyptian temple culture stressed the importance of the conduct of the soul during its human incarnation, and the meticulous rites of passage afforded the deceased were a matter of great importance. Again, the cooperation with those paranormal forces called ‘gods’ was paramount in aiding the transfer of a bunch of molecules – the body and its soul – from one form and toward another. Death was the continuation of a great journey, not a destination. It was even cause for celebration.

    Around 2600 BCE things change dramatically. A sudden reversal of weather and an abrupt rise in sea-levels coincides with the next 4,320-year phase of human consciousness evolution. The feminine-cooperative experiment is slowly dismantled in favour of solar, masculine-driven power which has led us to experience the opposite properties of the divine feminine: control over cooperation, power of the few over the many, scarcity replaces abundance, fear trumps trust, knowledge slides into ignorance.

    Existing sacred sites are adapted from lunar to solar, and inevitably, the places of connection with the world of the unseen are corrupted; understanding is lost and slowly the whole-istic system disintegrates into superstition. By 1300 BCE the climate deteriorated further. By the time of the Aztec and Mayan cultures, unlike the former keepers of the temples, the view of the invisible universe held by the newly entrenched priestly caste had become so distorted that it neither understood the relationship with nor possessed the ability to control the gods. Of course, no one ever did, it always had been a relationship. Out of an irrational fear of the wrath of the spirits, the priests condemned thousands of people to be slaughtered in open ball-courts to appease the spirit world, who never had it in for humanity in the first place.

    The communicating cord with the invisible frayed, and the distance between god, good and hu-man, which the Church would eventually exploit, widened into an unbridgeable chasm. At this point humanity began to approach death with dread, and the gods of yesterday became the ghosts of today.

    You could not write a better paranormal movie script, only this one is scarier, considering the many millions who died in the fruitless pursuit of appeasement.

    It took until the late Victorian era for science – or a tiny band of enlightened scientists, at least – to engage with the bogey man. Just as Bram Stoker was putting the finishing touches to his canine-toothed protagonist, across the Irish Sea, in London, a group of gifted men of their day were busy inking an experiment that would prove the survival of the soul after death. The Society For Psychical Research was a brain trust of people such as William Crookes, who gave us the cathode ray tube, and Oliver Lodge, who, along with Tesla, gave us radio.

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    Lodge’s fascination with life after death had begun whilst a member of the Ghost Club. Later he designed a posthumous experiment whereby he would communicate from the otherworld using an alpha-numerical code based on sound. While the experiment appears to have worked shortly after his death in 1940, his initials, along with those of all the past presidents of the Society For Psychical Research reappeared in the 1990s, encoded in a number of those otherworldly geometric shapes created by sound, the crop circles.

    Like the ancient Egyptians before, it appears these luminaries succeeded in proving that life is nothing more than a bunch of molecules and frequencies in a state of transition from one form into another.

    It could be that most of the life that exists beyond the veil is not so paranormal after all. Modern research into parapsychology and quantum states suggest that a substantial part of it is us reassembled in a super-human, superabundant state. And our concept of this invisible world whether in film or in the mind, is shaped by our relationship with those forces that lie but a whisper away from our breath.

    So whenever you next celebrate Helloween, sorry, Halloween remember that this celebration of accelerated tooth-decay once was borne of higher, less menacing ideals: originally the Celtic feast of Samhain, it was the time of tribute to the spirit world, to those who’d gone ahead to protect those in the physical world to survive the dark, cold months of winter. And in so doing, we rise safely out of the darkness and into the light each Spring.

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  • Mysteries, Miracles & Parapsychology

    Mysteries, Miracles & Parapsychology

    From New Dawn Special Issue 9 (Sept 2009)

    Parapsychology is full of anecdotal accounts of strange occurrences, which cause many people to simply shake their heads in disbelief.1 The phenomena of parapsychology grade into the mysteries and miracles that are the boon and bane of much religion. After all, to use a Christian example (and in no way am I making a statement about Christianity per se), not only can Jesus and the saints perform miracles, but so can Satan and his cohorts!

    When it comes to the question of whether or not parapsychological phenomena are real, for many people the stakes are high, as the answer has the potential to confirm or deny their worldview. Some are incredulous when it comes to telepathy, even though it has been statistically demonstrated time and again in laboratory settings, whereas the credulity of others stretches much, much further.

    In popular culture often the reality, or not, of the paranormal (viewed popularly as “miracles”) is seen as confirming, or refuting, one of the fundamental tenets of many religions, namely life after death. As the late parapsychologist and University of Virginia (Charlottesville) psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918 – 2007) wrote,

    Some persons can segregate beliefs about different aspects of non-material existences and events. This would be particularly likely to be true of persons who have made a special study of psychical phenomena…. However, I think that members of the general public do not usually make such a distinction. For most of them, a belief in life after death almost entails a belief in miracles, such as the phenomena described in the Bible, and also a belief in what we call paranormal cognition. Conversely, members of the general public who do not believe in life after death are also likely to be skeptical about all kinds of paranormal phenomena, the recognition of which would imply for them a soul that would survive bodily death.2

    The Incredulity Meter

    I am absolutely convinced that telepathy is real, even if a somewhat fickle and uncontrollable phenomenon. Given the choice between a telephone and telepathic rapport to communicate an important and specific message, I will use the phone. In my opinion there is nothing miraculous about telepathy, although how it occurs remains a mystery (there is still no generally agreed upon theory as to the mechanism for telepathic transmission).3 I should note, however, that I always attempt to maintain a healthy skepticism about any particular claim of telepathy (it is human nature to be disingenuous, or to fool one’s self), but there are plenty of well-documented cases of telepathy in the literature, and I have had my share personally.

    My incredulity meter really begins to perk up when it comes to physical parapsychological phenomena, such as psychokinesis and levitations, materialisations of solid substances out of “thin air,” or the ability to withstand physical trauma, such as walking on hot coals or applying extreme heat or fire directly to the skin without damage. Lacking good, indeed virtually impeccable, documentation for certain extreme feats of this nature, I instinctively dismiss them as nonsense, or at the least remain agnostic.

    Of all the cases that register high on my incredulity meter, however, some are classics and though they may boggle the imagination, it is difficult to dismiss them. Here I will focus on particular aspects of two such celebrated examples from the history of parapsychology, one from the seventeenth century and the other from the nineteenth century. They are, in the opinions of some, intimately tied to religious beliefs and the concept of miracles.

    The Flying Saint

    Saint Joseph of Cupertino (San Giuseppe da Copertino, 1603-1663; born Giuseppe Maria Desa in Cupertino, southeastern Italy) was considered rather dull witted (in modern terms, he may have suffered from learning disabilities), and said to possess a violent temper (a point we will return to). Joseph was extremely pious, however, and became a Franciscan friar. Joseph exhibited various mental psychic phenomena; for instance, it is said he was aware of the thoughts of penitents and knew if they were not fully honest and forthright during confession. Due to his mental deficiencies, he could learn only a small amount of material at a time. When preparing for exams he simply studied one specific topic, and then prayed that that would be the very subject, of all possible subjects, that would be asked of him – and so it was. Was this an example of precognition, or was Joseph telepathically influencing or accessing (perhaps unconsciously) the examiners in terms of the questions they would put to him?

    Joseph was also said to have the power to heal the sick. But it was his bodily levitations, his literal flights in the air, that he is most famous for, and which by many are considered to be absolutely mysterious and miraculous, either justifiably earning Joseph the appellation of Saint (he was canonised in 1767), or in the skeptic’s opinion dismissal as either a fraud, or at the least someone who incited hallucinations among those witnessing the supposed levitations. At first glance, St. Joseph’s flights rank high on my incredulity meter.4

    Although we are separated from St. Joseph by three and a half centuries, and his time still contained a strong element of superstition and anti-scientific sentiment (after all, the Inquisition was in full swing during Joseph’s lifetime, persecuting Galileo in 1633), it is still difficult to dismiss all of the varied eyewitness accounts of Joseph’s flights. Reportedly the first levitation was in his hometown of Cupertino during an outdoor procession on the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. Joseph took off, flying over the crowd. After it was over, in embarrassment, he fled to hide in his mother’s house. From then until the end of his life, Joseph experienced uncontrolled fits of bodily levitation. Various minor incidents could potentially initiate a levitation: a casual remark about the wonders of God, or viewing an image of the Virgin Mary, could send Joseph into ecstasy, and then with a loud sob or cry he would fly into the air.

    His reported flights were not trivial. On one occasion he flew from the middle of the church to the high altar, a distance of forty feet, and remained there for about fifteen minutes before descending. He once flew over the heads of bystanders to reach a statue of the Immaculate Conception, and then flew back again over their heads once more. Another time he reportedly flew eighty yards, over a pulpit, to a crucifix.5 During another levitation he ended up in a tree, and once he came out of his trance he was unable to get down until a ladder was fetched. On several occasions he carried another person up with him, holding them by the hand or hair.

    Although it is “only” eyewitness testimony (but what else can we have from the seventeenth century?), it is incredibly varied and consistent, and Joseph’s levitations were not always viewed positively. Indeed, his superiors often found Joseph to be an embarrassment. His unannounced flights during solemn ceremonies could cause a disruption. Once floating before the altar holding the Holy Sacrament, his sandals fell off. Joseph was at times banned from choir practices, public masses, and even from meals with his fellow friars. Joseph and his “miracles” attracted a huge following, and especially later in his life, the church authorities periodically attempted to place him in seclusion. In my mind, these facts only reinforce that the levitations may well have been genuine. Prominent witnesses to Joseph’s levitations were the High Admiral of Castile, Spanish Ambassador to the Papal Court (his wife fainted at the sight); John Frederick, Duke of Brunswick (who converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism as a result of witnessing Joseph levitate); and Pope Urban VIII (during a papal audience Joseph fell into ecstasy and levitated).

    The Inquisition and Poltergeists

    What do we make of Joseph’s levitations? Could they have been genuine? They are difficult to explain away as hallucinations on the part of the witnesses. Furthermore, they hardly fit the mold that would be expected of stories tailored to aid in the canonisation of a beloved friar. Due to the publicity he attracted, in 1638 Joseph was investigated by the Inquisition in Naples, but cleared of any wrongdoing. Joseph’s levitations were undisciplined, uncouth (he apparently cried out at the start of each incident), and disrupting to those around him. What is really pertinent in my mind is that Joseph is not the sole example of such levitations, for similar phenomena are reported widely in medieval church accounts, popular folklore, and in ethnographic accounts of “primitive” peoples and their myths.6

    Joseph’s levitations strike me as perhaps a form of self-directed “poltergeist” affliction. Derived from the German, meaning a boisterous or noisy ghost, typical poltergeist incidents include strange noises (scratching, raps, knocks, banging) and the movement of objects. In a typical poltergeist case objects inexplicably fall off of shelves or get thrown through the air even when nobody is close enough to reach them, and no physical means are apparent that could have caused the objects to move.

