New Dawn – World's Most Unusual Magazine

Category: Paranormal

  • The Soul in the Sea: Re-Uniting with the Dolphins

    The Soul in the Sea: Re-Uniting with the Dolphins

    “What mystery is the sea,” exclaimed Herman Melville, “whose stirrings speak of a hidden soul beneath!”1 I only understood what the great American meant for the first time two years ago, while visiting the Roatán Institute for Marine Sciences in Honduras. It was located at an otherwise uninhabited islet just off the mainland, where a shallow barrier corralled more than thirty dolphins within some six square acres. The top of the fence stood so low above the water, all but the most arthritic dolphin could easily hop over it. In fact, several have made good their escape in this manner, I was told, only to jump back inside a few days later.

    As part of their daily routine, all the resident dolphins are herded together and taken out to sea, where they often frolic with their friends and relations in the wild for an hour or so – much like walking one’s pet dogs – before returning to the fenced-in islet. Perhaps they regard it as a sanctuary from sharks, enjoy its largesse of flattering attention from scientists and tourists, are bribed by free squid and herring – among their favourite delicacies – or all these amenities and more no human can guess.

    Together with fellow tourists guided by a local handler, we waded into shallow depths and were immediately met by a female dolphin, which allowed us to come quite close, even touch her. Expecting to feel a hard or at least tough, scaly exterior, I was surprised by her supple, smooth, warm skin, so human-like.

    “No one who has ever touched the skin of a dolphin,” wrote famed oceanographer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, “is likely to forget the silken, elastic, soft feel of it.”2 But a deeper impression was made by her light brown eyes. Behind the anticipated high intelligence and complex awareness, there was something even more compelling lurking deeper inside. If, as the old French saying has it, “the eyes are the mirror of the soul,” then her gaze betrayed a core mystery comparable only to a kindred connection.3

    The feeling is not uncommon. Cetacean researcher Ann Spurgeon spoke for many, when she observed, “We looked often into the dolphins’ eyes, and the quality of the look they returned was unlike that of any animal we have known.”4

    According to no less an authority on the sea than Cousteau himself, “it is obvious that dolphins are often motivated by curiosity, and especially by curiosity about man. One literally can see it in their eyes. This is a fact that can be doubted only by someone who has never really looked a dolphin in the eye. The brilliance of that organ, the spark that is so evident there, seems to come from another world. The look which the dolphin gives – a keen look, slightly melancholy and mischievous, but less insolent, conniving and cynical than that of monkeys – seems full of indulgence for the uncertainties of the human condition.”5

    Belgium’s pioneering underwater archaeologist and the world’s first aquanaut went further: “The glimmer of interest which sparkled in their eyes seemed to be a human glimmer.”6 Robert Sténuit’s radical suggestion articulated my, as yet, unformulated suspicion – a wordless knowing beyond understanding, much less expression, as though my own mind had been somehow confronted with or partially overtaken by a significant truth too grand or potent for me to really comprehend or to put into words.

    Richard Wagner’s Hans Sachs articulated my perplexity in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg: “I feel it, but cannot understand it; cannot completely recall it, but can never forget it. I can grasp it entirely, ’though cannot measure it. But how can I grasp that which seems immeasurable? … It seemed so old, and yet was so new.”7

    Cousteau was no less taken by his first, personal contact with a wild dolphin. “It was an extraordinary situation,” he confessed, “as though the barrier between man and animal no longer existed. There was some sort of strange understanding between us. It would be very difficult for me to say exactly what our feelings were for one another, but there was undoubtedly something.”8

    Such an inexpressibly profound impression is not unknown to other persons touched by the creature’s singular energy field. “Those who have come very close to dolphins feel it inside themselves,” stated Dr. Horace Dobbs, a leading delphinologist, “yet cannot explain it. Exactly what it is remains a mystery. For want of a better word, let us call it spirit of the dolphin.”9

    Dolphin Meets Humans

    From the moment the Roatán dolphin first approached our gaggle of tourists, I could not escape the strong impression – realisation, perhaps – that it was very rapidly probing us with the powerful energy of some unseen and inconceivable instrument; scanning each one of us individually; psychically scoping us out down to the absolute bottom of our souls; reading everything in our conscious and subconscious minds; assessing the totality of our identity; determining our threat or friendly potential; yes, judging us – completely and thoroughly within the matter of a few seconds.

    Being in the ocean with a living, breathing dolphin close enough to touch it was nothing like seeing one perform at Sea World, watching it on television, or reading about cetaceans in a library. No “virtual reality” approximates sharing the same water with such a singular creature. Although common enough these days, and similarly enjoyed by many thousands of tourists around the world, my dolphin encounter near Roatán was nevertheless a memorable, if ineffably real occurrence.

    I approached it with no expectations, no preconceived ideas, but left myself open to whatever might or might not happen. I did not endeavour to “mind meld” with the creature, nor force any such boorish impertinence upon it, and instead hoped to learn something not otherwise available in less personal circumstances. To be honest, the experience was somewhat tinged with fear, not for what the dolphin would do, but what it could do. However amiable it outwardly appeared, being at the mercy of a nine-foot-long, three-hundred-ten-pound, mentally sharp beast moving through the water seven times faster than the best human swimmer and with the agility of a bull-whip in an environment where bodily inferior men are sluggish and clumsy, gave me pause. Aristotle and his 4th century BCE colleagues believed the dolphin was the fastest creature in the sea, and they may have been right.

    In 1975, Jacques Cousteau wrote of his personal experience aboard a French Navy cruiser “in the waters of the Far East… I realised that the school of dolphins, in catching up to and then passing the Primauguet, as it moved at full power, must have been swimming at a speed of no less than fifty miles per hour!” Later, he calculated that a dolphin needed to beat its tail one hundred twenty times per minute, or two strokes every second, to reach a speed of just ten knots, or 11.5 miles per hour.10

    Professor Paul Budker, director of the National Museum of Natural History and the Laboratory of Colonial Fisheries in Paris, found that dolphins “move as though by magic, and are capable of producing more power per pound of muscle than any other animal.”11

    Cambridge University’s Sir James Gray observed that “the form given by Nature to the dolphin is more effective than that of any submarine or torpedo conceived by man.”12

    Dolphin Aggression Rare

    While friendly toward humans, dolphins do have a temper and occasionally show aggressive behaviour, not always for obvious reasons. “A dolphin could kill a man with a blow of its snout,” writes Sténuit. “It could dismember him with a snap of its jaws, because it possesses a double row of strong, conical teeth, eighty-eight in all, which sink in with precision. But never, absolutely never, has a dolphin or a porpoise attacked a man, even in legitimate defence, with a harpoon in its side, or when, with electrodes in its skull, it has been massacred in the name of science.”13

    Since Sténuit made this statement in 1968, three humans have, in fact, been killed by Orcas, the first on 21 February 1991, at Canada’s Sealand of the Pacific, in British Columbia, which thereafter closed its doors for good; again in 1999, but most recently and famously, eleven years later in Shamu Stadium at San Diego, California’s Sea World, by the largest Orca in captivity, weighing six-and-a-quarter tons and measuring over twenty-two feet long.

    In spring 1985, author Timothy Wyllie was brutally attacked at Key Largo, Florida by a sexually aggressive male dolphin intent on raping him. All these incidents and similarly negative encounters occurred with captive dolphins, whose naturally amiable dispositions were perverted by the unnatural conditions imposed on them

    For example, the “Seaworld of Hurt” web site reports that an Orca called “Tilikum” was “held captive against his will; all he could do was swim in small circles and float aimlessly at the surface of the water, far away from the expansive ocean in which he had swum a hundred miles a day alongside his family members.” His artificial environment was a “barren one-hundred-foot-by-fifty-foot pool – just thirty-five feet deep… He was forced to perform every hour, on the hour, eight times a day, seven days a week. When ‘Tilikum’ did not perform a trick correctly, food was withheld from both him and his tank-mates, which caused a great deal of tension, and as a result, ‘Haida’ and ‘Nootka’ would bite ‘Tilikum’ and rake the entire length of his body with their teeth. The constant stress and exhaustion gave him stomach ulcers.

    “When the park closed its doors at the end of each day, the three incompatible Orcas were crammed into a tiny, round, metal-sided module for more than fourteen hours until the park reopened the next morning. Over the course of twenty-one years at SeaWorld, where he is confined to a tank containing 0.0001 percent of the quantity of water that he would traverse in a single day in nature, ‘Tilikum’ has been involved in multiple incidents of aggression. The stress of captivity drives ‘Tilikum’ to exhibit abnormal repetitive behaviour, including chewing on metal gates and the concrete sides of his tank – so much so that most of his teeth are completely worn down.”14

    These typical seaquarium conditions – less hideous than those in so-called “Third World” countries – are on a par with the worst penitentiaries, which similarly bring out the worst in human behaviour. “No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be,” Jacques Cousteau pointed out, “can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal… There is no doubt that a dolphin who lives among humans for any length of time undergoes a deep psychological modification.”15

    Aggressive confrontations between dolphins and ourselves take place mostly under captive environments. Free dolphins in the wild are not known to have ever deliberately killed or injured anyone. That said, there are accounts, however rare, of their overt sexual interest. Wyllie writes that the only man he ever knew who truly hated dolphins was a father who claimed that his son was raped by one, although under what circumstances, he did not specify.16

    If real enough, the isolated and extreme rarity of these incidents must nevertheless be stressed to put them into balanced perspective. Guilt for negative encounters with dolphins, however, has been and continues to be virtually entirely on the human side. They are, after all, our fellow mammals, still imperfect, for all their admirable qualities, and far more typically dedicated to refraining from killing us, for which, in view of our past and present atrocities committed against all cetaceans, they have abundant justification.

    “When we work to save them,” stated Frank Robson, New Zealand’s leading cetologist of the last century, “we are, in a sense, acting to save ourselves.”17 In spite of the horrific abuses we continue to heap upon them, wild dolphins continue, as they always have, to seek out and enjoy our company, even volunteering to rescue unknown numbers of us from otherwise certain death at sea. In this, they are either abysmally naive or angelically high-minded. Given their prodigious brain, however, the former alternative is less likely. It is as though they remember how, more than twenty-five centuries ago, Greeks made killing dolphins a capital offense, and enacted their own form of reciprocal legislation against taking human life. However rarely observed, Pacific killer whales occasionally encircle a pod, individually seizing and devouring a victim, until all the dolphins have been devoured, behaviour from which the species’ original term derived: Orca gladiator.

    No less appropriately, the genus name Orcinus means “of the kingdom of the dead,” from the original Etruscan and later Roman god, Orcus, punisher of evil souls in the Afterlife. Among themselves, killer whales, as well as dolphins, commit infanticide, similarly practiced by raptors, most notably eagles, as well as elite human societies, such as those made famous by the Spartans and Vikings. Alpha males of our own, pre-modern, militaristic ancestors routinely inspected newborns for the slightest indication of physical deformity or any other inherent anomaly, as predatory birds still do. If discovered, the baby or hatching was, or is, discarded to safeguard the species’ genetic integrity.

    Such behaviour may contrast with but cannot detract from the dolphins’ over-riding amiability toward fellow mammals, us included. Even the dolphin I met off the coast of Honduras, while certainly congenial, pointedly refused to obey some of its human handler’s instructions. As Robson discovered, “there is absolutely no way a wild dolphin can be forced to comply with the wishes of a human. If it suits him, he’ll comply. If he doesn’t feel like it, he won’t.”18
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    Dolphin Conference

    Of all the enigmas Jacques Cousteau observed during almost seven decades of underwater exploration, perhaps his most bizarre encounter took place sixty years ago, off a reef in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In the process of gathering material for his now-classic film, The Silent World, he “saw a dolphin rise to the surface to breathe, and then let himself sink down into the water again, without swimming.” This sighting followed several days of other, unusual delphine behaviour, when, “every morning at about ten o’clock,” a small pod of dolphins swam by his anchored research vessel. Intrigued, Cousteau and a fellow diver slipped into the sea.