    As the physicist and early psychical researcher Sir William Barrett wrote in 1911, “Of the genuineness and inexplicable nature of the phenomena there can be no manner of doubt, in spite of occasional attempts at their fraudulent imitation.”7

    It appears that in most cases the affected objects are not being moved by spirits or ghosts, as traditionally believed, but unconsciously via paranormal means by a living person, someone who is typically emotionally or psychologically disturbed, with unresolved repressed feelings of deep guilt or fear, and intense “hysterical” tendencies. The poltergeist instances swirling around such a person are a sort of unconscious acting out and externalisation of the emotions.

    Interestingly, very similar types of poltergeist phenomena have been described for thousands of years in different cultures on different continents;8 such facts lend credence to the idea that poltergeist instances are genuine (and I will admit that I have witnessed a mild poltergeist instance first-hand). Modern researchers, such as Dr. William G. Roll,9 have intensively studied various modern poltergeist cases and it is clear that the paranormal movement of material objects against the forces of gravity and inertia is real (that is, objects are levitated) and such movements follow general patterns (as would be expected of a genuine set of phenomena).

    I believe that Joseph was a psychologically disturbed, highly conflicted, individual prone to extremes in temperament. This is evidenced by his reported fits of rapture and ecstasy, as well as his occasional violent temper (even the saints can have bad days, I suppose). His own frustration with his apparent learning disabilities and mental limitations probably added to his troubles. Joseph also suffered from cataleptic or epileptic fits, convulsions, and severe attacks of depression (melancholia, as it was called10). Joseph, I suggest, did genuinely levitate. I hypothesise that Joseph was essentially the centre of what we might now refer to as poltergeist activity (or to use the more modern terminology, recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, RSPK), but in his case the activity (the levitation of objects, or an object) was directed unconsciously toward his own physical body. Joseph basically inflicted the levitations upon himself.

    The Levitations of Home

    In the nineteenth century the famous Scottish (though raised in America during his childhood) spiritualistic medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833 – 1886) was known for his bodily levitations, as well as levitations of other objects, in séance settings.11 In one famous instance, Home reportedly went into a trance and was levitated out a window about seventy feet from the ground, observed to be floating in the air outside an adjacent window (seven and a half feet from the first window), and then glided in through the second window feet first.

    The well-known English physicist and chemist, Sir William Crookes (1832 – 1919; he was knighted in 1897), a careful laboratory experimentalist (among other things, he was a co-discoverer of the element thallium, invented the Crookes radiometer, and developed Crookes tubes), carried out investigations of D.D. Home and other so-called mediums. Crookes witnessed Home levitate numerous times, as he describes in his own words:

    The best cases of Home’s levitation I witnessed were in my own house. On one occasion he went to a clear part of the room, and, after standing quietly for a minute, told us he was rising. I saw him slowly rise up with a continuous gliding movement, and remain about six inches off the ground for several seconds, when he slowly descended. On this occasion no one moved from their places. On another occasion I was invited to come to him, when he rose eighteen inches off the ground, and I passed my hands under his feet, round him, and over his head when he was in the air. On several occasions, Home and the chair on which he was sitting at the table rose off the ground. This was generally done very deliberately, and Home sometimes then tucked up his feet on the seat of the chair and held up his hands in full view of all of us. On such occasions I have gone down and seen and felt all four legs were off the ground at the same time, Home’s feet being on the chair. Less frequently the levitating power extended to those next to him. Once my wife was thus raised off the ground in her chair.12 

    All Hallucinations?

    The reported incidents of levitation by Home, both of his own body and objects around him, are numerous, reported by many witnesses, and they fall into a larger pattern including not just St. Joseph. As the early psychical researcher and Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang (1844 – 1912) wrote,

    …when we find savage ‘birraarks’ in Australia, fakirs in India, saints in mediaeval Europe, a gentleman’s butler in Ireland, boys in Somerset and Midlothian, a young warrior in Zululand, Miss Nancy Wesley at Epworth in 1716, and Mr. Daniel Home in London in 1856-70, all triumphing over the law of gravitation, all floating in the air, how are we to explain the uniformity of stories palpably ridiculous?13

    Other than mechanical tricks, such as concealed strings, wires, and rods (which, in my opinion, really strain credulity as an explanation for the best cases of levitation in the likes of Joseph or Home – I hardly think Crookes would have overlooked a mechanical apparatus and they seem out of the question for Joseph), a classic “explanation” for levitations is that of “excited expectation” and “mass hallucination” on the part of the duped observers.

    Addressing this theory, Lang received the following information from Mr. Hamilton Aïdé (a member of the nineteenth century London literary scene):

    The argument of excited expectation and consequent hallucination does not apply to Mr. Hamilton Aïdé and M. Alphonse Karr… Both were extremely prejudiced against Home, and at Nice went to see, and, if possible, to expose him. Home was a guest at a large villa in Nice, M. Karr and Mr. Aïdé were two of a party in a spacious brilliantly lighted salon, where Home received them. A large heavy table, remote from the group, moved towards them. M. Karr then got under a table which rose in [the] air, and carefully examined the space beneath, while Mr. Aïdé observed it from above. Neither of them could discover any explanation of the phenomenon, and they walked away together, disgusted, disappointed, and reviling Home.14

    So, might at least some (if not all) of Home’s levitations have been genuine? Possibly. And possibly they were due to self-inflicted poltergeist-type manifestations. My sense, reading about his life and career, is that Home, like Joseph, suffered from various emotional and psychological issues, and it is documented that he was the focus of classic poltergeist manifestations during his youth. It is often stated that Home was never caught in any fraudulent behaviour. This is true to a point. In fact there were allegations of fraud made against Home, but these were investigated explicitly, and thoroughly, shortly after Home’s death by the meticulous psychical researches W.F. Barrett and F.W.H. Myers, who concluded “…we have found no allegations of fraud [italics in the original] on which we should be justified in laying much stress.”15

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    Fire Ordeals

    Besides his levitations, Home was also well known for his ability to handle hot coals with immunity, and even to be able to transfer this ability to observers around him.16 Home could perform such feats as holding a handkerchief in his hand, and place a hot piece of charcoal on it, taken directly from a burning fire, and yet the handkerchief would not burn. Crookes studied these fire phenomena intensely, even subjecting such a handkerchief to laboratory analyses afterwards to test for fire retardants, but found nothing unusual. Likewise, hot coals applied to St. Joseph’s body had no effect when he was in an ecstatic trance.17 Indeed, incidents of handling hot charcoal, coal, and other hot objects, walking on fire, and other “ordeals by fire” are widely reported in the ethnological literature18 and in that sense are nothing unusual, but are they genuine or simple conjurers tricks?

    In 1959 the psychiatrist Berthold Eric Schwarz, M.D., investigated first-hand fire ordeals among members of a fundamentalist Christian sect, known as The Free Pentecostal Holiness Church, found in the rural mountain regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. On numerous occasions Schwarz observed church members place their hands and feet in kerosene flames with immunity.19

    In one instance, shortly after washing his hands (thus presumably precluding the possibility that they were coated with a fire retardant or non-conducting substance), an individual smeared fuel oil on his hands and feet, and held them in a flame for over ten seconds, but they did not burn. He poured a pool of oil into his cupped hand and attempted to light it with a torch, but it only flickered and would not burn. As a control, Schwarz reports that both an iron poker and a wooden dowel sprinkled with the fuel oil burst into flames when the torch was brought to them, and Schwarz himself could not keep his own hand closer than three centimetres to the torch flame for more than one or two seconds without pain or being burnt. Other examples of fire handling reported by Schwarz include:

    On three occasions, three different women held the blaze [from kerosene or fuel oil torches] to their chests, so that the flames were in intimate contact with their cotton dresses, exposed necks, faces and hair. This lasted for longer than a few seconds. [This is very similar to the immunity to fire that Home was said to be able to impart to handkerchiefs, clothing, and people. – Note by Schoch.] Twice, at separate times, one of the ‘most faithful of the saints’ slowly moved the palmar and lateral aspects of one hand and the fifth finger in the midpoint of an acetylene flame… He did this for more than four seconds, and then repeated the procedure, using the other hand…. Once this saint, when in a relatively calm mood, turned to a coal fire of an hour’s duration, picked up a flaming ‘stone coal’ the size of a hen’s egg and held it in the palms of his hands for 65 seconds while he walked among the congregation. As a control, the author could not touch a piece of burning charcoal for less than one second without developing a painful blister.20

    Although he did not observe it directly, Schwarz was told that during winter services the young girls would hug red-hot stovepipes and pass around hot glass lamp chimneys with immunity. The key to these miracles, at least according to his informants, was that one must be in a trance and truly believe that no harm will occur. When not entranced, even members of the sect suffer burns. Schwarz recounts a couple of examples. A male congregant was applying a kerosene torch to his hand with no ill effects, until he noticed that a piece of the wick was breaking off. This caused him to come out of his religious trance and he suffered a burn only in the one spot where the flame had touched his skin post-trance (the areas where the flame was applied to his skin during the trance were not affected). In a similar manner, a female congregant who had often handled hot glass lamp chimneys with immunity developed blistering burns when, one night when the electric power at the church failed, she reflexively grabbed a burning kerosene lantern hanging on a wall. She was not in a trance state at the time and so suffered.21

    Something Strange

    Are levitations and fire ordeals real? Is there something more to them than simple conjuring and fraud? If so, how do we explain what is happening? Mysteries and miracles? Do such phenomena support certain religious beliefs, or the value of faith? Do we need to extend our common sense concepts of what is possible? I will refrain from making pronouncements but, to quote the title of Professor Archie Roy’s book on the paranormal, I have “A Sense of Something Strange.”22

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    Footnotes

    1. Parapsychology is the study of paranormal psychical phenomena such as direct mind-to-mind interactions (telepathy), precognition, and the possibility of mind-over-matter phenomena (also known as psychokinesis). For an introduction to parapsychology, see Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak, compilers and commentators, The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research, New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008.

    2. Ian Stevenson, “Thoughts on the Decline of Major Paranormal Phenomena”, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 57, part 215, pp. 149-162 (April 1990); quotation from p.155.

    3. See discussion of, and evidence for, telepathy in Schoch and Yonavjak, 2008.

    4. For information on Joseph’s life and paranormal feats, see Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural: A History of the Paranormal from Earliest Times to 1914 (Revised Edition), Dorset: Prism Press, 1992; Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894; Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft, New York: The Citadel Press, 1970 (originally published 1956).

    5. Lang, 1894, p.104.

    6. Lang, 1894; see also, Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.

    7. William F. Barrett, “Poltergeists: Old and New”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.15, pp.36-40 (1911); quotation from page 37 and reprinted on page 103 of Schoch and Yonavjak, 2008.

    8. Lang, 1894, 1898; Caesar de Vesme, A History of Experimental Spiritualism, Vol. 1, Primitive Man (translated from the French by Stanley de Brath), London: Rider and Co., 1931; Caesar de Vesme, A History of Experimental Spiritualism, Vol. 2, Peoples of Antiquity (translated from the French by Fred Rothwell), London: Rider and Co., 1931.

    9. William G. Roll, “Poltergeists, Electromagnetism and Consciousness”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, vol. 17, no. 1, pp.75-86 (2003); reprinted in Schoch and Yonavjak, 2008, pp.105-122.

    10. Lang, 1894, p.102.

    11. For general information on the life and mediumship of D.D. Home, see W.F. Barrett and F.W.H. Myers, “Review of D. D. Home, His Life and Mission, by Madame Dunglas Home”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.4, pp.101-136 (July 1889); Stephen E. Braude, “The Fear of Psi: It’s the Thought that Counts”, Darklore vol. 2, pp.98-111, 266-267 (Brisbane, Australia: Daily Grail Publishing, 2008); Hereward Carrington, The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, Fraudulent and Genuine, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1908; William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, London: J. Burns, 1874; David Fontana, Is There An Afterlife? A Comprehensive Overview of the Evidence, Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania: O Books, 2005 [2007 reprint]; D.D. Home, Incidents in My Life, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1863.

    12. Quoted in Carrington, 1908, p.380.

    13. Lang, 1894, pp.99-100.

    14. Lang, 1898, pp.362-363.

    15. Barrett and Myers, 1889, p.102.

    16. Carrington, 1908, pp.399-409.

    17. Lang, 1894, p.103.

    18. See discussion and references in Carrington, 1908; Berthold Eric Schwarz, Psychic-Nexus: Psychic Phenomena in Psychiatry and Everyday Life, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980.

    19. See Schwarz, 1980, chapter 1, “Ordeal by Serpents, Fire and Strychnine: A Study of Some Provocative Psychosomatic Phenomena,” pp.3-24 (originally published in Psychiatric Quarterly, vol.34, pp.405-429 (July 1960).

    20. Schwarz, 1980, p.14.

    21. Schwarz, 1980, p.15.

    22. Archie E. Roy, A Sense of Something Strange: Investigations into the Paranormal, Glasgow: Dog and Bone Press, 1990. Archie Roy, Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University and a past president of the Society for Psychical Research, has carried out extensive research on paranormal phenomena; he agrees that there is “something to it” and psychical research deserves to be taken seriously.

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  • Ouija: How the Spirit World Helped a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

    Ouija: How the Spirit World Helped a Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 2 (April 2012)

    Sois sage dear heart & set my teachings down 
    If you do not your world will be undone
    & heaven itself turn to one grinning skull.1

    These lines appear in the poem “The Will,” by James Merrill (1926-1995), arguably the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century. Critics rarely mention that for most of his life Merrill was deeply involved with discarnate entities on a Ouija board, and that the poet’s 550-page masterpiece, The Changing Light at Sandover (Knopf, 1982), is based entirely on his conversations with those spirit guides. Fully one-third of the book consists of direct quotes from the numerous spirits with whom, with varying degrees of belief, ambivalence, and denial, Merrill hammered out the problems of the universe.

    The lines quoted above are channeled from “Ephraim,” the first spirit guide with whom Merrill communicated on the Ouija board. Ephraim’s words place a crushing burden on the poet’s shoulders. The spirit is telling Merrill that if he doesn’t tell the world everything the spirits have told him, the world will be “undone,” i.e., destroyed. And that isn’t all: “heaven” (the “afterworld,” the “divine”) will be destroyed as well.

    Ephraim seems to be implying (this is borne out by other quotes in The Changing Light at Sandover) that the afterworld exists, but that it needs man to give it definition, to give it shape and purpose. Behind this outlandish assertion lies the strange assumption that the spirits come to us, via the Ouija board or by whatever means, not because we need acknowledgement and answers, but because they need acknowledgement and answers. The German phenomenological philosopher Martin Heidegger has said, “God needs Being;”2 Ephraim’s statement seems to bear this out.

    Over the past 160 years, the West has seen a great flowering of interest in, and practice of, channeling, i.e., receiving messages ostensibly from the spirit world. During this period, four literary/philosophical figures of stature have, by dint of lengthy encounters with the spirit world and the records they’ve kept of those encounters, provided us with valuable information concerning the nature of channeling. James Merrill is the most recent of these four.

    The first was Victor Hugo (1802-1885), author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables. Hugo’s feverish conversations with a hundred and twenty discarnate entities on Jersey island in 1853-1855 were at the centre of a sudden, ecstatic, upsurge of interest in channeling in England and France beginning in 1852. Instances of Ouija board-type channeling already went back a long way: In Rome, in 371 CE, a group of noblemen used an olive wood tripod supporting a circular metal dish with the alphabet engraved on the rim (a ring on a thread was suspended overhead) to obtain a message whose content led to all of the participants’ being executed for treason.3But from the time of the consolidation of Christianity up till the early nineteenth century, there are few records of such séances, no doubt because such activity usually led to a burning at the stake. By 1848, the grip of religion had relaxed sufficiently to allow the Fox sisters, of Hydesville, New York, who were channeling raps from the afterworld, to capture the attention of the world and bring about the birth of Spiritualism in the US and England and Spiritism in France.

    The Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) was a third dominating literary influence to become immersed in channeling. In 1925, Yeats published A Vision, a summary of his three years of talks with the spirit world through the agency of his wife Georgie’s automatic writing. Nobody was much interested; by this time the anti-mystical influence of Freud and a growing disillusionment stemming from World War One had dampened interest in channeling. (In 1992, the University of Florida published all 4,000 pages of the transcripts of Yeats’s talks with the spirit world.) In 1916, the Swiss philosopher-psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961), who had broken with Freud and was already exploring other dimensions of reality, had a frightening encounter with the spirit world whose full details became known only in 2008 with the publication of Jung’s personal diary, The Red Book. (There had been some mention of the encounter in Jung’s 1962 autobiography.) Carl Jung was the fourth towering figure of our times to take the phenomenon of channeling seriously.

    James Merrill and his lifetime companion David Jackson first used a Ouija board in 1955. (The planchette, a three-legged marker sliding over the letters of the board, had by now replaced the three-legged table, tapping with one leg, that Victor Hugo used.) By this time the influence of Jung, with its focus on transpersonal realms of archetype and collective unconscious, had superseded that of Freud. The wisdom of the East was opening up to seekers in the US and Europe. The stage was set for a second great upsurge of interest in channeling, one that reached its peak in the early 1980s and has only recently begun to wane.

    People tend to either dismiss channeling completely or hang on the spirits’ every word. This is too bad, since the truth of channeling is not only complex, but may be far different from anything we have imagined so far. Carl Jung found this out in the summer of 1916. One day, a huge host of unhappy spirits of the dead seemed to stream in and occupy his living room. Before he could ask them anything, they hurled questions at him: “What is the nature of man?” “What is the nature of the universe?” “Who is God?” “Is God dead?” They told Jung that the dead know nothing beyond what they know at the moment of death.4

    Was this an isolated incident? To say that the spirits come to us because they need help, and not the other way round, seems like a preposterous assertion. Yet there are hints here and there, especially in the writings of Hugo, Jung, Yeats and Merrill, that to pose such a question is at least to embark on a fruitful inquiry. This writer can’t hope to do anything more than point the reader in a few directions. To explore in depth what the spirits told James Merrill seems like a good way to start.

    James Merrill

    The future author of The Changing Light at Sandover was born in New York City on March 3, 1926, the second son of Charles Edward Merrill, co-founder and senior partner of the investment brokerage firm of Merrill-Lynch. The younger Merrill grew up in a milieu of wealth and privilege. He attended the best schools in New York and New Jersey and graduated from Amherst College with highest honors after having taken a leave of absence to serve in World War Two.

    At 28, Merrill, with several volumes of poetry under his belt and a well-received off-Broadway play, had established himself as a talent to be watched. That was when he and David Jackson, living in Stonington, Connecticut, came across a Ouija board, began playing with it, and watched with bewildered amusement as the heart-shaped marker moved rapidly from letter to letter of the alphabet laid out in two curving rows on the brown, placemat-sized, board. Ephraim had arrived; he claimed to be a bisexual Greek Jew strangled to death at age 32 in 36 CE at the court of the Emperor Tiberius;5and he was charming and witty enough to hold the attention of the ultra-sophisticated, very intelligent, very well-read, and very skeptical Merrill and Jackson. Their attention rarely wandered as, over the ensuing months, years, and decades, a steady stream of equally captivating spirits came gliding across the Ouija board to beguile them with enchanting tales of our multidimensional reality.

    By 1975, the hard-working Merrill had garnered a reputation as America’s leading poet. In that year, he put together his first volume of poetry devoted almost exclusively to his Ouija board adventures. Published in 1976 as Divine Comedies, it earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1978, Merrill published Mirabell: Books of Number, a continuation of the Ouija board saga; and in 1980 the final volume, Scripts for the Pageant, for which he earned a National Book Award. All three books were published together in 1982 as a single, 550-page poetic epic, The Changing Light at Sandover. James Merrill died suddenly of an AIDS-related heart attack on February 6, 1995. He was not quite sixty-nine.

    The Spirits on Ancient History

    Over more than thirty years, the spirits communicated to the two men a dazzling vision of our world as one set in motion by a God who is only one of a pantheon of gods, and who, like the deity of the Gnostics, has all but withdrawn from His creation. Our world, the spirits told them, was shaped and is controlled in its human and non-human dimensions by four archangels who are aided in their task by the discarnate spirits of a sentient species, long extinct, that preceded ours on earth. Reincarnation is a definitive, abiding principle of our world and the other levels of reality to which it is linked. But our universe is a troubled one; the gods are at war with one another, and our own God is failing for reasons that have entirely to do with us, his human creation. Only Merrill and Jackson – and all of us together – can help Him survive.

    The spirits call this God “God B,” or “God Biology.” The “youngest brother” of many gods, He was, eons ago, made custodian of the Milky Way galaxy and charged with the task of seeding our planet with sentient life.

    Four archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Emmanuel, and Raphael, work at his side. It was they who moulded our world, bringing it through geological age after geological age until it had been properly prepared for habitation.

    Two “root races” preceded our own, although that term – familiar to students of Madame Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, Edgar Cayce and their depictions of the Lemurians and the Atlanteans – is not used by Merrill’s spirit guides.

    The first sentient species God placed on earth was a race of intelligent, immortal, winged humanoids living in what is now China. The spirits allude to this species’ central city… a vast obsidian pile gleaming on the plain rutted by his machines. The winged humanoids destroyed themselves in an atomic war of such violence that God had to throw up a shield of positive matter6 – the Himalayas – to protect our planet from radioactive fallout.