    “To this day, I have not forgiven myself for not taking a camera,” he recalled. “The sight that greeted us was one that we have never seen again. There were about fifteen dolphins – probably the school that we had seen going past Calypso every morning – in the crystal-clear water, on the side of the reef. They were sitting on the bottom, in a group, as though they were holding a conference. I say ‘sitting;’ I mean that they were literally poised on their tails.

    “They remained where they were, stirring a bit and looking at one another. Then they continued with their meeting. But when we tried to move in closer to them, they swam away immediately. It was a unique and extraordinarily impressive sight. The truth is that I still have no idea what they were doing.” Telepathically communicating with each other, most likely. Cousteau himself wrote that their “meeting” suggested “an underwater congress.”19

    More intriguing still, about what did they confer? Given their proximity to Calypso, they were probably discussing the untypical presence of anthropomorphic divers in an otherwise unvisited area of the vast Indian Ocean; what could have brought the strangers here, how should the pod regard them, and related issues of the moment. The dolphins sat together, as humans do, yet another comparison between both species – like eye similarity, the soft spot at the top of our head corresponding to the dolphin’s blow hole, human-like fingers, hands, thighs, knees, feet and toes in the dolphin embryo, etc., etc. – indicating a shared evolution of some kind.

    Can all this mean that we were once dolphins before our ancestors returned to dry land, where primate attributes are more useful? If so, do the dolphins still preserve a cultural or collective memory of our aquatic past, and regard us on account of it as their mammalian relatives? Is that the real basis for their demonstrable love of humankind? Given their immense intellect, they may know much more; everything, in fact, there is to understand concerning the illimitable bounty of the sea. What they might teach us about it could mean the difference between our annihilation or survival in an age of extinction.

    Poisoning of the Oceans

    The animals’ wholesale slaughter by Japan has assumed international notoriety, but even more devastating is progressive poisoning of the planet’s water resources. Just how far rising levels of toxicity have already gone to reduce dolphin world population is difficult to determine. But cetologists do know that the first birth given by a dolphin mother dies from all the human toxins it ingests, while a second birth usually survives, because its immediate predecessor absorbed most of the toxins. This process, even if it continues at present levels – which, of course, it won’t – must result in at least cutting dolphin populations in half.

    “The growing presence of toxic chemicals in the marine environment presents a crisis unlike any ever faced on this planet,” warns Blue Voice, an ocean conservation organisation founded in 2000. “Vast quantities of toxic chemicals enter the waterways and oceans of the world each day and accumulate, then bio-magnify in the marine food chain. In a time when we have reduced the number of large pelagic fish by ninety percent and the bio-mass of the oceans by seventy percent, we are poisoning much of the living marine resources that remain. This has staggering global implications for ocean life and human health. A level of one hundred parts per million of mercury has been found in a bottlenose dolphin killed for food in Japan – a level more than one hundred times that accepted by Japanese health authorities… Dolphins, toothed whales, large tuna and swordfish are among the marine creatures with highest levels of contamination, because they feed at the apex of the food chain.”20

    Whenever greed and self-interest are at issue, Man’s indifference to the suffering and extermination of his fellow creatures – even if their plight endangers himself – is human nature. As such, it cannot be eradicated by education or legislation, but will only disappear with himself. This was what Cousteau and other scientists realised and advocated in the last century.

    “Redemption will come only when we return to the water, as sea mammals did in the past,” Cousteau repeatedly declared; “gravity is the original sin… The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope… We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilisation is all about – farming replacing hunting… If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed, and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect. If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.”21

    That work, as he envisioned it, was gradually returning us to our aquatic origins in the baptism of a new species to wash away the original sin of our human-all-too-human nature. Nor is the prospect as fantastic as it may seem. Some human populations living in an intimate relationship with the sea are already developing marine mammal characteristics.

    Projecting what we have learned or suspect about such transformational potentials and our own aquatic origins into some inconceivably distant future, we can imagine an Earth entirely restored to its original, pristine condition. All its creatures roam free – unhunted, unexploited, and unharmed, save by natural predators, as part of the eternal balance of life – through an unpolluted environment of worldwide fresh air and water.

    The wheel of organic existence runs on undisturbed, because no trace may be found of the viral species that formerly dominated this exquisitely beautiful planet, save among the last vestiges of its overgrown and crumbling cities. Their former inhabitants are gone, for the good of the world and themselves. Nor can the descendants of this lost race be found among the deserted, disintegrating ruins, because they have – all of them – reunited with their brother and sister dolphins in the sea.

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    Footnotes

    1. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Penguin Classics, 1996
    2. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Dolphins, Doubleday & Company, 1975
    3. Gregory Y. Titelman, “Les yeux sont le miroir de l’dme,” Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings, Random House, 1996
    4. Splurgein cited by Amada Cochrane & Karena Callen, Dolphins and Their Power to Heal, Healing Arts Press, 1992
    5. Cousteau, op. cit.
    6. Robert Stenuit, The Dolphin, Cousin to Man, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 1968
    7. Richard Wagner, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, G. Schirmer, Inc., 1932
    8. Cousteau, op. cit.
    9. Horace Dobbs, Dolphin Healing, Judy Piatkus Publishers, 2000
    10. Cousteau, op. cit.
    11. John C. Lilly, Lilly on Dolphins, Anchor Press, 1975
    12. Eleanor Devine & Martha Clark, The Dolphin Smile, The Macmillan Company, 1967
    13. Stenuit, op. cit.
    14. Seaworld of Hurt, www.seaworldofhurt.com/features/30-years-three-deaths-tilikums-tragic-story/
    15. Cousteau, op. cit.
    16. Timothy Wyllie, Dolphins, Telepathy and Underwater Birthing, Bear and Company, 1993
    17. Frank Robson, Pictures in the Dolphin Mind, Sheridan House, 1988
    18. Ibid.
    19. Cousteau, op. cit.
    20. www.bluevoice.org/news_sharedfate.php
    21. Cousteau, op. cit.

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  • Thoughtforms, Tulpas & Egregores

    Thoughtforms, Tulpas & Egregores

    From New Dawn 146 (Sept-Oct 2014)

    What are thoughts – are they real, and once created are they things that exist independent of our minds? Are they constructs created by our soul’s mental and emotional faculties? If so, how do these faculties mould consciousness into the creation of thoughts? In many of the world’s religions, mystical and esoteric traditions there is a belief that once a thought comes into being it becomes a real entity that exists separately from the thinker.

    The first time I became aware that our thoughts had a profound effect on our personal reality was as an adolescent in reference to Mark 7:15 in the Bible. In this passage Jesus says, “There is nothing that enters a man from outside which can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are the things that defile a man.” In explaining that we are not what we eat but what we think, Jesus was alluding to Proverbs 23:7: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” It was during this time I began seriously contemplating what these two passages meant, but could not fathom their true implications.

    In the late 1960s I began studying a Kabbalistic meditation known as pathworking and had some profound experiences in which I could visualise mythological figures on the lower paths of the Tree of Life. The questions I asked then was, am I creating these figures out of my own thoughts and are those figures real on some level? I had no answers.

    Several years later I began studying a new method of meditation form – the Diamond Way tradition of Tibetan Buddhism – a form of Vajrayana or Tantric Buddhism. In studying Buddhism, it became evident from their teachings the physical world we experience is created from our thoughts and our reality is an illusion. Trying to sort through the implications of what I was learning, I stumbled upon the writings of Prentice Mulford, one of the founders in the late 1800s of the New Thought movement. In his book Thoughts Are Things he explained how our thoughts influence our spiritual, mental and physical health. Our thoughts create sickness as well as wellness.

    I was becoming convinced that our thoughts in some way were creating our reality. It was at this point I re-connected with the Kabbalah, this time magical Kabbalah. This led me into the many streams of magic, especially Renaissance magic and later Tibetan Buddhist magic. I soon discovered in the Western magical traditions the practitioner, through ceremonial rituals, moulds reality into their bidding through their thoughts and emotions. I also discovered this was true with Tibetan Buddhist magic as well.

    I became very curious; do these rituals actually work? So I began an intense study of rituals from various Renaissance grimoires (magical books) and performed a specific ritual with a specific intention. To my surprise, within a few months I got the results I asked for. I asked myself, did I actually use my thoughts in the ritual to produce the results? And if so, was there a scientific basis for my experience? At the time I was a polymer researcher in the chemical industry and ordered a book on quantum mechanics from a scientific book club that added some clarity. It, too, presented a picture of reality similar to Buddhism in that reality does not exist until it is observed in some way, which means that through our thoughts we create the world around us.

    On the heels of being exposed to quantum physics, I discovered two related concepts on reality creation, one from Jungian psychology on the imaginal realm and the other from the theosophical literature on thoughtforms. I discovered there is a reality that exists separate from physical reality called the imaginal realm. In the imaginal realm there exist animated beings that are created by our thoughts and emotions called thoughtforms and tulpas. Thoughtforms in general are created by our intentions both consciously and unconsciously. However, tulpas are thoughtforms that are created with conscious intention.

    What are Thoughtforms and Tulpas?

    The word thoughtform has various spellings. In some cases, it is spelled thought form or thought–form, but I have put the two words together as one word, thoughtform, reflecting a single construct. Thoughtforms and tulpas are created by focusing on a single thought and infusing that thought with intense emotions, becoming a separate mental/energetic thing. Once created, thoughtforms and tulpas exist in all spiritual realities and make up what is known as the imaginal realm. The imaginal realm interpenetrates all existence and is the repository of collective thought formations and energies. Thoughtforms and tulpas can be experienced physically, but in most cases they are experienced as apparitions. Nonetheless, they exist as separate entities manifesting both as physical and apparitional formations.

    Tulpas are thoughtforms that have their origin in Tibetan Buddhism and the Bön religion. In these traditions tulpas are consciously created beings or objects. The word tulpa literally means to build or to construct. In Tibetan Buddhism those who create tulpas are naljorpas and tulkus. Naljorpas are ascetics possessing magical powers and tulkus are special lamas that consciously incarnate into their next lifetime as bodhisattvas (highly evolved spiritual beings). In the Bön religion, magicians known as ngagspas create tulpas.

    According to Theosophists Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater,1 there are three classes of thoughtforms. The first class is “that which takes the image of the thinker.” The second class is “that which takes the image of some material object.” The third class is “that which takes a form entirely its own, expressing its inherent qualities in the matter which it draws around it.” To this list I will add a fourth class – that which takes the collective form of a group mind known as an egregore. Although there are four distinct classes of thoughtforms presented here, they nonetheless have overlapping qualities that will be evident in the following cases.

    The thoughtform of the first class, taking the image of the thinker, is when a person intensely imagines and focuses that they are somewhere else, such as in another city, an area of the city or another country. With intense focusing they see themselves in another locale performing various activities. They have created a thoughtform of themselves that exists separately from them, has autonomy and mental awareness. In some cases other people can see and sense the thoughtform of that person as an apparition.

    The Franciscan friar Padre Pio is one such case. He was able to be at the friary and then project the thoughtform of himself to various locales. People in those locales would see him or smell the fragrance of roses indicating his presence. In one documented case during World War II, Padre Pio projected his thoughtform appearance in the air over San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy. American bombers were getting ready to bomb the city when a brown-robed friar appeared before their aircraft and all attempts to bomb the city failed.

    The possible explanation for this case is that Padre Pio, through intense prayer to keep the city safe, focused intensely on protecting his city. The intense prayer coupled with detailed images of how he would keep the city safe created a thought structure. Added to that thought structure were strong emotions solidifying the thought structure into a specific form. Once solidified, an image of Padre Pio split off creating a thoughtform of himself, which manifested before the airplane as the brown-robed friar.