    The second species, whom the spirit guides call the Atlanteans, was a race of unusually intelligent half-men/half-horses, resembling the centaurs of mythology. On the one hand these centaurs, in the beginning a grazing, pastoral breed, were limited in their ability to manipulate the environment because they had forelegs with hooves, not hands with opposable thumbs. On the other hand, this didn’t seem to hinder them from breeding a species of winged feathered servants by feeding uranium into the eggs of green grass flies. The centuries flashed by. The centaurs’ forehooves evolved into stubby fingers and they were able to store their grain in silos, using refracted sunlight to control the temperature. They continued to breed their winged servants in incubators, speeding them through 6,000 generations a year. When the servants emerged from their incubators, they were as tall as their masters, humanoid in shape, pitch-black in colour, and with burning red eyes. They resembled giant upright bats – and (coincidentally, or not) the “mothmen” described by John Keel in The Mothmen Prophecies.

    These bat-creatures became the centaurs’ engineers, constructing their masters’ arenas and cities and running their heating and lighting plants.

    There was a problem. The centaurs were immortal, and the Atlantean continents had become crowded with fenced-off areas containing all of the older generations of the centaurs down to the most primitive and ancient. The young, “witty” centaurs had taken to tormenting the very old trapt in their primitive form.7 The centaurs came up with a solution: They would annihilate the previous generations using atomic bombs. And they would get their servants, the bat-creatures, to do it for them.

    The servants faithfully carried out their duty. But now the bat-creatures, being themselves immortal, and proliferating quickly, began to fear that their masters would do the same thing to them. They rose up against the centaurs and, using atomic bombs, slaughtered all but a few.

    The bat-creatures now set out create an empire in the air. They forced the surviving centaurs to build landing strips and antigravitational skeins – continent-wide “crusts” sculpted with latticed cities and smooth plains. They forced the centaurs to man “anchor points,” huge stones glowing with radiation. This radiation, beamed up, would hold the floating continents in place in the ozone layer.

    The bat-creatures enjoyed their empire in the air for a thousand years. But earthly vegetation had encroached more and more thickly on the anchor points, which could no longer be manned by the centaurs since they had evolved into ravenous longnecked creatures / reptilian heads [ripping at] greenery – dinosaurs.8

    The radiation moorings frayed; the bat-creatures, arrogant and complacent, ignored this. Then one beam tore, then another; there was a sudden cataclysmic unravelling of the moorings; and the bat-creatures’ latticed cities shimmered, shred, and plunged to earth. All died; and all were damned, first for killing the centaurs, then for neglecting the mooring points. The bat-creatures, now a useless squeaking thinking cloud shunning light,9 were condemned by the four archangels never to take life again but to labour constantly in the service of mankind.

    God B took the fate of his first two creations (and of the bat-creatures) very seriously. He decided that what had brought about the downfall of these species was their immortality. Being immortal, they could kill each other only with nuclear weapons. And, being immortal, they had not overcome the need to fight because they had not been able to learn properly – because immortality had provided them with no deadlines.

    And so God brought homo sapiens, ourselves, into the world, and gave us mortality and a cycle of reincarnations.

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    The Spirits on Reincarnation

    In The Changing Light at Sandover, the spirits have a great deal to say about reincarnation. They explain that all nature is suffused with soul; that “Mother Nature” is the resting place of soul,10 and that the reincarnational cycle of which humankind is a part demands that we live lives as animals, plants, and even rocks, as well as men and women. Merrill is told he is now living his 268th and last incarnation. Jackson is told that he has lived 289 lifetimes and must live several more. He is understandably dismayed, since this means he will be separated from Merrill.11 

    The spirits explain that, “Soul falls into two / Broad categories: run-of-the-mill / souls who / Life by life, under domed thicknesses, / Plod the slow road of Earth – billions of these / Whom nothing quickens, whom no powers indwell / …The other soul belongs to an elite: / At most two million relatively fleet / Achievers…”12

    The souls of the two million elite, whom the spirits call the movers and shakers of mankind, enjoy a privilege not available to the other souls on earth: they spend time between lifetimes being recalibrated. This process, called cloning, takes place in the “Research Lab” and is carried out by the shades of multitudes of bat-creatures who labour without rest. Merrill is told that, between this lifetime and his last, these workers

    wafted him hither, added the humus of / the Jew plus the gene of a chemist (& failed musician)

    with the result that

    et voilà U are not JM [James Merrill] what u might want to be / but a productive 5.5.13

    “5.5” is Merrill’s talent rating, so to speak, a component of his Basic Formula. A talent rating quantifies the soul’s aptitude for serving mankind; Merrill, a partial 5,14 is very high on the scale.

    Esoteric essences, called soul densities, may be injected into souls between lifetimes; one such is shooting, a special quality found only in plants. It is a cool upward thrust of / carbons. An intensity that might translate as pride; its insertion gives the soul, when reborn, spectacular vitality but a short lifespan. The poet Edwin Muir, the novelist Yukio Mishima, and the horticulturist Luther Burbank, all benefited from this lively brand of Lab cloning.15 

    In some schools of thought, such as Hinduism, and some channeling experiences, such as that of Victor Hugo, the rebirth of human being into animals, plants, and especially rocks, is seen as a punishment; according to Merrill’s guides, it’s a gift, an opportunity for enlightenment and exploration – a saintly elevation.16 The poet W.H. Auden (1907-1973), eventually one of the spirit guides on Merrill’s Ouija board, has been reborn as a soul romping through the mineral world; the spirits report one night that, Our witty poet surfacing off Alaska as a vein of pure / radium has havocked a nosy radio ship. 58 in lifeboats!

    Most of the world’s population – the “run-of-the-mill / souls who/ Life by life, under domed thicknesses / Plod the slow road of Earth”17 – spend no time in the Research Lab but instead “get a short pep-talk, then rejoin the race.”18It seems that Earth’s population explosion beginning in the nineteenth century has stretched the amount of available soul matter thin. The spirits tell Merrill that to rectify the situation,

    We have in the past century had to resort to / souls of domestic animals, most recently the rat./ By 2050 these too will be exhausted, & then?/ Wilder strains, mountain cats & forest monkeys. So / now u / Begin to see how without visibly interfering / We of the Lab must go about our work.19

    Only the souls of the elite two million are eventually able to graduate from the cycle of reincarnation. Then they move upward through nine levels of afterworld purity. Those that reach the top are the best that humanity is capable of. They are incorporated into a kind of celestial blood bank from which transfusions of their soul-matter are made available on the basis of need to earth’s most talented mortals, especially its geniuses. The spirits explain that,

    Since mid 19th cent. souls of the great scribes / Have been used 1/9 on earth reincarnated, 8/9 / as let us say safety deposits. We mine them… Proust / is deservedly enshrined. Tap him & as a statesman / at a dull banquet he converses, seems to be himself / But part of his mind literally wanders: Out on loan!20

    (Victor Hugo’s spirit guides describe a roughly analogous procedure to the French poet.)

    Merrill and Jackson are told that the shade of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud shared its soul matter with that of the living British-American poet T.S. Eliot; this afterworld-to-earth Vulcan mind meld gave birth to Eliot’s famous poem The Wasteland. W.H. Auden’s shade, often present at the séances, is connected to the living Merrill in the same way, while the largely silent presence of the shade of W.B. Yeats has the same kind of relationship with the mortal David Jackson.21

    The V Group of Gifted Souls

    A group of spectacularly gifted souls, numbering five and called “the Five” (or, “the V”), play a very particular role in the advancement of humanity. When we’re born, we have no memory of our past lives – except for the V. These five souls reincarnate again and again remembering every detail of all their previous lives. They are the spiritual leaders of mankind, whose “immortal” names are Laduman, Soriva, Rachel, Torro and Von.22 They take life again and again as athletes, artists, scientists, politicians and religious leaders.

    The spirits explain:

    These have lived centuries & live today heldover lives / Not in the scheme you know of the 9 stages. Remaining / Aware of it all, knowing the fruitlessness of speaking / Of their knowledge, they return to earth charged with / Energy / Beyond the norm.23

    The Five began as “reincarnations” of the archangels Michael, Raphael, Emmanuel and Gabriel, each of these archangels representing one of man’s five (“V”) senses. Michael is “God’s seeing on earth;” his earthly incarnations include Akhnaton, Madame Curie, and Galileo. The Archangel Raphael is God’s hearing on earth, and has been reborn as Homer, Mohammed, Mozart, and an East German astrophysicist (alive today, but anonymous), inter alia. The archangel Emmanuel, God’s touching on earth, has spent time among us as Montezuma, Noah, and George Cotzias. (Cotzias is a scientist/friend of Merrill who had been engaged in unlocking the genome governing aging and now speaks to Merrill from the afterworld.)24 Sometimes these supercharged beings return to earth to live completely anonymous lives. (These often our choicest agents, declare the spirits).25 

    The Spirits on a Curious Period in Ancient Egypt’s History

    The first two representatives of God B’s V were the twinned souls of Akhnaton and Nefertiti. The lifetime in ancient Egypt of this strange twinned soul is of particular importance, and the spirits spend some time explaining it to Merrill. His account in The Changing Light at Sandover reads like ancient Egyptian history seen through hallucinogenic glasses, or the acid trip of a genius.

    Akhnaton/Nefertiti were married at age thirteen and ruled for eighteen years, according to Merrill’s spirit guides. The royals oversaw a switch in religious belief and a leap forward of all the sciences. Polytheism was abolished; the temple priests were strangled; the slaves were freed; and the worship of a single god was introduced. A surge of creativity sweep across Egypt: Physicians found great cures; there were no fevers / A generation was born a hand taller than its parents / Light storage much like the battery was invented / both palaces and humble homes were lit and heated by the sun.26 Harnessing the power of the sun, the Egyptians controlled the tides up and down the Nile and closed the Straits of Gibraltar, allowing just enough water in to turn the Mediterranean into a tranquil lake.

    The crowning achievement of this epoch was the erection of a fifteen-metre-high rock crystal pyramid with dimensions sculpted in such a way as to harness every ray of the sun and enable Akhnaton to rule the world. For one year, 1,500 workers polished the capstone to perfection. On the night before it was to be lowered onto the top of pyramid, Akhnaton, watching with Nefertiti on a barge decorated with diamond pyramids, was so intensely thrilled his physicians fed him opium each hour.27

    The setting-in-place of the capstone, attempted at the first moment of dawn, was a cataclysmic failure. The proportions of the pyramid were a fractional millimetre wrong;28 there was a violent, fiery explosion, and the crystal pyramid rose, fell, then melted into a lake of molten crystal (which, the spirits tell Merrill, is still there, solidified beneath Thebes). Far away on the island of Crete, the volcano Thera erupted, destroying the city of Minoa. Akhnaton and Nefertiti, their twinned soul unutterably harrowed, cut their wrists, held their arms over the side of the barge, and bled to death into the Nile. The devastation was such as to render the surrounding deserts infertile for 1,200 years.

    This fiery ending to monotheistic Egypt (provoked by no less than His beloved, first two, “twinned,” V souls) devastated God B and made him rethink his plans.

    God B & the “No Accident Clause”

    Up until this time, it seems, mankind had complete free will; “Chance” prevailed upon the earth. God B now decided to invoke the “No Accident Clause,” that is, to remove an element of free will from the souls of the elite two million who guide the destinies of man. Hitherto, these movers and shakers were free to do whatever they liked – to remain open to the randomness of the universe. But God B now moved from a policy of, so to speak, total deregulation, to one of some regulation, commanding his archangels to clone certain controls into his ruling elite. As scholar Judith Moffett tries to explain, “Apparently the No Accident clause means that what happens to [God’s chosen] souls is planned and purposeful to the minutest detail.”29

    From the 14th century BCE to the 20th century, then, mankind has not had complete free will; through the movers and shakers of humankind, God B has exercised a high degree of control over our lives. But now the No Accident Clause is unravelling. This is because religious and moral standards are eroding quickly in our time, and also because human beings not belonging to the elite are increasingly acquiring the money, the power and the leisure time to do great damage, e.g., to buy and sell atomic bombs. Accidents have begun, the spirits tell Merrill. Like the first faint twirls of smoke / We see all the old signals.30

    The spirits hint that God B fears that mankind, his third sentient species upon earth, may also be about to destroy itself with atomic bombs. He has prepared for this contingency. A fourth sentient species, which God calls Alpha Man, waits in the wings. This race will be immortal (after a little time), winged, and without genius. The divine spark of genius is responsible for mankind’s greatest achievements, and also for his most hideous disasters; if homo sapiens fails, there will be no more genius. The new race of Alpha Man will – if it is needed – Swim & glide, / A simpler, less willful being. Duller too? / If so, is that sharp edge not well lost / Which has so variously cut and cost?31

    James Merrill on the Spirits

    What did James Merrill think about all this? Did he think the spirits really existed, and that the stories they told were really true?

    In an interview with this writer, the poet claimed to have “maintained an attitude of perfect ambivalence toward the spirits for twenty-five years,”32 never being quite able to accept them, and never being quite able to reject them. Either these “communicators,” as he called them, using Yeats’s terminology, were outside us working on our minds, which was fantastic, or they were inside us working through our total consciousness, which was also fantastic. We were all far more than we knew.

    What was the reality of these spirits? The poet said they often seemed to him to be metaphor and reality – subatomic reality – both at the same time. They were literally who they said they were – and they were also powers, energies, manifesting from “within the atom,” the elemental forces of nature itself. The bat-creatures’ story of building cities into the sky was exactly that. But it was also, somehow, the story of a fatal destabilising of the atom – or an account of the extension of man’s brain, in an earlier phase of our evolution, through the addition of a cortex.33

    Merrill insisted all his life that the spirit guides, if they possessed a measure of objective reality (and he tended to believe they did), were dependent for the expression of that reality on pictures and ideas created by the mind of man. These powers/energies would be “invisible, inconceivable,” he said, “if they’d never passed through our heads and clothed themselves out of the costume box they’d found there.” It followed from this that the spirits would manifest themselves differently from culture to culture, from epoch to epoch, from person to person. “A process that Einstein could entertain as a formula might be described by an African witch doctor as a crocodile,” said Merrill, adding that, “what’s tiresome is when people exclusively insist on the forms they’d imagined. Those powers don’t need churches in order to be sacred. What they do need are fresh ways of being seen.”34

    He wasn’t just “making it all up,” Merrill insisted. “I worked very hard,” he said, “in putting the poem together, to try to persuade the reader that these things actually happened… What does rather sadden me are the critics who think that we were pretending – that we didn’t have the experience.”35

    It seems that the disasters attended man on earth have also attended God B; that God’s welfare is intimately bound up with that of his creations.

    Towards the end of The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill and Jackson are brought into the presence of God. The spirits empower them to use the Ouija board to “listen” to His “song.” What the Ouija board spells out is:

    Ive brothers hear me brothers signal me
    alone in my night brothers do you well
    I and mine hold it back brothers I and
    mine survive brothers hear me signal me
    do you well I and mine hold it back I
    alone in my night brothers I and mine
    survive brothers do you well I alone
    in my night I hold it back I and mine
    survive brothers signal me in my night
    I and mine hold it back and we survive 36

    The shade of W.H. Auden, listening in from the Other Side, tells them the Deity is like a shipwrecked sailor, alone / keeping up his nerve on a life raft.37

    Even such urbane and skeptical Ouija board adventurers as Merrill and Jackson are shocked and saddened by this encounter. It sets them to thinking; and, in this brief discussion, we can take up only one thread of that thinking.

    In the beginning, Merrill had thought the spirits were himself and David Jackson. Then he thought they were a kind of amalgam, some otherworldly energy necessarily filtered and distorted through his mind and sense organs.

    He had become increasingly aware that the spirits shifted and changed the more he got to know them, as if he were in some sense the author of this drama – and as if they too were the authors.

    Merrill now recalled the time when the spirit guide who spoke to them most often revealed that, when he began to serve them through the Ouija board, his form on the Other Side was as a black-and-white centaur. But, he says, as he had grown to love them, and they had grown to love him, he suddenly found himself transformed into a Technicolour peacock. He tells them:

    B4 [before] our meetings I was nothing no time passd but now / yr touch like a lamp has shown me to myself & I am / me! [the peacock].38

    The mortals’ “touch like a lamp” has been sorely lacking in mankind’s relations with God. There has been a reverse transformation: Over the past few centuries, our increasing indifference to God has drained Him of His power. Earlier “Great Scribes” (to whose number, the spirits tell Merrill, he belongs) have described, in function of the fullness of their faith, a God very different from what Merrill and Jackson have seen. The spirits tell Merrill this when, speaking directly in the afterworld to two deceased friends of the Ouija board adventurers, Maria and Wystan, while Merrill and Jackson listen in through the Ouija board, they say:

    Dante heard that song [God B’s desperate “shipwrecked sailor” plea] / The lyrics may be changing / Dante saw the rose in fullest bloom / Blake saw it sick / You and Maria [deceased friends of JM and DJ, observing from the other side] who have seen / The bleak unpetalled knob / Must wonder, can it last till spring? / Is it still rooted in the sun?39

    How the Spirit World Relies on the Living

    At séances, in some religious philosophies, in accounts of experiences in other aspects of multidimensional reality, other hints peek through that the paranormal beings with whom we speak need us as much as we need them. At a séance conducted by prominent South Florida medium Marilyn Raphael, one of the more forceful spirits, a frequent visitor at these séances, stated:

    We as inhabitants of the spirit world no longer have what you call a light around us. You are our light. The light is created by the living. The disembodied soul has no energy to create light. When we come into your room, we feed on your light and your energy. Now once we feed on your energy, we feel your thought patterns. You create the vision for us to see ourselves. Your energy is what we here live from. We become the apparition, we become the dialogue, we become the writer of ourselves when we can have your energy. But we do not take your energy unless we are invited.40 

    It is as if humankind were the sense organ of God; as if it were only through the human imagination, functioning in the incarnate mode, that the spirit world can sense and see itself. And, if that is so, then the exhortations of these beings to humankind to survive and expand are in a sense cries for help; they, too, are fighting to survive.

    Dannion Brinkley writes in Saved by the Light his classic account of a near-death experience, that, while communicating with a group of Light Beings, he was seized by “the amazing realisation that the Beings were desperately trying to help us, not because we were such good guys, but because without us advancing spiritually here on earth, they could not become successful in their world.”41

    In Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Harvard Medical School Professor of Psychiatry and Pulitzer Prize-winning author John E. Mack wonders if the alien abductors aren’t extensions of ourselves seeking redemption through reintegration with us. “The alien identity seems to be connected in some way with the soul of the human self,” he writes, “and one of the tasks the abductee then confronts is the integration of their human and alien selves, which takes on the character of reensoulment of their humanity.”42

    Even astral-traveller Robert A. Monroe, in his three autobiographical volumes, hints at the importance of man to other dimensions of the universe when he says that we secrete an astral substance, called Loosh – that only we secrete – that is essential to beings in many levels of the universe, who periodically, and surreptitiously, come and “harvest” us.

    On a more conventional note: the importance of man to God was understood very well by the Kabbalistic scholars of long ago. Gershom Scholem, world authority on Jewish mysticism, sums it up:

    “Opposite poles, both man and God encompass within their being the entire cosmos. However, whereas God contains all by virtue of being its Creator and Initiator in whom everything is rooted and all potency is hidden, man’s role is to complete this process by being the agent through whom all the powers of creation are fully activated and made manifest. What exists seminally in God unfolds and develops in man… Man is the perfecting agent in the structure of the cosmos… He is also the ‘transformer’ who through his own life and deeds amplifies these forces to their highest level of manifestation and redirects them to their original source.”43 

    James Merrill’s spirit guides might have been dictating this.

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    Footnotes

    1. Merrill, Divine Comedies, 41; 2. Heidegger, 291; 3. Dodds, 222; 4. Chambers, Secret Life of Genius, 215-217; 5. Merrill, Sandover, 8; 6. Ibid., 459; 7. Ibid., 168; 8. Ibid; 9. Ibid., 122; 10. Ibid., 389; 11. Ibid., 143; 12. Ibid., 139; 13. Ibid., 145; 14. Ibid., 143; 15. Ibid., 151; 16. Ibid., 309; 17. Ibid., 511; 18. Ibid., 139; 19. Ibid., 145-146; 20. Ibid., 189; 21. Ibid., 217, 219; 22. Ibid., 131; 23. Ibid; 24. Ibid., 142-143; 25. Ibid; 26. Ibid., 227; 27. Ibid., 126; 28. Ibid., 127; 29. Moffett, 198; 30. Ibid., 476; 31. Ibid., 512; 32. Personal Communication, January 1978; 33. Moffett, 191-192; 34. Merrill, Recitative, 68; 35. Radio Interview, “Voices and Visions,” 1985; 36. Merrill, Sandover, 360; 37. Ibid., 362; 38. Ibid., 155; 39. Ibid., 363; 40. Unpublished manuscript: Night Out on the Earth Plane; 41. Brinkley, 46; 42. Mack, 49; 43. Scholem, qtd. in Reincarnation, 191-192.

    Works Consulted

    Dannion Brinkley, Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received, New York: Harper Collins, 2008.

    E.R. Dodds, Professor, “Supernormal Phenomena in Classical Antiquity,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 55, Part 203 (March 1971): 189-237.