    In another case, the philosopher Michael Grosso2 reported an experience he had with a lover named Windy. He met Windy in London and they had an intense love affair. Michael had to return to New York and Windy was to join him there soon, but there were visa problems that prevented her from joining him. They could not get each other out of their minds. At times, in their intense imagination they could see, feel, smell and touch each other. One night, Michael in an intense imaginative love experience projected the thoughtform of himself to Windy.

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    Several days later Michael received a letter from Windy that read, “I’m writing this in haste before I go to work. A strange thing happened to me this morning. It was Sunday morning, about eight o’clock. I was lying in bed, half-awake, wishing I didn’t have to get up. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking I had to go to the loo, but I didn’t move. I was somewhere between sleeping and waking, when it happened. Believe me, I’m not crazy, and my life’s not so miserable that I have to make stories up. But the truth is, suddenly you were in bed with me. You were there! Making love to me! I knew it was you, I couldn’t see, but I knew it was you. I felt your body, recognised your voice. I knew I wasn’t asleep, it wasn’t a dream. I would appreciate it, philosopher, if you would explain this to me. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. It was very peculiar. I do hope this isn’t a prelude to my going completely mad.”

    The possible explanation for this case is similar to Padre Pio. Michael in an intense love making fantasy created a detailed image with strong emotions of making love with Windy. The inner image coupled with intense emotions created a thoughtform of him making love in a real situation. The thoughtform of himself split off and was projected to Windy. That thoughtform took on some physical characteristics allowing Windy to know it was Michael.

    The second class, taking the image of some material object, can be applied to the phenomenon called doppelgänger as well as tulpas. In these instances, the doppelgänger and the tulpa exist as separate material objects. In 1991 Debra Mann reported on an unusual case of the doppelgänger manifestation of George Hensley.3 George was heading back to college in Laramie, Wyoming and discovered the route he was taking through Telephone Canyon was blocked by snow and police were redirecting traffic onto another route. George decided he would take the route anyway because it was the shortest. He waited until the police left and started driving his jeep down the canyon. He noticed a hitchhiker along the road, picked him up and asked the hitchhiker if he wouldn’t mind driving because he (George) was very tired and needed to sleep.

    The hitchhiker accepted the invitation, got in the driver seat and started driving. George noticed the hitchhiker looked like a younger version of himself even wearing his good-luck Eisenhower jacket that he wore during World War II. Unbeknownst to George, while he slept the middle of the canyon was completely blocked with snow, but somehow when he awoke the hitchhiker had made it through the canyon. Near Laramie at Bosler Junction, the hitchhiker got out of the jeep and later George discovered that Telephone Canyon had been totally blocked with snow. How did George get through the canyon and who was the hitchhiker?

    I can only give a partial explanation for this case. George intensely focused on getting back to college going the shortest route. On some level, he knew the trip was fraught with danger. Knowing that danger, he created in his mind detailed images coupled with intense emotions for a safe route through the canyon. This created a thoughtform of himself as a doppelgänger. The doppelgänger was a split-off part of himself manifesting as a protective guardian angel thoughtform, smoothing out a safe route. In this case, the thoughtform was a solid physical manifestation that took on a life of its own. The part of the story that baffles me is how the material thoughtform manoeuvred the jeep through the blocked snow filled canyon.

    The next case is that of Alexandra David-Neel4 the Tibetan explorer and the first female lama from the Western world. Alexandra studied the dubthabs rite5 that is used in Tibet to create Yidams, which are particular types of tulpas. In most cases, in Tibetan Buddhism, Yidams are deities that are created through intense focusing and imagination. Alexandra had heard that certain lamas could create tulpas, so she decided to see if she could create one as well. Rather than creating a Yidam deity, which she saw all around her in painting and statues, she chose instead to create a short fat jolly monk.

    Alexandra shut herself in tsams, which means living in seclusion. In Tibetan tsams literally means a barrier or border, usually a tent, hut or cave. In some cases, tsams are non-material in which the lama isolates himself or herself in a state of meditation. While she was in tsams, most likely a tent, Alexandra performed the required thought concentration of the dubthabs rite as well as other rites. Within several months, the monk tulpa manifested and grew into a life-like figure becoming her companion. The monk became animated and visible even to others. At times, she could feel his robe and his hand touching her shoulder.

    Over time, the monk began to change into a slender creature with a “sly malignant look.” He became so animated that she could no longer control him. At this point, she decided to dissolve him. It took her six months of constant struggle, but she finally succeeded. In reference to what she created, Alexandra wrote: “There is nothing strange in the fact that I may have created my own hallucination. The interesting point is that in these cases of materialisation, others see the thought-forms that have been created.”

    The explanation for this case is similar to the creation of the doppelgänger. However, Alexandra consciously created the tulpa by using the dubthads rite, which means a method of success. In similar fashion as to the doppelgänger, Alexandra’s tulpa became a solid material object at times, took on a life of its own and manifested physically in which others could see it. Once animated and having a life of its own, the tulpa became a separate entity in which Alexandra was losing control. Eventually, she was able to reverse the process dissolving her creation.

    The third class, taking a form entirely its own, expressing its inherent qualities in the matter which it draws around it. In this class, a positive or negative thoughtform is projected into an individual’s aura, the protective energy field surrounding the body. The mental and astral bodies of the soul create this energy field. The auric field is either strongly intact preventing outside influences from entering, or weak and diffused allowing unwanted influences to invade. There are cases where mothers intensely pray for a guardian angel to protect her child. She creates an angelic thoughtform using her energetic thoughts coupled with the energetic material of her child’s aura. Once created, the thoughtform penetrates her child’s aura and remains there to keep out negative influences.

    In Western magical traditions there are protection rituals the magician uses to strengthen and protect their auric field. In the late 1800s the magical fraternity The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn used a specific ritual known as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to create a strong auric field to protect the magician from intruding influences.

    In creating guardian angels and using the Banishing Ritual, the mental and astral bodies of the soul uses the energetic properties of the aura and surrounding energies to create the protective field as a positive thoughtform. However, there are cases in which the auric field’s thoughtform is not positive but negative. The following two cases pertain to the third class of thoughtforms and they come from my personal archives when I was a psychotherapist and paranormal investigator.

    The first case is a male client I worked with around issues regarding his possessive mother. After the father died when my client was a child, his mother became over protective, fearing something would happen to him. She focused on protecting him with intense emotions to keep him safe. Her intense focusing intruded into his aura, setting up a strong symbiotic relationship in which her protective thoughtforms mingled with his auric energetic field. Their two mental and emotional energies merged creating an unconscious possessive thoughtform that prevented him from separating from her and maturing.

    My client moved from the state of Washington to Cincinnati, Ohio to get away from his mother, but she still possessed him. He could constantly feel the thoughtform of her all around him and could see her image in his mind’s eye continuously. We used various imagery techniques and protective rituals to strengthen his aura. Finally, after a year we were able to cut the energetic stream that animated her possessing thoughtform. Once free of her possessing thoughtform, he continued daily protective rituals to keep his auric field strong.

    The explanation for this case is my client’s mother had good intentions in trying to protect her child, but her own fears and insecurities got in the way. She intentionally created a protective thoughtform that went awry because unconsciously she infused her fears and insecurities into the thoughtform. Being a child when this happened, his auric field was weak and diffused allowing his mother’s thoughts and emotions to invade and use his auric energies along with hers to create the thoughtform. Her constant focusing on his safety allowed the thoughtform to become possessive as well as using the energies from his auric field to exist.

    The second case is of a woman who contacted me regarding her haunted house. After working with her for a while, I managed to convince her to move. After she moved, the haunting activity ceased. Within a few months she contacted me again, the haunting activity had reoccurred and it was now more like a poltergeist. She moved again, only for the haunting activity to follow her. It became evident at this point that she was haunted and not the houses. As I dug deeper into the case, I discovered soon after her divorce was when the haunting activity began. It became evident that either she or her husband had created a negative thoughtform that had affected her auric field and was haunting her. Now being part of her auric field, the thoughtform followed her from place to place. With all the methods I used, including spirit releasement techniques, we were unable to free her from the thoughtform. It was this fact that persuaded me to believe she was the one creating the thoughtform and not her former husband.

    The explanation for this case is my client created the poltergeist thoughtform out of anger and frustration over her failed marriage. She resented and hated her husband over the way he had treated her, but would not stand up for herself. Rather than releasing her anger onto her husband, she turned it inward affecting her auric field, which was already weak and diffused. Her negative thoughts and emotions created the thoughtform that remained attached to her and her anger and resentment kept it alive.

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    Egregores: Collective Thoughtforms

    The fourth class is the collective form of a group mind known as an egregore. An egregore is a special class of thoughtforms experienced mentally as images, feelings, complete structures with or without animated beings. According to Gaetan Delaforge6 egregores are “created when people consciously come together for a common purpose. Whenever people gather together to do something an egregore is formed, but unless an attempt is made to maintain it… it will dissipate. However… (if) people wish to maintain it and know the techniques of how to do so, the egregore will continue to grow in strength and can last for centuries. An egregore has the characteristic of having an effectiveness greater than the mere sum of its individual members. It continuously interacts with its members, influencing them and being influenced by them…. If this process is continued a long time the egregore will take on a kind of life of its own, and can become so strong that even if all its members should die, it would continue to exist on the inner dimensions (the imaginal realm)…”

    In this description, Delaforge is discussing egregores in general. However, when egregores are created through “spiritual or esoteric activities its influence will be even greater. People who discover the keys to tap in on a powerful egregore representing… a spiritual or esoteric tradition,” as described above, they can activate the egregore, gaining “access to the abilities, knowledge, and drive of all that has been accumulated in that egregore since its beginnings.”

    Delaforge’s focus is creating egregores through conscious intention by group minds. However, as with all thoughtforms, egregores can also be created unconsciously by group minds such as political parties, organisations of various kinds, religious denomination as cited above, ethnic groups as well as a variety of inner world structures within the imaginal realm. These egregores exist separately and can be accessed consciously or unconsciously. If accessed, the energies and thought formations can have a profound influence on individuals and groups motivating them into specific directions and actions.

    I have had several spontaneous experiences with egregores as well as creating four with conscious intention. There are two spontaneous experiences, I wish to discuss, one visual and the other emotional. Living in North Carolina I have made many trips to the coast driving on a road in the southern part of the state. On one occasion I was passing a cotton field I had driven by many times. I glanced over at the field and saw the cotton in bloom as I had seen many times before, except this time I saw many African Americans in period clothes picking cotton. I turned back to the road and then back to the cotton field, and this time I saw no one in the field just cotton in bloom. On that occasion, I tapped into the visual egregore of the slaves who had worked that field before the Civil War.

    The second experience occurred when I took a retreat in a Trappist Monastery. I hiked up a small mountain to a large cross overlooking the monastery grounds. It was July and the day was very hot. By the time I reached the top of the mountain where the cross stood, I was exhausted. I sat down to rest leaning against the cross when suddenly my exhaustion was lifted; finding myself in a deep state of calmness and not at all tired, but energised. I was bathed in the sacred egregore energies left there by people who had meditated and prayed at that very spot.

    After being introduced to the imaginal realm and egregores, I decided to create my first egregore in the mid-1980s. This egregore was a cave where a wise woman lived and was created specifically to help one of my psychotherapy clients. My second egregore was an inner temple based on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. My third egregore was a special room in a large house which I used to contact those who have passed on. The fourth egregore I created recently and it is a combination of the special room and the inner temple. All of these egregores I created consciously and they worked for the purpose they were created.

    Keep in mind the imaginal realm is the plasticised reality we mould through our thoughts, emotions, imagination and focused intention. The imaginal realm is that reality that exists between the physical reality and the realm of the light, which we experience at death. This landscape of the imaginal realm also includes our material reality as well.

    Summary

    Thoughtforms are created from the soul’s mental and astral bodies through imagination, desire, willpower and intention. In many cases, once thoughtforms are created they exist as real things separate from their creator. Thoughtforms are created from energised thoughts, and from this perspective thoughts are real things. Once created, thoughts exist as separate entities all on their own. The take-a-way lesson – beware of what you desire because you may actually create it.

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    Footnotes

    1. Annie Besant & C.W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms, 1901, 26-30
    2. Michael Grosso, ‘Trans-Atlantic Sacred Sex: A Psi-Related Story’ Ecstasy: The Journal of Divine Eroticism, 1993, Vol. II, Num. 3, 5-9
    3. Debra D. Mann, ‘George Hensley and the Doppelgänger’, Fate Magazine, Feb 1991, 70-75
    4. Alexandra David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Dover, 1971, 306-320
    5. Alexandra David-Neel, Initiation and Initiates in Tibet, Dover, 1993, 91-99
    6. Gaetan Delaforge, ‘The Templar Tradition Yesterday and Today’, Gnosis, 1988, No. 6, Winter, 8-13

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • Psychic Pets? The Cat: Walker Between Worlds

    Psychic Pets? The Cat: Walker Between Worlds

    From New Dawn 154 (Jan-Feb 2016)

    Following publication of my Nexus article, “The Shared Evolution of Dolphins and Humans,”1 reader response, as much as my own growing interest in the subject, urged me to pursue it much further by writing a book-length investigation slated for release by Bear and Company in March. But my quest for answers about interspecies’ relationships with a creature apparently so much different than us opened up even stranger digressions mostly left out of my book Our Dolphin Ancestors. These bizarre accounts and insights are instead presented here, in the same venue where my inquiry began, because they merit, I believe, further consideration.

    Among them is a one-minute, forty-nine-second home movie taken at the Theater of the Sea, a marine animal park in Islamorada, Florida, USA.2 Since it was posted in May 2012, the film clip has attracted an audience of some seven million viewers (see video image above, more images are in the magazine). It shows two bottlenose dolphins, named Shiloh and Thunder, engaging Arthur, a common domestic cat, which, to all appearances, is thoroughly enchanted with them. There is much chummy inter-play between feline and cetaceans, as the former continuously paws and nuzzles the latters’ snouts. Shiloh and Thunder respond by repeatedly offering their sensitive rostrums for affection, and gently tap the cat on the top of its head – remarkably, given physical disparities between a thirty-three-centimeter-long, four-kilogram, water-hating cat and aquatic, four-meter, one hundred eighty-two-kilogram dolphins.

    One might expect Arthur to have been utterly horrified by mere sight of such beasts, while the dolphins, for their part, should have little or no interest in the tiny landlubber. Their gentle care in petting the cat’s head – something most cats do not tolerate by anyone – is astonishing. When they suddenly vanish, Arthur nervously paces back and forth, attentively searching the surface of the water for his absent friends. When they reappear, he rushes back across the gangplank to greet them again with undiminished affection.

    Yet, the animals were less curious about exploring two different species, than interested in greeting each other, as though resuming a former acquaintance. They seemed to recognise each other from the start. The cat knew at once that the dolphins were not only harmless, but exceptionally desirable companions, while Shiloh and Thunder quite obviously loved Arthur. It is inexplicable that these wildly divergent species should find the least commonality between themselves, much less such intimate rapport. Throughout their extraordinary encounter, eye contact was virtually unbroken. Given dolphins’ renowned telepathic abilities, as discussed in my forthcoming book – many cat-owners experience telepathic connections with their pets – thought transference appears to have been the medium that fashioned their instantly amiable relationship.

    But what kind of information passed between them? Certainly, not words, but perhaps some form of emotional knowing illustrated by mental imagery. Nor was the video-recorded meeting between house-cat and wild dolphins a freak incident. Such unlikely get-togethers have been observed by sailors over thousands of years of sea-faring, whenever their feline shipmates were visited by dolphins. Fundamentally different from each other as these animals might seem, both are notable for their curiosity, acute perception and quick awareness, which may comprise at least the basis for their anomalous commonality. In any case, Arthur’s loving relationship with Shiloh and Thunder suggests an empathic bond between these widely divergent species.

    PET Telepathy

    Such enigmatic connections are more commonly observed between felines and humans. A 2012 Anglo-American study of households in England and the United States found that “a third of cat owners claim that their pets respond to their thoughts and silent commands.” The sample study additionally showed that, on average, thirty percent of pet owners claimed their cats usually wait at a door or window a few minutes before their loved ones come home, even when arrival times vary or are never the same. Many cats are reported to know the identity of particular callers before the telephone rings. The wife of a University of California professor at Berkeley told how she always knows when he is calling, because their cat interrupts its sleep or whatever activity in which it is engaged, and rushes to the telephone: “When I pick it up,” she says, “the cat meows. If someone else calls, the cat does not react. It meowed even when my husband called home from Africa or South America.”3

    The About.com website relates that an American housewife and her friend “were standing in the bathroom, talking, and the cat was there, too. I happened to mention a recent story I heard from another lady friend about her cat – that her cat always drank from her bathtub’s dripping faucet. Up until then, my friend never saw her kitty drink from anything other than her bowl. The next day, her cat was found in the tub, drinking from the faucet!”4

    Sammy, the Norwegian Forest Cat

    It is quite one thing to read about the personal experiences of strangers and another to have one yourself. When he was younger, Sammy, our Norwegian Forest cat, sometimes amused my wife and me by leaping on a tree, scooting straight up, fifteen feet or more above the ground. When he got as high as he wanted to go, he looked around from his lofty vantage point, then descended like a lumberjack, tail-first, in spurts. But as he grew older, he withdrew these athletic performances from his normal routine. During one of our strolls across the yard on some spring afternoon, I recalled his tree-climbing days of the past, and wished he would attempt at least one more demonstration. The thought had no sooner crossed my mind than Sammy sprang from my side to a nearby walnut tree, scampering up the first three-quarters of its height, before executing his lumberjack descent.

    His unbidden, wholly appropriate response seemed a clear example of telepathy, although it was entirely one-sided. Henceforward, all my attempts at mentally commanding him to jump on another tree failed. He had other paranormal tricks up his sleeve, however. On a single occasion only, after sundown one summer evening, he suddenly and excitedly demanded that the front door be opened. He flew outside without pausing, as usual, at the threshold, dashed down the front steps, and shot around the eastern side of the house. By the time I caught up with him, he was staring fixedly at something on the sidewalk. In the shadows, I could make out what appeared to be a small pile of writhing humps.

    On closer inspection, they belonged to a little snake never seen there before or since. Previously, back in the house, all his normal, physical senses had been cut off from the outside world. He could have neither seen nor smelled the creature, and even his superb hearing ability would not have likely detected the smooth motion of a serpent gliding slowly across the sidewalk. Sceptics may dismiss such anecdotal episodes as unrevealing, but anyone who lives on intimate terms with an animal for an extended period can integrate such events into the broader context of the pet’s personality. While these incidents do not pass muster for strict up-holders of the scientific method, it nevertheless depends upon accurate observations. I can only conclude, therefore, that Sammy accessed a form of extrasensory perception to determine the presence and whereabouts of the snake, which was otherwise unknown to him.

    Can a Cat Know the Time?

    More remarkable than Sammy’s talents at remote viewing is his concept of time, as demonstrated during our outdoor excursions. He is very sensible about them, does not run off, stays fairly close to me and mostly out of mischief, so does not require a leash. If I take along some writing that needs work, listen to music on my ‘walkman’, or read, we could spend hours together ‘outside’, a word he certainly knows. More often, my time is limited, and our walks may go on for ten or twenty minutes, though we usually take several each day.

    It was at the outset of one of our first outdoor jaunts that I glanced at my watch, and made a mental note to myself: “We’ll go back inside the house at 2:30.” For the next half hour, Sammy went about his usual business of sniffing the air, chomping grass, urinating on a territorial bush, exploring a suspicious hole in the yard, making his customary inspection of the back patio, chasing a squirrel, stalking a mole, or observing bugs and birds from a favourite vantage-point. In the midst of these commonplace feline pursuits, he paused for a moment, while a puzzled expression came over his face, as though he were trying to remember something, then bolted up the front steps and demanded to be let in the door. My watch read precisely 2:30.

    What first seemed a trifling coincidence progressively grew into something more significant. Over the subsequent years of our friendship, we shared and continue to share – weather permitting – daily kitty walks, which may take place from early morning to dusk, but never at the same hour. Usually, I do not think of a definite minute when we should go back inside, and either of us concludes our walk in a normal fashion. Any potential visual clues from me – conscious or not – Sammy may pick up seem unlikely, due to the entirely random nature of these outings. Yet, he abruptly terminates about sixty-five per cent of his walks at the explicit instant I mentally programmed before we set out. For example, in three, consecutive walks I counted, he concluded each one at the appointed minute.

    Engaged as I am in my own activity during our walks, I usually forget about the specific time I predetermined for their conclusion. Even so, Sammy still returns to the house at that preordained moment, often to the exact second. Moreover, whenever I mentally willed him to come in from the outdoors, without having scheduled any prior cut-off, he never responded. What could a cat possibly know about time? Even if Sammy does indeed read my mind, the hour or minute I set inside my head to end our walk is surely far beyond the limits of his feline intellect to grasp. Yet, the timeliness of his behaviour is repeatedly – if not invariably – demonstrable. What it suggests is just as certainly outside our current ability to understand inter-species communication.

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    Morphic Resonance

    The famous British biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, proposes a broader basis than explanations for telepathy, although inclusive of extrasensory perception: “Natural systems, or morphic units, at all levels of complexity, are animated, organised, and coordinated by morphic fields, which contain an inherent memory. Natural systems inherit this collective memory from all previous things of their kind by a process called morphic resonance, with the result that patterns of development and behaviour become increasingly habitual through repetition.”5

    In other words, members of a particular group are linked by self-organising energy fields that contain a collective memory unique to themselves, and shape certain patterns of behaviour or adaptation. Applying his hypothesis to the animal kingdom, Sheldrake maintains that animals communicate telepathically among themselves and with us through emotional bonding. Hence, morphic fields are channels for extrasensory perception. But theoretical proposals are less capable of explaining how a common house cat born in the United States ten years ago is capable of regularly predicting the imminent death of his human companions with perfect accuracy.

    The Cat That Knows When Death Approaches

    While a kitten, Oscar was adopted from a local animal shelter to serve as a so-called ‘therapy cat’ at Providence, Rhode Island’s Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. He spends most his time in the facility’s third-floor, end-stage dementia section, a forty-one-bed unit for treating sufferers with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and other illnesses. Most of the residents are terminally ill and generally unaware of their surroundings. Some months after Oscar settled in, staff members noticed that, like the doctors or nurses, he began making his own customary rounds, sniffing and observing patients, then curling up to sleep with certain convalescents. Those he slept with died within two hours of his arrival. He remains with an invalid until he or she passes away, then, post mortem, quietly leaves the room.

    “He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” observes David Dosa, a geriatrician, assistant professor at Rhode Island’s Brown University, and affiliate of Warren Alpert Medical School, both in Providence.6

    “It’s not that the cat is consistently there first,” says Dr. Joan Teno, who cares for Steere House residents and sees Oscar on a regular basis. “But the cat always does manage to make an appearance.”7

    Also, he is “not a cat that’s friendly to [living] people,” states Dr. Dosa. When, for example, an elderly woman with a walker passed him by during his rounds, Oscar “[let] out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that [said] ‘leave me alone’.”8

    He only shows consistent affection to terminally ill persons. In an early, typical instance, Oscar wrapped his body around the ice-cold calf of an old woman who had a serious blood clot in her leg, and stayed with her until she died. By the time Steere House staff members counted twelve persons in succession he had accurately prognosticated with impending death, his powers seemed to fail him. Having determined that another woman was about to die, an attending physician noticed that Oscar took no interest in the situation, and casually walked away. But the cat proved the doctor wrong, because she survived for another ten hours. Oscar dutifully returned to the patient, curling up in her lap and purring, until she died two hours later.