    C.A. Buckley, “Quantum Physics and the Ouija-Board: James Merrill’s Holistic World View,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 26 (2) (Spring 1993): 39-61.

    John Chambers, “The Channeled Myths of James Merrill,” The Anomalist 5 (Summer 1997): 41-58.

    John Chambers, The Secret Life of Genius: How Twenty-Four Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds, Rochester, VA: Destiny Books/Inner Traditions, 2009.

    John Chambers, Night Out on the Earth Plane, Unpublished Manuscript.

    John Chambers, Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life, Rochester, VA: Destiny Books/Inner Traditions, 2008.

    Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Eknowning), [Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis], Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

    John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, New York: Scribners, 1994.

    J.D. McClatchy, ed., Recitative, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986.

    James Merrill, “The Art of Poetry, 31: James Merrill,” The Paris Review 84 (Summer 1982): 184-219.

    James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

    James Merrill, James Merrill: Voices from Sandover, Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, FFH 4182, VHS, 1990.

    James Merrill, Radio Interview, “Voices and Visions”: A Guided Tour of Revelations,” Documentary, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1985.

    James Merrill, “The Will,” Divine Comedies, New York: Atheneum, 1976, 41.

    Judith Moffett, James Merrill: An Introduction to the Poetry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

    Gershom Scholem, qtd. in Reincarnation: A New Horizon in Science, Religion, and Society. Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams, New York: Julian Press/Crown Publishers, 1984.

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.

  • Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence – An Interview with Dr. Kirby Surprise

    Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence – An Interview with Dr. Kirby Surprise

    The experience of meaningful coincidences is universal. They are reported by people of every culture, every belief system, and time period. Traditionally these synchronistic events are made acceptable by ascribing them to outside supernatural forces such as divinities, or in modern times, impersonal archetypal influences.

    Dr. Kirby Surprise demonstrates that synchronistic events, based on the activity of the mind, are actually caused by the person who perceives them, and reflect many levels of their consciousness.

    His research reveals that what we believe and the way we look for patterns in the world generates synchronistic events that mirror our own assumptions. By decoding the science of synchronicity, Dr. Kirby uncovered how we actually create events and how we co‐create our reality.

    A licensed psychologist who makes his living assessing, diagnosing and treating delusions and thought disorders, Dr. Kirby Surprise is certainly qualified to untangle the web of reflected meanings and false assumptions about synchronistic events.

    His groundbreaking new book is titled Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Change, and Unlocking Your Mind (New Page Books, 2012).

    New Dawn recently spoke to Dr. Surprise.

    NEW DAWN (ND): Dr. Surprise, doesn’t it seen strange for someone named Surprise to be writing a book on coincidences?

    DR. KIRBY SURPRISE (KS): Yes, Surprise is actually my family name, and I am a licensed psychologist. It’s definitely a meaningful coincidence that I wound up writing a book on synchronicity. Having a name like Surprise is probably one of the reasons the book seems to have had a charmed life in the publication process. The name and the book itself are their own synchronistic event.

    ND: What exactly are synchronistic events?

    KS: Synchronistic events (SE) are coincidences in which a meaning or message seems to be conveyed by the events to the observer. They happen when the inner and outer worlds become synchronised. Here’s an example from the book that helped fuel my own fascination with SE:

    One cool autumn day I was sitting in my car waiting to pick up a friend. I was listening to the radio to pass the time. During a commercial break an ad for the movie Carrie was played. The movie is about a teenager who discovers she has the ability to move objects at a distance. I started having fantasies about what it would actually be like to experience moving an object this way. I had seen the film; during its climax, Carrie uses her power to crush her family’s home. I looked across the street and saw an old cottage. Focusing on the house, I fantasised about what being able to move an object that large would be like. I was remembering a National Inquirer headline about a house that supposedly was turned over on its side by some psychic force. I was wondering what effect such a power would have on a person, how it might feel to move a house.

    As I stared at the house the entire cottage shuddered violently. The house started to move. It rolled over onto its side. The roof was now facing me. I was astonished and felt panicky. I stared at the overturned house and wondered, could I have really done this? I wondered if this was just a vivid dream. I decided I was awake and the event was real.

    “OK,” I said to myself. “If I just did that, then I want to see the house crushed like in the movie.”

    As I stared, awestruck, the house again began to shudder. The roof started to collapse inward as if the centre of the house were slowly imploding. Beams burst through walls and windows shattered as the house began to tear itself apart. A moment later, I saw a flash of yellow paint above the house, then the largest bulldozer I’d ever seen climbed lazily over the centre of the house, crushing the structure into rubble in a few moments. It then started to load the debris into waiting dump trucks. The house had obscured the demolition equipment from sight. With the radio on and windows up, I couldn’t hear the tractor engine. My fantasy had come to pass, my wish fulfilled through a series of synchronistic events.

    ND: You’re claiming that not only are these events real, but that we all create them every day. But isn’t it possible that we are just interpreting what we experience wrong, that synchronistic events are a trick of the mind?

    KS: Many SE are based solely on the way we interpret events around us. SE can seem like miracles, violating the laws of time and space. You are the actual miracle. You have billions of sensory neurons pointed out into the environment. Each neuron is literally a digital biological computer operating like a binary circuit sending signals to the brain. Your brain is the known universe’s most powerful supercomputer. Your brain has a hundred billion neurons, each as powerful as a small desktop computer, each networked to as many as two hundred thousand others.

    One of the things you’re doing with all that computing power is taking trillions of bits of digital sensory information, and constructing, in areas of memory, the universe as you are experiencing it as you read these words. You, the conscious executive functioning in the frontal lobes, is about the size of a walnut. You have no direct contact with the outside world. You experience a neurological representation of the world constructed for you on a stage of the brain’s memory. You are, in effect, your own “Matrix” computer.

    The automated systems of the brain that construct this reality for you make vast changes to the information before you experience the data as the reality around you. The brain evolved to match patterns. It looks over vast rivers of sensory information, and memory, to find the patterns you, the executive function, has been interested in.

    We evolved as grassland hunters. Our task was to look out over the miles of waving patterns in the savannah, and see through the camouflage of other creatures. We survived by looking at all that data, and deleting the patterns that had no meaning, and completing the partial patterns that meant dinner, or predator. We do this because there is millions of times more information in the environment than we could consciously process.

    So, the brain evolved automated systems to do the editing for us. The brain deletes most of the sensory data from the reality you’re experiencing right now. Patterns you have looked for in the past get enhanced, missing pieces added, until patterns with some meaning emerge.

    Consider this: the typical reader reads only the first three or four letters of each word in a sentence. The brain deletes the rest of the word, and then fills in the meaning by using the context of the sentence and subject matter. This speeds up pattern recognition while reading. As you read, you have been hallucinating parts of this very sentence. So, when you say we are “just” interpreting events, you’re describing a miraculously complex process.

    SE do not appear as “tricks of the mind.” They partially result from the automated systems of the brain searching out and enhancing patterns in your environment. The patterns are always there, but unless they have some emotional relevance to you, what psychologists call “Emotional Valence,” they are deleted and no memory of them is created. SE often appear because you have been consciously, or unconsciously, thinking about something, and the automated pattern recognition systems in your bio-supercomputer highlight matching patterns in the environment for you.

    Even more amazingly, you are also altering the randomness of events in the external world as well based on your thoughts and emotions. You are not just altering sensory data, you actually change the probabilities in the outside world as well.

    ND: So, you’re saying that we create our own reality?

    KS: Only in the sense that I believe some well meaning people often mistake our brain’s creation and editing of our neurological representation of reality for creating objective external reality. Clearly, none of us creates actual reality. We do have some influence over the randomness of events around us though. We create SE that mirror our thoughts and emotions. This happens with all thought processes, conscious, unconscious and transpersonal. We don’t create or change the physical matter and energy around us, but we do influence the relationships between events to create SE.

    ND: How much influence do we have over the events around us?

    KS: Research is telling us that we do change the randomness of events around us by around 3-5%. The best experimental designs are called “Double Blind Experiments.” In this design the subjects have been randomly selected, and subjects don’t know what the experiment is actually about. The person performing the experiment does not know what the expected outcome of the experiment is either. The experimenter and subjects are both “Blind” to the expected outcome. The core problem this method is meant to help eliminate is a basic, hard-to-swallow, scientific fact: the expectations of the researcher change the outcome of the events in the experiment just by the act of observation and expectation.

    The estimation of SE influence being 3-5% comes from Dr. J.B. Rhine. He was a psychologist and researcher. Back in the 1930s a man came to his office with a strange claim. He said he was a gambler, and he could control dice rolls with his mind. Not all the time, but enough so that it was a noticeable effect that turned the odds in his favour. Rather than dismiss this claim, Rhine did what a good scientist does. He said “show me.” They took six pairs of dice; the gambler’s task was to have more dice come up with the number six than could be expected by chance. They tossed the dice. Again, and again, and again. It works. The amount of change over random hovered at about 3-5% above chance. The effect was real. Rhine spent decades doing rigorous experiments on the ability of subjects to change random events. He was having people produce SE on demand. The research, reproduced and confirmed by peers, states the odds are millions to one in favour of us being the cause of this effect.

    Rhine concluded events could be changed in the direction of the subject’s desire and attention. These random events included series of coin tosses, die throws, the position objects landed in when dropped in a random manner, the values of randomly generated electrical currents, and the rate of particle release from a radioactive source, among others. In each instance, he found that the probability of these physical events was changed by the psychological expectation and attention of the observers, even though no physical force was detected.

    Rhine’s work went beyond proof of personal causation. He found emotional states, such as interest or boredom, affected the subjects’ ability to influence SE. Boredom and anxiety decreased the ability to change the randomness of events in their desired direction. Focused attention and positive expectation increased the occurrence of the targeted events. He found alcohol or caffeine lowered or raised scores respectively. He found emotions and personal physiological states can facilitate or inhibit SE. My book shows people that not only do they do this all the time, but that very complex ideas and emotions can be reflected by SE as well.

    ND: If this is the way our reality works, then why aren’t more people aware of doing this?

    KS: There is a measure of self-awareness called “The Mirror Test” developed by biopsychologist Gordon Gallup. Animals are shown their own reflection in a mirror. If they recognise the reflection in the glass as their own, it is taken as an indication it is a self-aware being. Humans, some great apes, elephants, and dolphins generally recognise their own reflections; a few birds do as well. Interestingly, some birds and dogs that can’t initially recognise their own reflections can be trained to do so.

    Synchronicity is a form of mirror test. People see in the mirror of events around them the image of their own inner life. They see what they think, feel and believe. They even see their fantasies about what causes these reflections. Everyone has experienced meaningful coincidences. They are explained by supernatural and religious beliefs, archetypal influences, or more exotic personal mythologies. SE mirrors these beliefs back to the observer. SE often are mistaken for confirmations of the objective reality of personal beliefs. Most people are looking into the mirror of SE every day. They don’t realise the images they see are their own thoughts.