    According to Dr. Teno, “it always seems to be in the last two hours” that he makes his farewell visits.9 Since Oscar began his ministrations, he has correctly predicted an average of ten deaths per year, bringing his total number to more than one hundred. His accuracy persuaded Steere House directors to institute a unique protocol: when discovered sleeping with a patient, family members are notified of their loved one’s momentarily expected passing. Most of them do not object to a cat’s presence at the time of death, but on those rare occasions when relatives request Oscar’s removal from the room, he invariably shows his annoyance by pacing back and forth in front of the closed door and loudly meowing in protest.

    Dr. Dosa speculates that, “the cat might be picking up on specific odours surrounding death.”10 He is supported by Dr. Teno: “I think there are certain chemicals released when someone is dying, and he is smelling and sensing those.”11 Margie Scherk, a Vancouver, British Columbia veterinarian and president of the American Association of Feline Practitioners, suspects “he is smelling some chemical released just before dying” – ketones, bio-chemicals produced by decaying cells. “Cats can smell a lot of things we can’t.”12 While no one could disagree with her last statement, Scherk’s and her colleagues’ conclusions are not convincing.

    Although Oscar was one of six cats simultaneously delivered to Steere House in 2005, he alone comforts the dying in their last moments. Also, no other cat, anywhere, evidences such regularly attentive behaviour, so far as I have been able to determine. However, cats have long been known to ‘knead’ ailing or dying animals – feline and human – by slowly, rhythmically, gently pumping their front paws, back and forth, on a suffering creature, while purring with half-closed eyes in an apparent state of altered consciousness, an apparent effort at healing, somewhat like “the laying on of hands” practiced by spiritual healers. Since ketones are emitted by someone twenty-four hours, more or less, before expiring, they cannot be responsible for prompting Oscar, because he only visits the dying no sooner than one hundred twenty minutes prior to their deaths. More importantly, Scherk, et al, ignore the most important question posed by his actions: why does he perform them?

    The answer is obvious to observers unencumbered by materialism; namely, Oscar feels compassion for humans experiencing the last and probably greatest trauma of their lives, and voluntarily assists them in an otherwise lonely, difficult transition. He recognises a resident’s forthcoming demise in his or her diminishing aura, that metaphysical light source all living things emit until it declines with terminally ill health and is ultimately extinguished when the physical body ceases to function. While the accompanying release of ketones cannot account for Oscar’s fortuitous bedside manners, another set of bio-chemicals produced by a woman during pregnancy may at least partially explain why cats commonly become especially attentive and affectionate toward an expectant mother. They detect human female pheromones, which are similar to feline versions.

    Reverence for Cats in Ancient Egypt

    Ancient Egyptians knew less about pheromones but they observed the particular concern and care cats show human mothers-to-be. Bast, among the oldest-known deities in the Nile Valley, was venerated as the divine patroness of pregnant women. Worship of Bast dates as early as the Second Dynasty (circa 2890 BCE), although her cultic origins undoubtedly preceded Dynastic Civilisation in the mid-4th Millennium BCE. Translated as “She of the Ointment Jar,” her name was written with the hieroglyph for a container of protective ointments associated with the goddess. These receptacles, as well as her image, were usually made of a local stone Greek followers referred to, after Bast, as alabaster, a word that passed into our own language. An entire city – Busbastis – was founded in her honour.

    Busbastis, originally known in ancient Egypt as Per-Bast – “House of Bast” – was located on the Lower Nile. 20th century excavation of Bast’s temple there yielded in excess of three hundred thousand mummified cats. Previously, during 1888, a farmer accidentally uncovered seven hundred thousand in Beni Hasan, Middle Egypt. These million feline mummies testify to the high veneration with which the ancient Egyptians accorded the creature, which they protected with animal rights legislation. Killing a cat was a capital offense, punishable by death. Whenever a household cat passed away, mourning residents traditionally shaved their hair and eyebrows, as expressions of respect and grief. Not without cause. Nile Valley Civilisation owed its existence to cats, which saved storage granaries from rat infestation. Beyond any obvious, mundane boon they granted, however essential, cats – in the sacred personification of Bast – were regarded as walkers between worlds, this one and the next, natural emissaries to and from the Afterlife.

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    Cats & Otherworldly Encounters

    Something of that ancient conception is borne out in modern accounts around the world describing feline behaviour, as exampled in Oscar, that feline Angel of Death, described above. An American woman recounted how a cat joined her family in reacting to a spectral appearance: “This incident occurred during my junior year of high school, in 1972. During a particularly hot and muggy July evening, my parents, sister and I were seated in the living room watching television. The house was unbearably hot and the windows were open with screens in them. All of this was to no avail that evening. There was no air moving, and I was wearing a light t-shirt and shorts, trying to keep cool. The chair I was sitting in was next to the doorway and the upstairs hallway. The hallway in the house divided the living room from the kitchen and was enclosed on both sides with a large curtain at the bottom of the steps. I looked to my left toward the stairway, just as our cat started up. The cat was a calico and was very even tempered.

    “Just as the cat climbed the first step, an icy blast of air rushed down the stairs. The cat hissed loudly and froze. The hair on its back and tail stood straight out, and in its frozen position it resembled a pointer. Simultaneously with the cat’s behaviour, the cold breeze continued to build to the extent that the curtains were almost blowing straight out. In 1972, we had no air conditioning or any other device in the house that could have created the icy air that we now felt. None of us said anything. I felt goose bumps form on my arms and back, and the temperature in the living room perceptibly cooled. Fifteen to twenty seconds had passed with no diminishment of the icy air or relief for our poor cat.

    “I got up from the chair and cautiously peered up the stairway. The light at the top of the steps was on and nothing was visible. The cat was still frozen in mid-stride, and the breeze was almost heavy and very cool on the face. Out of the corner of my eye, it appeared that a very faint, gold-tinted light could be seen shimmering. Yet, when I looked directly at the light, nothing could be seen. I continued to look up the stairs for the next few seconds, but could not discern any apparent reason for the arctic air. I sensed something, but could not see it. Suddenly, as quickly as it had occurred, the breeze stopped. The cat shook itself as if it had just recovered from an injury. Her fur relaxed and she proceeded up the stairs and went into the left bedroom.

    “The topic of discussion the rest of the evening concerned what had just happened. My father revealed to me that when he was less than three years old, two of his older brothers had been playing cowboys and Indians between the kitchen and the living room of this house. The brothers in question were Buell and Boyd. Boyd, who was a year senior to Buell, was playing the Indian. Buell, in the kitchen, was playing as the cowboy. An old, .22 calibre tube rifle was being used by Buell. Boyd was using an old toy bow. The rifle in question had no firing pin and had been used in this game for years.

    “Horribly, unknown to anyone, their older brother Joe had been working on the rifle and had replaced the firing pin. He had loaded and fired the rifle the previous day. One lone shell had been left in the tube. My grandmother, Hazel, had been sitting in the living room forty-one years earlier in approximately the same place I had been. Boyd jumped out from hiding beside his mother. Buell dodged and brought the rifle to bear. He squeezed the trigger and a loud bang echoed in the house. Boyd took the round in his heart. He turned to his mother and said, ‘Mom, I’m shot’. With those words, he collapsed into her arms and died.

    “Could what I witnessed twenty-nine years ago have been the spirit of that small boy, my uncle, who died in that same house forty-one years prior? I never felt fear, as I gazed up those stairs, but am absolutely certain that what happened was outside of our normal world. And our cat sensed it, too.”13

    Petadviser, an authoritative website consulted by ailurophiles everywhere, carried the following subscriber’s report: “Once upon a time, very long ago, I was visiting my parents’ home, and they had gone out for the evening. I was alone in their very large house, and, sitting with me, was my wonderful great big ginger cat, Gatito. After a while, I felt I could hear the footsteps and voice of my grandmother, who lived about fifty miles from us. It sounded like she was walking all over the place and calling the name, ‘Bill… Bill’. Bill was my father, her son. Ordinarily, I would have felt I was hearing things, but Gatito’s fur puffed up all over the place, and he got into a stalking position, and became uneasy in the house.

    “Later, my mother came home, and, while I didn’t tell her I thought I heard Grandma (because she [the mother] was never a believer), I did say I thought I heard noises in parts of the house. She opened doors and walked around to see if everything was in place, and as she did that, Gatito crept along with her – belly to the ground and fur still puffed up all over. The following morning, we heard the news that Grandma had died. It never occurred to mother that I truly had heard Grandma, but my father was always sensitive, and when I told him the story, he truly did believe me, and was very much comforted.”14

    On The Catsite, a pet owner recounted how she and her cat, “Toes,” both simultaneously observed the apparition of Penny, an older cat that had recently died: “I was in the kitchen and saw Penny cross the living room and go down the hall to the back of the house. Toes watched her walk by and then took off after her. He came back and looked all over before complaining to me. All I could do was say, ‘I know. I saw her, too’.”15

    These accounts are more than anecdotal, since at least one of them was captured on video in 1999.16 A simple laptop with webcam had been set up on the floor of a hallway at the Norton Hall Care Home, in Worchester, England, after repeated complaints from residents and staff about an unknown cat. No one had ever observed the animal, which nonetheless made its presence known by repeatedly meowing late at night. After several weeks of unsuccessful attempts to lure the elusive creature by laying out food and catnip over night, the caretaker positioned his computer camera where the feline fugitive was most often heard, in an effort to at least identify it. The resulting video showed the transparent, ghostly image of an otherwise ordinary, black-and-white cat materialise in a doorway, then saunter down the hall, beyond the webcam.

    Among the elderly residents was Mrs. Martha Mildred Jones, a devoted ailurophile, who, earlier in life, ran a stray cat shelter for many years. In an instance of remarkable synchronicity, she died at the Care Home in her ninety-ninth year on the ninth day of September – the ninth month – in 1999. Traditionally, cats are supposed to have nine lives. In any case, the ghost cat of Norton Hall was neither seen nor heard again after Mrs. Jones passed away.

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    Footnotes

    1. Nexus, Vol. 21, No. 3, April-May 2014
    2. “Cat and Dolphins playing together,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=rynvewVe21Y
    3. Anna Lemind, www.learning-mind.com/do-animals-have-telepathic-abilities
    4. http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa021201a.htm
    5. David Pratt, “Rupert Sheldrake: A Theosofical Appraisal,”
    www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_sheldrake_3.htm
    7-11. Ibid.
    12. www.inquisitr.com/1967618/psychic-cat-patrols-nursing-home-
    offering-comfort-to-patients-in-their-dying-days/
    13. Anna Lemind, op. cit.
    14. www.petsadviser.com/behaviors/can-cats-see-ghosts/
    15. www.thecatsite.com/a/can-cats-see-ghosts
    16. “Ghost Cat,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3gvHfD6ojA

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

  • Confessions of a Reluctant Ghost Hunter: Encounters with Malevolent Entities & Other Disembodied Spirits

    Confessions of a Reluctant Ghost Hunter: Encounters with Malevolent Entities & Other Disembodied Spirits

    From New Dawn 147 (Nov-Dec 2014)

    A dark, brooding spirit that disguised itself as a child and strangled people asleep in a mobile home in the woods changed my attitude about haunted houses forever. That was the last time I tried to remove a spirit for someone and the last of my three difficult, dangerous hauntings on Mount Hood in Oregon, USA.

    Before I was trained to remove ghosts, I used to think that all spirits who haunted houses and other buildings were simply the reluctant, confused, or stubborn spirits of deceased people who refused to move on. Perhaps they were surprised and disoriented by their death. Perhaps they were afraid to fully leave the physical world behind. Or maybe they felt attached to a place or person.

    I’ve always been able to sense spirits in rooms when they would come out to play. I wouldn’t see them all of the time, but sometimes I would ‘hear’ them or sense them on another level. I would sense an unusual coldness in one corner of a room or feel something amiss in that space. Often, I would see something out of the corner of my eye, if I shifted my gaze slightly left and out of focus. Then there are times when spirits just don’t want to be discovered and hide.

    It’s important to remember that disembodied spirits have no physical form and cannot actually speak, make footsteps, or appear to us in a solid form. What they do is project thought forms whenever they want to be noticed. And they project very specifically who receives the thought projection and the message that person receives. They can be cunning and deceptive. You might believe that you are witnessing your dear, departed grandmother, only because that’s what the spirit wants you to perceive. So I never have put much stock in the value of recording equipment or everyone being able to see and hear the same unearthly spirits at once. Some spirits don’t play fair and don’t want to be bothered. When bothered, they can become dangerous.

    Consequently, the recent outcropping of movies, books, and television programs that glorify ghost hunting worries me. What makes people think that spirits who haunt buildings are merely ghosts of dead people and what makes people think that stalking spirits who hide in buildings is a fun and safe sport? And why don’t we respect the dead enough to help them fully move on beyond this earthly plan and leave the rest of these spirits at peace?

    My formal training as a ghost hunter was one-on-one instruction by an experienced psychic who would remove ghosts by establishing contact and encouraging them to move on. Moving on, she maintained, was a natural transition that every deceased person should be able to do. The shell of troubled people that sometimes remains behind is only a dim memory of the personality, emotional body, and lower mental body. The higher spiritual side of them would evolve spiritually beyond this physical plane, taking the soul or essential life force with them. The empty half-life that remained behind is stuck in time and place, walking through the same troubled events daily in mindless rituals, often oblivious of any physical forms or living people.

    My teacher knew how to help troubled ghosts move on spiritually, which is the greatest gift that any ethical ghost hunter could give. Unfortunately, my teacher did not prepare me for the other things that go bump in the night – unearthly spirits that never lived a human life and never did belong here.

    Actually nobody sees them in the normal sense with eyes or hears them in the normal sense with ears. Keep in mind that spirits have no material form and, hence, cannot make a sound or appear physically. They cannot make footsteps or shout out anything to you in the normal manner. Instead, they project thought forms using consciousness that remains with us beyond our physical demise. And we receive these conscious thought forms in much the same manner we ‘read’ people on a daily basis, often knowing what they are thinking long before they utter a sound.

    As a result, phantom spirits can project just about any thought they want to imprint on us. They can make us believe they are shouting our names or posing as your dearly departed aunt. They can manipulate and trick you. Consequently, attempts to stalk them down and record them can prove deceiving. They have no mouths to speak or bodies for us to photograph in a physical sense, but will project onto your consciousness or recording equipment only what they want you to know about them. It’s questionable if we can ever truly trust what we think we see or hear.

    Ghost Hunting in Oregon

    Take, for example, my experience in attempting to remove a spirit who haunted a mobile home parked in dense woods in a national forest in Oregon. The old travel trailer sat in a dense thicket of old-growth trees that towered all around it. The owner of the trailer had been unable to rent, lease or sell it. So he offered it to a Native American herbalist, her husband, and teenage daughter to live there without payment, as long as they maintained it and kept a good eye on the property for the owner. In front of the mobile home was an old tree with many dog names and dates carved on it. In the back was a storage shed with many jars of carefully labelled and stacked preserves that had somehow been left behind, as though people had left hastily.

    I met the herbalist and her daughter while mushroom hunting in the national forest near their home. She took my son and me on herbal walks and taught us how to identify eatable foliage while foraging in the old forest. Her daughter drew pictures of herbs we encountered for later study.

    Unfortunately, the herbalist and her daughter both believed their mobile home was haunted. The daughter liked the little girl with golden curls who would sit with her on her bed while she sketched – something only she could see, apparently. Her mother and stepfather, on the other hand, reported an invisible spirit who choked them in their sleep. The daughter explained that her invisible friend did not like adults or dogs.

    Knowing that I had been trained to remove ghosts from haunted houses, the family asked me to go into their home to see what I could do. I believed that I was dealing with the spirit of a deceased person, perhaps a small girl who had died in that trailer home.

    I wandered through the trailer home and sat on the daughter’s bed, holding her sketch pad to attract the spirit. I grounded myself and got very still deep inside myself to receive an impression or message. Then I walked the length of the trailer and sat for a while, waiting for communication of some sort in the parent’s back bedroom. Particularly frightening was the dog’s gate that I had to remove before I could walk down a narrow, dim hallway with a washer and dryer jammed in there so that you needed to slip past them in the dark.

    I went back outside where I had asked the family to wait on the front porch to ask the herbalist’s husband for a flashlight. I knew that he’d recently worked as a night watchman and had one of those big, long flashlights in his car. Armed with the flashlight, I entered the trailer home once again to walk in the dark with the flashlight.

    On my second pass through the narrow hallway, I kept the light on the floor below to guide my feet. Halfway through the corridor, however, I bumped into the washer and dryer and then looked up at them.

    To my amazement, a distorted, dark creature sat perched there! He glared down at me with contempt in red, brooding eyes. I was so startled by what I saw that I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

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    “YOU are no little girl with golden curls!” I said.

    Its lips curled into a sort of snarl, followed by a sort of twinkling of its eyes. Then to my surprise, it turned into a little girl with golden curls. I ran out of the hallway.

    My teacher Helen had taught me certain tricks to encourage a reluctant ghost to move on, only I was not dealing with any ghost that I ever imagined. I didn’t know whether the bag of tricks Helen had taught me to bring would have much effect upon this spirit in the trailer.

    Nonetheless, I tried. I sat on the daughter’s bed and called to it. I sensed it hovering and moving about the small area, upset with me.

    At last, I remembered the mirror that Helen had instructed me to bring. I set the mirror against the back of the front door. I could see my face in the mirror faintly and smiled halfheartedly into the mirror.

    “Wouldn’t you like to see yourself in the mirror, too?” I taunted the spirit. “You cannot do that, because you have no physical form. But I could help you. I could help you see yourself in the mirror. Then you would be whole and have form like me and the girl. Would you like that?”

    I began playfully running the light from the flashlight around the area of the room in a sort of teasing manner. I was forming a pattern or labyrinth path that seemed to capture the attention of the spirit. I talked to it about wanting to be in the light, to possess the light, to feel the glow and energy of light all around it and inside it, as only a living being in the physical world could realise.

    “Follow the light,” I urged it. At last, I brought the light of the flashlight to the base of the mirror. “Go ahead,” I urged. “Go into the mirror. Become whole. Become manifest.”

    Then I flashed the light directly onto the mirror, causing a bright and garish glare of intense, distorted light on glass shining backward.

    I sensed the spirit had wrapped itself around the mirror in an attempt to possess it. Immediately, I jumped up to grab the mirror and carry it outdoors.

    I smashed the mirror on the front porch and stomped on it.

    “Dispose of this, and I think your troubles will be over,” I told the herbalist.

    From my bag of tricks I removed a box of kosher salt and spread an unbroken light of salt around the house. Then I staked out the four cardinal corners to the house with spikes and called on the four archangels with domain over the four corners to form a watchtower over the house. I ordered the spirit to stay outside the house and ordered it to be gone.

    But asking for something doesn’t always make it happen. And some spirits are devilishly hard to chase away.

    When I climbed into my little Triumph roadster and headed down the gravel logging trail from their home, I assumed that the spirit was now roaming the woods somewhere outside the trailer home. Suddenly the lights went out on my car. When I stopped to checked under the bonnet, the windshield wipers started working when I tried the lights again. Then I couldn’t get the car to start.

    At last, I was heading home down the mountain road again and all seemed to be running well. Only then I felt something touch my back and then tickle my neck. Something grabbed my neck and started to strangle me. I slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car to avoid the grasp. A car going the other direction came around the bend out of nowhere and nearly hit me in the narrow, gravel roadway.

    I decided that I probably had two choices. Either I could try to drive down the mountain again, hoping that something dangerous didn’t happen to me in my descent homeward, or else I could return whatever was in my car to the herbalist’s camp. That’s where I sensed it wanted to be left alone. I thought about possibly surviving the drive home and then having a spirit in my own home. I wondered whether the spirit would stay outside the trailer home, if I brought it back to that small clearing in the forest. I am not proud of my decision.

    After I pulled up to the trailer home, I knocked on the door and explained what had happened. I told them that I had little choice, really, and that the spirit would probably stay outside the trailer home now, content to roam the woods.

    The herbalist and I agreed to give it a day to see whether the spirit had returned to their home. We talked about going mushroom hunting that weekend.

    The next day I was busy catching up with work at our community newspaper. So I didn’t visit the family in the trailer house the very next day. The second day, a Sunday, I was also working late at the newspaper. I felt guilty about not making it back earlier and made myself a vow to do it soon.

    Later that night the fire and police scanners in our newspaper office came alive with response calls to a fire. Since I had my camera and strobe nearby, I decided to trail the emergency responders and possibly get some news photographs.

    The cars all headed up the mountain with me in the rear. They would occasionally stop, as though lost. After all, these were rural logging trails, and it was hard to see where they needed to go to find the spot on the mountain that was ablaze.

    They got higher and higher up the mountain and I began to fear that the fire might spread through the dry timber to the herbalist’s home. Then they reached their final turnout and I could see the results of the fire myself.

    The herbalist’s family trailer had burned to a crisp. Outside mother and daughter were crying in an embrace. A captain from the regional fire department was trying to question them.

    They reported that nobody had been cooking, running the heat, or burning candles inside the home. They had no idea how the trailer suddenly burned. Stranger still, their dog which they never tethered had died under the trailer home. It was tied there with some chain which they didn’t recognise.

    Then I remembered all of the dog names and dates carved on the tree in front of their home and understood. This mayhem had been going on for some time. It explained why the trailer couldn’t be rented or sold and why carefully stacked and labelled preserves had been hastily abandoned.

    Understanding Spirits

    I used to tell people that spirits could not harm us because they have no physical form. I no longer say that because I know differently now. I used to think of haunted buildings as places where deceased people and pets were stuck in time and space, unwilling or reluctant to fully move on. I feel now that some spirits have never lived what we might term a normal, physical life among us on this earth. Some are unearthly and too dangerous to handle. If they prove bothersome, it’s probably wisest to walk around them or vacate the premises.

    Nor do I encourage people to communicate with ghosts of deceased people. The dead deserve some respect and some peace. If some aspects of their lower selves have lingered here – confused or disturbed by their physical demise – then it should be the work of psychics trained to communicate and counsel them to leave on their own accord, which should be natural for them to accomplish once their reluctance, fear, or confusion has been removed.

    It is natural for all people and animals in this earthly plane of existence to die physically, at which time their essential life force, soul, or higher spirit ascends or evolves. In the case of some deaths, however, people or pets might die suddenly and in a confused, startled state. So the lower self remains here, trying to grapple with the transition. What’s left is a shell of the total person or animal. We see in such a ghost the lower personality, emotional body, astral body, and dim memories of the deceased.

    Spirits of deceased people who stay earthbound too long become entrenched and bitter. They live out ritualistic patterns of behaviour, based on dim memories and confusion. They often hide from view and often resent being stalked by so-called ghost hunters who try to taunt and expose them. Such entrenched ghosts might cluster with other ghosts who lived in other time periods but now form spirit communities that hide in buildings, disoriented and bitter. They will project their consciousness to resemble the way they once looked as they recall, including the clothes they once wore. But, when provoked, they can distort the way they appear to someone else, as well.

    This sad situation with disoriented spirits of former family members and other loved ones brings to mind the importance of preparing ourselves to die without confusion or attachments. As suggested in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, we must prepare throughout all of our physical lives for the moment of death, so that we enter this transition seamlessly and without confusion or reservation. People who work with haunted buildings often encounter phantom fragments of deceased people who were startled or reluctant to die and had not prepare themselves on all levels to make a complete transition from this material plane.