    You have an amazing ability. Your thoughts and feelings, your memories and experiences, are reproduced in the events around you as coincidences. The world presents you with meaningful coincidences based on your inner life. Everyone creates their own SE, constantly. The ability is innate to the way our brains process information into meaning. This seemingly magical ability goes largely unnoticed, unexplained and misunderstood, until it presents itself in spectacular form, simply because people never question the everyday SE in their mirror.

    ND: In the book you state religion has nothing to do with spirituality. What did you mean by that?

    KS: Many religious doctrines were created to keep people under control and to maintain civil order. You can spot them pretty easily: they consist mainly of behavioural instructions and commands. Jared Diamond describes in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies the evolution of the concept of a single, all-powerful God. When we lived in tribal groups without fixed laws, we generally had social communities of about 60 people. We can’t keep track of everyone in larger groups. This makes it impossible to make good pattern matches about everyone, so we break up into smaller groups. We answered this problem by creating a social technology that allowed many more people to live together. Tribal groups came under the law of a single king, whose authority came from the Gods we created and the punishments imposed on heretics.

    Alternately, some spiritual doctrines don’t focus on behaviour; they focus on achieving states of consciousness. They change the frame of reference to creating experiences of connectedness. Christian Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, Zen Buddhism, and the shamanism of our ancestors, often focused on creating states of ecstatic union. In these states of consciousness, the practitioner experiences existence without boundaries. The subject/object relationship we experience as separateness ceases to exist. You become one with everything. SE demonstrates this connectedness. This connection is not something you earn; it is what you already are. SEs are not something you learn to create, you learn to recognise you are already creating them.

    I have heard people ask if someone was “enlightened,” as if it were a possession that enhanced their value. Enlightenment is the recognition of your essential unity and connection with existence. You don’t have to earn it, you are it. Spirituality is connectedness. The stock and trade of most religion is having people trade that natural connection for a code of behaviour.

    ND: You’re saying that we all see a reality created by the meanings we look for, and that we do this naturally and unconsciously?

    KS: Absolutely. All of us have known decent, rational, people who have what we would consider extreme religious, political or philosophical views. You may wonder, “How could they possibly believe that?” It’s because beliefs are patterns of thought that become reflected in the world around us. People mistake their reflected SE for confirmation of their version of the nature of reality, when in fact they have just come to believe what they think.

    As a psychologist, I see people replaying the patterns of past traumas and relationships in their lives over and over. The unconscious recreates these patterns in our lives as a way of trying to process them. SE work the same way. Researchers have commented that one of the most consistent types of SE patterns that manifest around people are reflections of either traumatic or spiritual experiences. The commonality in both is the emotional valence around the events that seems to directly drive the SE.

    ND: What are the implications for the way people experience their spiritual life?

    KS: Most of us live in what Joseph Campbell would call a “Personal Mythology.” A Christian looks for help from Jesus, and SE appear that seem to be from their deity. Muslims look for Allah, and find the pattern of their thoughts reflected back to them. Pagans look for the mother Goddess, and are answered by however they believe their deity to be. I love to study mythology, what Campbell would call “Other people’s Religion.” I have several dictionaries of Gods and Goddesses. They contain descriptions of thousands of Deities, all of which were the centre of people’s spiritual life and belief, and all, but for a very few, are now considered mere myths of our ancestors.

    What has endured are the shamanic and mystical traditions, most of which have a strikingly similar teaching: there is only one being, one consciousness, and we are it. Again, as Campbell would say, “You are, in your deepest identity, God.” The implication here is that when you create SE, you are not altering an external environment. You are seeing a demonstration that your thoughts are not separate from the environment. You are experiencing an aspect of yourself that is not limited to the cause and effect of time and space. There is much more to you than meets the eye, you are connected to everything.

    ND: You claim that modern science and String theory support the idea that we are all navigating in many realities at once – can you say more about that?

    KS: I am offering an explanatory fiction of SE that fits the facts of String theory, as we now understand them. I have read, I believe in your magazine, articles by people who have come to understand that the Planes of consciousness described by our traditional mystics are actually the newly speculated on dimensions of reality String theory has given us. This is a great step forward, to realise that all matter and dimensions have their own flavours of consciousness.

    In String theory our universe has 11 dimensions, all particles being extensions of dimensions linked to other dimensions in various patterns. But beyond even that, it appears our universe is projected onto what’s being called a “Membrane.” It’s as if we exist as Flatlanders on the surface of a thin bubble in what is being called M space. We are not the only bubble universe out there. The separation between membranes is probably as small as the smallest quantum state. This means a virtually infinite number of alternate physical universes in the space around you right now. It used to be a joke when someone said Elvis is performing on stage in Vegas in a parallel probability. It’s not a joke anymore; it’s the standard model of physics.

    In the book I’m saying we don’t just live in one probability. We don’t jump from one to another, we live in an almost infinite range of them simultaneously. I believe our experience of the passage of time itself is the result of our movement, at the speed of light, as described in the Special and General theory, through these probability membranes. Our trajectory through these probabilities is altered by our thoughts and emotions because, as our not so ignorant mystics have told us, thought and emotion are dimensions that underlie the physical reality.

    Whether this explanation proves to be accurate or not, it is useful. If you believe it, it allows you to navigate probability just a bit, 3-5%, by choosing your thoughts and emotions, to create SE. The problem with explaining SE has always been a kind of “flat earth” thinking that mandated something to “cause” SE. It appears as if the entire structure of the universe would have to be altered to create SE. With an infinite number of probability membranes being travelled through, you do not alter anything: your mental patterns move you through probabilities in which events around you reflect your internal processes. You are already a multidimensional being.

    ND: If I wanted to try to prove to myself that my thoughts are being mirrored in the environment around me, exactly how would I go about it?

    KS: The best way, as self-serving as it sounds, is to first read the book so that you have a safe context to start with. SE are so responsive that people sometimes get trapped in the house of mirrors of their own thoughts. The book was created to ground people and give them a working context. It also contains a series of exercises that starts at the creation of simple SE, and progresses to creating more complex full personal mythologies. The easiest way to create SE is to simply regularly think about them, then look out into the world as if it is a single, responsive being trying to communicate with you through SE. Expect a response SE, and eventually they will appear. Just don’t forget you are seeing your thoughts mirrored in external events.

    ND: What advice do you have for people who are experiencing synchronistic events and might be scared or confused by them?

    KS: Relax. SE are not dangerous. The meanings they convey are just thoughts, and only have the reality you chose to give them. They are not even paranormal. They are extremely normal. Everyone is creating SE. You were born creating SE, you have been doing it all your life. SE are part of the natural survival skills you evolved to help you through your life. The best way to use them is as a form of communication with other parts of yourself, to teach yourself connectedness. Choose the patterns you want to look for and expect them to appear as SE. If you become scared or anxious, ask yourself why you are choosing to scare yourself, then move on to creating something fun with SE. Because SE are driven by the attention you put into them, any pattern of SE you don’t want can be extinguished by either looking for a different pattern, or ignoring them until they fade away. If you signal the brain you’re not interested in them, it will gradually stop presenting them.

    Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mind by Kirby Surprise (New Page Books, 2012) is available from all good bookstores. 

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 132.[/alert]

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  • The Amazing Prophecies of Benjamín Parravicini

    The Amazing Prophecies of Benjamín Parravicini

    Coming events cast their shadows forward.
    – Johann W. von Goethe

    This is the story of a most unassuming modern prophet – Benjamín Solari Parravicini (BSP) – who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1898, and died in 1974 at the age of 76. He was a painter and sculptor, and came from a traditional and well-to-do family. He held various posts with the Buenos Aires Municipal Arts Department; nothing particularly memorable nor exceptional about his social and professional life. He was a quiet, discrete and kindly person. Leading a low-profile life, he would have remained almost totally unknown to the world were it not for the fact that he had the uncanny gift of being able to peer into the future.

    With time, Benjamín Solari Parravicini – ‘Pelón’ as his friends nicknamed him – has become widely known both inside and outside his native Argentina because of the “messages,” as he called them, he received from his “Guardian Angel” about coming events.

    Contrary to what some in Argentina and elsewhere would have us believe, true to his unassuming style BSP never said he had “mystic visions” nor that the future appeared to him as a burning bush of divine inspiration. Nothing of the sort: he would suddenly become inspired by a feeling, and his Guardian Angel would send him one of many “messages” that he felt compelled to draw in pencil or charcoal in the simplest of forms; mostly as just one continuous line producing an image often rather naïve, to which he would add his written “explanation.”

    In this way, BSP fashioned and shaped more than 700 prophetic “messages” that mostly relate to transcendental and dramatic events affecting the world of his time and after his time, many of which are centred on his native Argentina.

    Most of these messages were revealed to him in the 1940s and 1950s, but he continued to receive them until just before his death in the 1970s. As with most prophetic lore, both the images and the prose are, for the most part, enigmatic. That is until passing events make them become clearer – often crystal clear.

    [PLEASE NOTE: Images for this article (drawn by BSP) can be viewed in the downloadable version of this issue of New Dawn magazine.] 

    Such is also the case with other prophetic literature as the quadrants of Nostradamus, the papal prophecies of St. Malachy of Armagh in Ireland, and of other more modern sages from Edgar Cayce to Jean Dixon.

    The interesting thing about BSP is that each message carries both a visual symbolic sketched drawing that speaks primarily to our emotions and intuition, whilst the written prose – normally set down by him afterwards when fully awake – speaks more to our intellect. No doubt, a good combination for today’s mindset where our worldview of reality is so heavily biased towards the intellectual. BSP gives us a more balanced appraisal of these messages both in their unconscious content – perhaps messages from the Collective Unconscious – and how he felt they could be intellectually “aligned” to make sense in today’s “real world.”

    Thus, with time his “psychographies” – as he called these images and texts – were found to predict many highly dramatic events of the modern world: the fall of Hitler and Mussolini after World War II, the rise of Castro in Cuba, satellite communications, the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City, artificial heart transplants, the atomic bomb…

    Many of BSP’s messages refer to Argentina for which in 1971 he envisioned miseries and mishaps at a national level; he saw a great falling down and went so far as to warn that Argentina would suffer its own bloody “French Revolution” that may sink it into severe turmoil unless Argentineans recognise and accept “The Grey Man” who will someday hopefully place Argentina back on the right track from which it has strayed so very far. If that does finally happen, then he envisions Argentina and South America in general as a “beacon for the whole world” after the coming catastrophes of artificial and natural origins envisioned by so many.

    Much has been written about what he meant by “The Grey Man” – el Hombre Gris. An unknown social or political reformer? A metaphor for the middle class? The common working man and woman? No one knows although in today’s decadent Argentina one thing is sure: this reforming political figure has definitely not shown up yet!