    Perhaps the only safe and ethical contact most people should have with ghosts of deceased people are cases when the recently departed come to visit us to say goodbye. The cat that pounces on your bed after death might do so only for a few days before fully moving on. Your relatives or loved ones might visit you shortly after death to say goodbye. Then we should leave them in peace.

    The other spirits that go bump in the night might not be so friendly and should be avoided.

    Read more on the above in Von Braschler’s book Confessions of a Reluctant Ghost Hunter: A Cautionary Tale of Encounters with Malevolent Entities and Other Disembodied Spirits, available from all good bookstores and online retailers.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 147.[/alert]

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    Suggested Reading

    Von Braschler, Confessions of a Reluctant Ghost Hunter, Destiny Books, 2014
    Louis Gittner, There Is a Rainbow, Louis Foundation, 1981
    Anton Gross, Letters to a Dying Friend: What Comes Next Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Quest Books, 1989
    Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Scribners, 2014
    Elisabeth Kubler-Ross & Caroline Myss, On Life after Death, Revised, Celestial Arts, 2008
    Brad Steiger, Words from the Source, Prentice Hall, 1975

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • The Amazing Story of the Clairvoyants Who Observed Atoms

    The Amazing Story of the Clairvoyants Who Observed Atoms

    From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4 (Aug 2012)

    In few, if any, science textbooks or records of Nobel laureates will you find the name of a bona fide and publicly acknowledged occultist or clairvoyant. This, however, is not because such individuals never contributed anything to the history of science. On the contrary, it is due to a profound hubris and acute myopia within the institution of Science that talented metaphysical pioneers have not been credited with scientific discoveries and insights that were ahead of their time. In this material, excerpted from Chapter 6 of my book The Grand Illusion (Vol. 1), we hone in on the startling work of two such metaphysicists in particular.

    Occult Chemistry: Leadbeater and Besant

    From 1895 to 1933, Annie Besant (1847-1933) and Charles Leadbeater (1854-1934), two of the best known theosophists and metaphysicians of the 20th century, conducted clairvoyant investigations into all of the then known elements and certain compounds in order to observe the so-called “fundamental building blocks” that composed them, as well as their general structure. This involved the apprehension of visual information at sub-microscopic levels far beyond the ability of the eyes to perceive. The term for this kind of clairvoyant perception today is micro-psi (Besant and Leadbeater referred to it as “magnifying clairvoyance”).

    The initial investigations were collected and published in the first edition of Occult Chemistry in 1908 (the book was subtitled Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds). A second edition of the 1908 material was issued in 1919. The sum total of Besant and Leadbeater’s clairvoyant observations of the chemical elements were collected and published posthumously in a third edition of Occult Chemistry in 1951.

    An article entitled “Occult Chemistry” appeared in the Theosophical publication Lucifer in 1895 (the year Leadbeater and Besant began their collaboration) and was reprinted as a separate pamphlet in 1905. In it, three chemical elements, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, were clairvoyantly examined and their analyses presented tentatively to the public by Besant and Leadbeater.

    Hydrogen, the first chemical atom selected for analysis, and possessing the lowest atomic weight, was found to be composed of eighteen smaller entities. Clairvoyantly it was seen to consist of six small bodies, contained in an egg-like form. According to Leadbeater/Besant, it rotated with great rapidity on its own axis, vibrating at the same time, and the internal bodies performed similar gyrations. “The whole atom spins and quivers, and has to be steadied before exact observation is possible,” they wrote.

    The six little bodies are arranged in two sets of three, forming two triangles that are not interchangeable. Further, the six bodies are not all alike; they each contain three smaller bodies – each of these being an ultimate physical atom – but in two of them the three atoms are arranged in a line, while in the remaining four they are arranged in a triangle.1

    The Ultimate Physical Atom (UPA)

    Figure 1. The hydrogen “micro-psi atom.” The UPAs are the heart-shaped objects designated a plus or minus sign denoting either an inflow (minus) or outflow (plus) of energy. Stephen M. Phillips argues that each triangle is a single hydrogen nuclei and that the micro-psi observation has somehow bonded two together. The mid-sized circles are therefore quarks, and the heart-shaped entities sub-quarks. (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater.)
    Figure 1. The hydrogen “micro-psi atom.” The UPAs are the heart-shaped objects designated a plus or minus sign denoting either an inflow (minus) or outflow (plus) of energy. Stephen M. Phillips argues that each triangle is a single hydrogen nuclei and that the micro-psi observation has somehow bonded two together. The mid-sized circles are therefore quarks, and the heart-shaped entities sub-quarks. (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater.)

    As noted, in 1895 – when physical atoms were still thought to be the most basic unit of matter – Leadbeater and Besant observed in the early stages of their investigation that hydrogen was not a unity but was composed of eighteen smaller units. These smaller units they dubbed an “ultimate physical atom” (UPA), and later took to referring to them as “Anu” (singular and plural) – the Sanskrit term for this new entity. They had no way to determine the exact size of the UPA but they found it existed in two varieties: positive and negative (or Yin and Yang). The positive and negative aspects wound around each other in opposite directions (somewhat like the snakes on the caduceus, or the helical structure of DNA), forming the UPA.2

    According to Besant and Leadbeater, the UPA was a very complex entity, with only its main characteristics provided in their diagram. “It is composed entirely of spirals, the spiral being in its turn composed of spirillae, and these again of minuter spirillae.”3 In addition to this reference to the subatomic fractality of “matter,” they correctly declared that the Anu was definitely not the electron. The spirals composing the UPA, if unwound, would actually be found to be circles or strings – twisted around on themselves many times to create the helical form depicted.

    Oxygen was found to consist of 290 minor atoms and nitrogen of 261. Now, this is where it gets even more interesting. When Besant and Leadbeater divided the number of UPAs in oxygen by the number of UPAs comprising hydrogen (18), they arrived at 16.11, almost exactly the atomic weight of the oxygen atom (16). This procedure yielded the same precision with nitrogen, an even more complex structure than oxygen, and therefore much more challenging to apprehend clairvoyantly for the occultists. In fact, this uncanny precision continued right through the entire table of known elements of the time (minor human counting errors notwithstanding).

    Although science had not identified such a thing as the ultimate physical atom, Besant and Leadbeater had identified this tiny entity as comprising physical atoms. Moreover, by using hydrogen as the standard (being the first element in the periodic table – itself being composed of eighteen UPA), they were able to ascertain the atomic weight of the elements by dividing the number of UPA they observed by eighteen. Should Besant and Leadbeater have been merely “delusional cranks,” we should not expect this kind of amazing result.

    As a matter of fact, this ability to deduce the accepted atomic weights of the elements from the number of UPAs they observed was the only thing Occult Chemistry had in common with the chemistry of 1895.4

    Noteworthy is the way the UPA was depicted by Leadbeater/Besant as being created by an upwelling of force from a higher-dimensional source – just as in the hyperdimensional physics advocated by Paul LaViolette, David Wilcock, Richard Hoagland, and others researching aether physics. (Those readers interested in the notion of an aetheric medium and its false elimination from mainstream science are referred to in my The Grand Illusion 1.) The models of physics on the cutting edge have been left with no choice but to incorporate other dimensions or ‘levels’ of reality to account for today’s scientifically observable phenomena. Furthermore, Leadbeater and Besant’s clairvoyant analysis provides intimate and detailed verification of the hyperdimensional torsion and/or spin forces embedded in the ‘aether’, which I write about extensively in The Grand Illusion 1.
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    How They Arrived at the UPA

    Leadbeater and Besant explained: “Any gaseous chemical atom may be dissociated into less complicated bodies; these, again, into still less complicated… [T]he fourth dissociation gives the ultimate physical atom. This may vanish from the physical plane, but it can undergo no further dissociation on it.”5 (emphasis added)

    Note that in their description of the UPA is a hint of multidimensional behaviour (this becomes relevant shortly). Interestingly, in 1888, the co-founder of Theosophy (it was founded in 1875), Helena P. Blavatsky, pre-empting Leadbeater and Besant by at least seven years, explained in The Secret Doctrine that on the next higher plane (etheric), what then-current science considered an undecomposable unity would – to higher perception – prove very complex. Water, for example would feature “many other constituents” besides just hydrogen and oxygen.

    As theosophists, Leadbeater and Besant would have anticipated the composition of the elements they clairvoyantly inspected (having obtained some hard-to-get samples via Sir William Crookes) to be much more complex than scientists of their time believed. They were right.

    Believe it or not, there appears to have been another earlier clairvoyant ahead of the game. At a time when Isaac Newton (a Hermeticist, though not clairvoyant) was arguing that matter was composed of impenetrable atoms given motion by outside forces, Emmanuel Swedenborg taught that matter was made up of a series of particles in ascending order of size, each of which was composed of a closed vortex of energy which spiralled at infinite speeds to give the appearance of solidity.6

    Two types of UPAs were observed by Besant and Leadbeater (see Figure 2), and they were identical in every way except “the direction of their whorls and of the force which pours through them. In the one case force pours in from the ‘outside,’ from fourth-dimensional space, and passing through the atom, pours into the physical world [‘male’]. In the second, it pours in from the physical world, and out through the atom into the ‘outside’ again, i.e., vanishes from the physical world.”7 (This was the “female” UPA.)

    Figure 2: The Two Types of Ultimate Physical Atoms, Male and Female (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater)
    Figure 2: The Two Types of Ultimate Physical Atoms, Male and Female (Source: Occult Chemistry by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater)

    In agreement with present-day aether researcher Paul LaViolette, David Yurth states in Seeing Past the Edge that these two opposite or mirror image particles constitute what we now refer to as matter and anti-matter states.8 This makes sense in light of Leadbeater and Besant’s comments that the positive/male UPA flows its creative energy outwards into our reality while the negative/female (anti-matter) counterpart transmutes energy from our reality back into the aether.

    Leadbeater and Besant said that if the higher-dimensional energy flow was stopped even momentarily, the whole manifest universe would disappear, “as a cloud melts away in the empyrean. It is only the persistence of that flow which maintains the physical basis of the universe.”9 LaViolette (among many others) has vindicated our two eminent occultists on this point, agreeing that without this constant flow,

    the subatomic particles and energy waves composing our physical universe would gradually dissipate, disolving [sic] into a state of uniformity. What would remain would be the ever-present, vast, and unfathomable multi-dimensional consciousness, of which we are a part, and whose now featureless calm “surface” had once generated our beautiful physical universe.10

    Physicist Nassim Haramein also supports this view, stating that, “without spin, none of reality can come to exist. All things spin!” Haramein agrees that “spin is fundamental to creation and objects that appear to be inanimate exist solely because spinning atoms within allow the objects to radiate, and hence, appear in our reality.”11 How did Leadbeater and Besant (and Swedenborg) know with such certainty so far in advance of science that our “physical” world’s source of origin is the aetheric medium’s spin dynamics?

    Besant and Leadbeater described the ultimate physical atom as a sphere, slightly flattened, with a depression at the point where the force flows in, causing a “heart-like” form. “Each atom is surrounded by a field,” they wrote, “formed of the atoms of the four higher planes, which surround and interpenetrate it.”12 If this is accurate, then etheric, astral and mental particles are of increasingly large size (physicists are searching for these “super particles” without realising they have already been quietly discovered).