    The Collection of Psychographies

    The author of this article was lucky to have been a friend of Sigurd von Wurmb and his kindly wife, Ana María, who were long acquainted with BSP from his early years. After BSP’s death they received a good part of his psychographies, many of which von Wurmb catalogued and then published in four volumes released through the local Kier Publishing House in Buenos Aires. Regrettably, Sigurd von Wurmb passed away in January 2007, however he left a very good and sequential account of what BSP’s work was all about; a website dedicated to him (in Spanish) can be accessed at http://sigurdvonwurmb.com.

    Today, Ms Bibiana Bryson, with whom the author is acquainted, continues that work and is also custodian to another sizeable portion of BSP’s psychographies. She manages an excellent and authoritative website (www.freewebs.com/bibianabryson/parravicini.htm) on BSP in which she publishes information and research done on his work, as well as new interpretations based on major world events as they unfold.

    The Cross Symbol

    As to the source of his knowledge, BSP spoke of “superior beings” who made known to him their grave concern over the future of mankind. Notably, he spoke of José de Aragón, a monk-like figure he considered his Guardian Angel, who egged him on to draw and speak to future generations. He even told him to draw a symbol to inspire the “New Humanity” that, even now, is being born and will carry Man to superior levels of consciousness, a wholesome life, and harmonious alignment with constructive cosmic forces. He called that symbol “Cruz Orlada,” i.e., the “Trimmed Cross,” whose mystic symbolism Brother Aragón one night dictated to BSP as follows:

    “Very simply, dear son, because God is the Universe and the universe is circular, thus we have that God is a Circle; thus God is Universal. The cross inside the Circle which can be plain or “trimmed” with flames, symbol of the Sun, and also of God – i.e., the God-Christ – shall be Love, Faith, Light; it is carried the heart of union… Send it to our brother Sigurd (von Wurmb) who can spread it through his pen in the press here and abroad…. Tell him the time of the Trimmed Cross has come.”

    What Do the Psychographies Mean?

    On her website, Ms Bryson admonishes all to be cautious regarding alleged “meanings” and “interpretations” of BSP’s messages. She points out one such case making the rounds on the Internet that some say may refer to a catastrophic event about to take place during the up-coming London Olympic Games which we will refer to in this article.

    As Sigurd von Wurmb and Ms Bryson aptly point out, “BSP did not go into any trance, and all interpretations of his drawings are the sole responsibility of the persons making them, and should not be ascribed to BSP himself.” Von Wurmb said that BSP considered himself “a messenger, a channel of higher voices,” bent on warning man of impending perils and guiding him upwards. “BSP must not be forced into a circle of sensationalism, especially since there are serious and respected researchers into his life’s work.” These researchers include Ana María von Wurmb, Pedro Romaniuk, and Ms Bryson herself amongst others.

    One of the most striking examples is a “psychography” that clearly references the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, both regarding the image and the text which says, “North America’s Light of Liberty shall lose its shine; its torch shall not illuminate as it did yesterday, and the monument shall be twice attacked.” This psychography is dated 1939, almost thirty years before the Twin Towers were even built.

    Others from the 1930s carry texts announcing the coming Atomic Age:

    “The atom shall come and reign supreme” (1938), and how that relates to the increasing chaos after World War II, “The atom shall dominate the world; the world shall be atomised and will be blinded. There will be storms caused by man’s excursions into the atmosphere, new illnesses, the sexes shall be perverted and confused; collective madness, total chaos. The world shall become dark” (1934).

    About today’s mixed-up world he further stated back then, “The man-woman shall be a reality and will have two phases, by bisexual birth and through ancestry…. Medical doctors will operate and successfully, but the man-woman shall not be until 1970” (1937).

    “All goodness shall disappear from the World. Robbery and crime shall take over. The purity of creatures shall be corrupted by evil example in denaturalised homes. Marriages shall wane; lovers shall be admired all the same. Men shall cease seduction; women shall seduce” (1934). An undated message believed to be from the thirties says, “666. BLIND WORLD. The world seduced by evil shall fall.”
    On a more political stance, “A power race between Yankees and Russians shall take place. They shall race for space and land. It might not seem so, but America will prevail” (1941).

    Another message dated 1938, that many interpret as referring to the fall of Paris to the Germans in June 1940, reads as follows: “The Heart of the World shall fall in 1940; and shall be German until 1944.”

    A more poignant one from 1938 – as the world watched a seemingly unstoppable Hitler and his ally Mussolini grow in power – reads: “Hitler – Mussolini. With the same ends; the same ending.” It shows a defeated Mussolini tied to Hitler’s back.

    Then, there’s one from 1937 that seems to refer to Cuba’s Fidel Castro: “Bearded Head; that will seem holy but shall not be so and will inflame the Antilles.”

    Regarding the decadence of the Catholic Church, he issued several warnings of bad things to come: “The Church shall err in its steps and its own leaders will falsify things” (late 1930s).

    Alluding to the Vatican Council II, BSP warned, “The papacy shall have new norms. What was evil until yesterday shall cease to be so. Mass shall be protestant, without specifically saying so. Protestants shall be Catholics, without saying so.” 

    In a clear reference to the last popes of our times, notably John Paul II, BSP said, “The Pope shall leave the Vatican in his travels and reach America whilst mankind falls” (1938).

    Another message from 1938 with a different kind of theme reads, “The heart shall be artificial in 1966.” In part, this tallies very closely in time to South African surgeon Dr. Christian Barnard’s first successful heart transplant in history.

    The 2012 London Olympics

    Then there are two psychographies which some claim point to the 2012 Olympics. The first has a series of images that not only relate to the Olympics but also bear similarities to a map of the main Olympic site in London when its image is superimposed upon it.

    This message set down in 1972 shows the 114.5-metre tall spiralling sculpture designed by Indian artist Anish Kapoor and called the “ArcelorMittal Orbit.” It lies in Olympic Park and according to the BBC is 22-metres higher than New York’s Statue of Liberty.

    There is also the 27-ton Olympic Bell that is much bigger than Big Ben’s as well as the Olympic Torch. Alarmingly, it shows a scythe, traditionally a Saturnian symbol of the Reaper of Death. The associated text in the message says, “Fire, Hunger, Plague, Death are rung by the bell nearing the world; but the world does not yet see or hear. The darkness of the dragon which seemed asleep, draws nigh. The terror of the bear that mocked love and brotherhood. The hour of the humble democrat who never was humble, and with him comes poverty, homelessness and, with them, all the explosions of dissolution. Darkness comes and, after that, Light from the South. And the Cross!”

    The dragon is widely used as a symbol of England and Wales. Might the bear refer to Russia and the Slavs? The hypocrisy of “democrats” is a global phenomenon nowadays.

    The other psychography that might point to the London Olympics was composed in 1938 and comes from Ms Bryson’s private archive. It seems to show a series of symbols and images of London, Britain and the Olympics, and carries an ominous message: “The Hour of Great Tribulation has Come!”

    It too seems to show Big Ben, a jagged outline of the Olympic Stadium, English flags (a cross) and even the one-eyed Olympic mascot.

    Still to Come?

    Below is a small sample of Benjamín Solari Parravicini’s other prophecies that have not come to pass yet, and if proven true will have unprecedented impact on Mankind…

    “The ugliness and deformity with which ‘extra-terrestrials’ are shown is human fantasy. That does not exist” (1972).

    “Obelisks on the moon shall one day speak and shall destroy the voice of man” (1972).

    “The seven-circular-step lunar crater shall reveal its secret to mankind” (late thirties).

    “Interplanetary vessels come to earth in PEACE” (1960).

    “Earthbound civilisation includes a lost civilisation that was far superior to the ones that followed it…” (1960).

    “The interplanetary amphibious vessels shall show us the existence of inhabitable Canals inside the Earth. They shall submerge in the South Pole only to reappear in the North Pole in a matter of seconds!!” (1960).

    “In view of the many visits from extra-terrestrial vessels, science will first deny, then doubt, and finally shall say ‘It is true!’ And our wisdom shall stay behind. They have been watching and contemplating us for centuries” (1940).

    “There shall appear flying high above in circles of light, bringing alien beings from other planets. Yes, they are the ones who came to populate Earth and it shall be well told. Yes! Those called angels in the Old Testament, or the voice of Jehovah, shall again appear and they shall be seen and Heard” (1938).

    Argentina

    Many predictions refer to BSP’s native Argentina and have so far proven grimly accurate:

    “RA. Argentine Republic must ready itself to suffer. They shall have some thugs that will reduce the country to a fascist-style communism. Death shall run through streets and roads” (1938). To many, the author included, a reflection of today’s Argentina under the corrupt Kirchner government and the increasing violence of all sorts that their erred policies have triggered throughout the country.

    “On its new Constitution, breaking with prior norms, a tall mountain of evil figures shall arise. All of them will cover their hidden agendas behind their make-believe masks” (1940). In 1994, Argentina sanctioned a new Constitution with dire results as it has given the corrupt political party system a veritable monopoly over political power.

    Since then, successive administrations have gone from bad to worse, starting with the corrupt Carlos Menem government (1994-1999), followed by the grossly failed Fernando De la Rúa government that dumped the country into an abyss of chaos (1999-2001), the ignorant interim administration of Eduardo Duhalde (2002-2003) and finally today’s grossly corrupt and perverse Néstor and Cristina Kirchner administrations (2003 to date).

    In more general terms, he foresaw that, “Argentina shall suffer on a small scale, what shall later hit the World. It shall set an example!” (1938).

    There is much truth to the first part of this message, as the unprecedented financial and social collapse Argentina went through in 2001/2004, triggered by its Sovereign Debt default, gave the global banking money masters a practical opportunity on how to macro-manage a full-fledged collapse and not only get away with it, but also make a huge profit out of it.

    Argentina was used as a sort of “leading case” and ten years later the banksters are now applying those lessons they learned from Argentina in countries like Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Italy and others.

    When times are troubled as they are today, we would do well to lend an ear to what the very few prophets still left are saying. Their messages might be hard to unravel but they hold warnings and guidelines that we would certainly do well to heed.

    It’s certainly worth listening to Benjamín Solari Parravicini as many of his hundreds of prophetic messages are yet to be fulfilled. Interestingly for those of us living in the Southern Hemisphere, an idea that runs through many of BSP’s messages is his belief that Salvation shall come from the South. In a similar tone wrote Chilean diplomat Miguel Serrano, in line with many Europeans and North Americans who, despairing at today’s materialistic world that is falling apart at the seams, have also looked Southwards for a true renewal.

    [PLEASE NOTE: Images for this article (drawn by BSP) can be viewed in the downloadable version of this issue of New Dawn magazine.] 
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 133.[/alert]

    [alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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