    Leadbeater and Besant’s depiction of the UPA was fundamentally toroidal and way ahead of their time: “It turns incessantly upon its own axis, spinning like a top; it describes a small circle with its axis, as though the axis of the spinning top moved in a small circle; it has a regular pulsation, a contraction and expansion, like the pulsation of the heart.”13 Spin was first proposed in physics thirty years later by Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck in 1925 and was confirmed in electrons by Phipps and Taylor in 1927. The circular precessional motion described by the axis of the spinning UPA would later become known in physics as Larmor precession. Though the expansion and contraction (radial pulsation) described by Leadbeater and Besant is still unknown to physicists today, LaViolette points out that this description is quite plausible in the context of the ancient aether physics.14

    The UPA’s spinning motion is common to globules in complex plasmas,15 and as we see in Chapter 9 of The Grand Illusion, many of Leadbeaters’ and other metaphysicists’ clairvoyant observations can be accounted for in light of plasma dynamics. For instance, when exposed to an electric current the UPAs, as depicted by Besant and Leadbeater in 1919, arranged themselves in physical rows of “particle chains” – just like globules in complex plasma, as illustrated by A. Piel et al.16 In this UPA formation the depression of one UPA receives the aetheric flow of its neighbouring particle and then passes it out through its own apex, and so on.

    In Occult Chemistry Leadbeater refers to the UPA as having a certain level of apparent consciousness, and our best occultists and mystics (and scientists) all seem to agree that the universe is indeed conscious at all levels. It is interesting, as Jay Alfred points out, that David Bohm’s research into plasmas yielded the observation that electrons in a plasma configuration began to act as if they were part of a larger, interconnected whole, so much so that he frequently had the impression that the electron sea was “alive.” Mircea Sanduloviciu and colleagues have even created plasma spheres that can grow, replicate and communicate, fulfilling most traditional requirements for biological/living cells.17

    The links between consciousness and the spiralling energy inherent in the multidimensional fabric of the cosmos are increasingly being elaborated on by modern science. It is interesting to note some of the parallels between modern toroidal models and the fundamentally toroidal model Besant and Leadbeater described during their clairvoyant investigations. While Wilcock states that the aether’s substance naturally forms itself into a spherical formation because of the near-uniformity of the aetheric pressure on all sides, as well as the fact that it is the most ‘harmonic’ shape, he acknowledges that changing energy densities in the aether can cause these spheres to warp to some extent. For instance, they may stretch and flatten to create a donut-like shape, otherwise known as the torus, a model employed by Wilcock, Haramein18 and string theory.

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    Occultists’ Vindication Arrives Via Dr. Phillips

    In the late 1970s Stephen Phillips, then a physics graduate student at the University of California, happened across some of the diagrams from Occult Chemistry. Contrary to what we might expect of most physicists, he took a serious interest in the material, and the end result was a major technical validation of the data obtained by Leadbeater and Besant.

    Dr. Phillips discovered that “Besant and Leadbeater’s clairvoyant descriptions of the chemical elements are completely consistent with the Quark, Quantum Chromodynamic and Super-String theories of modern subatomic physics.”19 This he detailed in depth in his 1980 book The Extra-Sensory Perception of Quarks, in which Phillips reconciled Occult Chemistry with modern physics. Because of his work, “Occult Chemistry now stands as a glittering testimony to the validity of Besant and Leadbeater’s claims.”20

    To clarify, a UPA’s ‘whorls’ are the ‘strings’ of modern string theory. Phillips suggests, based on comparisons between the occultists’ whorls and the ‘strings’ of string theory, that “[a] whorl is a closed, 26-dimensional, bosonic string (the reported presence of spherical ‘bubbles in koilon’ in 7th-order spirillae imply that whorls extend beyond the sixth, compactified dimension, so that they must be 26-, not 10-, dimensional strings,)” and also that “[t]he UPA is a subquark state of a superstring composed of ten strings, i.e. the superstring is itself a composite object.”21

    Thus, Phillips has reinterpreted Besant and Leadbeater’s observations to be not those of atoms, but of subquarks and quarks. The notion of quarks was only introduced into modern physics decades later in 1964 by Gell-Mann and Zweig.22 Quarks are the building blocks of so-called ‘elementary’ particles, and are generally accepted as existing by the scientific community today.

    However, Phillips’ model is actually a subquark (or composite quark) model. In it subquarks make up quarks, quarks make up elementary particles (protons, etc.), elementary particles make up atoms, and so on. Thus, Phillips has identified the UPAs as subquarks, and, as Donald DeGracia reports in Beyond the Physical: A Synthesis of Science and Occultism, he calls his subquarks “omegons” to indicate they are the final and smallest form of physical matter (omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet). Phillips shows, through rigorous quantitative procedures, that “the sub-quark combinations predicted by his model are almost in exact agreement with the detailed structures presented by Besant and Leadbeater.”23 He has successfully correlated the structure of the UPA with superstring models: the UPA itself is the ‘superstring’ of modern subatomic physics.

    However, please note: the only way Phillips could get the numbers generated by his theory to match the actual observations of Besant and Leadbeater was to infer that when they were observing the subquark structure of an atom, they were not observing one atom but two atoms that had somehow fused together – as a result of their interference with and observations of these entities – to create a diatomic arrangement. This might have resulted from the spreading of the particles’ wave packets/de Broglie waves caused by the mental stabilisation of the particles by the theosophists, removing the uncertainty in their momentum, therefore increasing the uncertainty of their spatial locations.

    From a slightly different angle, the procedure, in effect, may have ‘teased out’ some of the inherent non-locality of the particles’ de Broglie waves/wave packets in time-space or ‘reciprocal space’ so as to influence their locations in space-time:

    [E]ach particle would become so delocalised that there would now be just as much chance of finding it near an adjacent atomic nucleus as there was in finding it in the much smaller space occupied by the nucleus prior to its coming under observation… their wave functions would eventually overlap significantly, leading to a non-vanishing probability of their mutual strong interaction.24

    The clairvoyantly observed structure of micro-psi atoms (MPAs) consisted of two overlapping triangular formations, with each triangle containing nine UPAs, while the contemporary view of hydrogen is of a lone electron orbiting a nucleus of one proton. However, from the viewpoint of modern quark theory, that lone proton is actually an arrangement consisting of three quarks. Phillips further claims that each quark is in turn made up of three subquarks, meaning the hydrogen atom consists of nine subquarks. Because in Besant and Leadbeater’s hydrogen there were two triangles each of nine UPAs, Phillips’ conclusion is that each triangle must correspond to an atom of hydrogen as understood by modern science, meaning that the hydrogen structure observed by Besant and Leadbeater was actually made up of two atoms of hydrogen.

    In the end, there are far too many correspondences between what Besant and Leadbeater observed and what is now scientifically known about subatomic behaviour, to dismiss their work.

    The shapes they described, the fact that they observed isotopes… before isotopes were widely recognised in science… and a host of other relevant observations; all of these are ideas that were completely unknown to the science of their day.25

    The table on page 62 provides a partial overview of Leadbeater and Besant’s clairvoyant observations as compared with subsequent scientific discoveries.

    “Some micro-psi anticipations of scientific discoveries and ideas.” Note: Brendan Murphy’s comments in italicised brackets. (Source: Stephen Phillips, Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 9(4), 489–525, 1995.)
    “Some micro-psi anticipations of scientific discoveries and ideas.” Note: Brendan Murphy’s comments in italicised brackets. (Source: Stephen Phillips, Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 9(4), 489–525, 1995.)

    As DeGracia points out, Phillips has shown that to comprehend the finer points of Occult Chemistry one requires an advanced understanding of modern physics. Besant and Leadbeater described the quantum nature of physical matter in 1895, exactly as science would thirty years later and more. How did they know about quarks and subquarks so far in advance of their official scientific discovery?

    To gain some comprehension of how controversial the terrain we tread here, the existence of sub-quarks was only recently scientifically accepted, and even then not unanimously. Yurth reports that in the 1990s an armada of 450 scientists confirmed the existence of sub-quarks with an “unprecedented” level of scrutiny, and still physicists at the American Physical Society, MIT, Princeton and Columbia University succeeded in suppressing the publication of the research data in such mainstream publications as Scientific American, Physics Letters, Physics Review and Nature.26 Thank goodness for free scientific enquiry, eh?

    Regardless, Besant and Leadbeater were obviously capable of perceiving the fundamental nature of matter using occult means, the siddhis. According to Leadbeater, there is a tube-like structure that protrudes from the Ajna, or third-eye chakra of the etheric body, and it is by means of utilising this tube as an organ of vision that one can exercise micro-psi. As we can see, there is good reason to believe him. This psi faculty/ability is one of the siddhis Patanjali wrote about in his Yoga Sutras circa 400 BCE.

    In Aphorism 3.26 of the Yoga Sutras (c. 400 BCE), the earliest known treatise on yoga, its author Patanjali refers to a particular siddhi in which a yogi can gain “knowledge of the small, the hidden or the distant by directing the light of a superphysical faculty.”
    In Aphorism 3.26 of the Yoga Sutras (c. 400 BCE), the earliest known treatise on yoga, its author Patanjali refers to a particular siddhi in which a yogi can gain “knowledge of the small, the hidden or the distant by directing the light of a superphysical faculty.”

    One more interesting thing about sub-quarks highly pertinent to our occult leitmotif: the sub-quark’s track looks the way it does because in our space-time continuum the particle exists and then does not exist, exists and then does not exist. The discovery of the sub-quark constituted the very first scientifically verified instance of multi-dimensional behaviour in a measurable physical entity: “…in the rarified environment of the particle accelerator, the sub-quark exists-disappears-exists-disappears with a consistent, repeated, predictable frequency pattern…”27

    Leadbeater and Besant stated that the UPA – like the sub-quark today – could vanish from its plane but could undergo no further subdivision. It is truly the most fundamental aspect of physical matter at our density level. The scientific verification of Leadbeater and Besant’s observations clearly indicates the human ability to peer into domains non-existent to our ordinary senses and science’s conventional equipment – domains our most fundamental known ‘particles’ (standing wave structures) venture rhythmically in and out of. Yurth comments that this brings us “literally to the Edge of creation.”28 Do pause and let all of that sink in for a moment.

    Conclusions

    Our occultists are quantitatively and qualitatively vindicated from almost every conceivable angle. (I cover more angles than we have space for here in The Grand Illusion 1.) If we accept Phillips’ conclusion that ultimate physical atoms (UPAs) are sub-quarks rather than atoms, as Leadbeater/Besant once thought, then it is from dedicated occultists that we have obtained the first and possibly most accurate and detailed depictions of them and the aetheric medium that spawns them. On top of that, we must credit the initial discoveries of several isotopes to Leadbeater and Besant.

    Overall, the interrelated combination of clairvoyant observations, string theory, and ‘anomalous’ research findings that the Standard Model cannot explain – but which aether models easily incorporate – is too powerful to ignore.

    Brendan D. Murphy’s website is http://www.brendandmurphy.net.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 6 No 4.[/alert]

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    Footnotes:

    1. Annie Besant & Charles W. Leadbeater, Occult Chemistry: Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements, 1919
    2. Annie Besant & Charles W. Leadbeater, Occult Chemistry, 1950
    3. Ibid
    4. Donald DeGracia, Beyond the Physical, 109
    5. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    6. See Victor Zammit, A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife, Ch. 2, www.victorzammit.com
    7. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    8. David Yurth, Seeing Past the Edge, 252
    9. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    10. Paul LaViolette, Subquantum Kinetics: A Systems Approach to Physics and Cosmology
    11. Nassim Haramein, What is the Origin of Spin?, www.theresonanceproject.org/pdf/origin_of_spin.pdf
    12. Besant & Leadbeater, 1919
    13. Ibid
    14. Paul A. LaViolette, Genesis of the Cosmos, 238-9
    15. Jay Alfred, Our Invisible Bodies, 49
    16. Ibid., 50
    17. Ibid., 65-8, 133-4
    18. See www.theresonanceproject.org/research.html for Haramein’s model
    19. DeGracia, 110
    20. Ibid. See also Phillips
    21. Stephen Phillips, Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1995, 489-525
    22. Ibid., 110-11
    23. Ibid., 111
    24. Phillips, 1995
    25. DeGracia, 113-5
    26. Yurth, 255
    27. Ibid, 54-5
    28. Ibid, 55

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