All One Mind

To reply "Guilty" or "Not Guilty" implies that we have been accused or have accused ourselves. From a perusal of the world media, whether newspapers, television or internet, we are exceptionally good at what I refer to as "The Blame Game". We even engage in it in our personal relationships - expressions like "It's all your fault." "It's all my fault." When we play the Blame Game we are trying to make someone else guilty in the hope that we will remain innocent. However, the blame, and hence the guilt, we are projecting onto others comes from our illusion of ourselves. The illusion of an autonomous independent self comes from the idea that we can be and are separate. Having accepted this as true we feel justified sitting in judgment of each other. The problem with most accusations is that the investigation, the hearing, the judge and jury are bypassed in the assumption of guilt. Having lived all my life in the Blame Game ...

The Law of Love - your gift from your creation There is only one law and that is the law of love. Really love is all there is. Love Yourself. Use your neighbours as your witnesses to which law you buy into, the Law of Love or the laws of futility. For those of you who want or like references, Luke 10.27; A Course In Miracles, lessons 67, 229, 267.

The futility of ego-based perspective "Ego" is that part of mind that believes that it is separate from mind. We will always be learning -- No matter how much the ego learns it can never know. We will always want more -- No matter how much we do, have or give it will never be enough. We will always be bodies -- No matter how close we bring our bodies to each other we can never become one. We will always mis-interpret -- No matter how many images, symbols, words or languages we master we can never truly communicate. I am that which thinks that it is separate from everyone and everything else. I use words, sound vibrations and body movements to deliver what I think and feel. I am not a singularity, I am not special, I am not unique. I am a multi-personality fictional concoction of past lives, histories, traditions and superstitions delivered to me from all my ancestors through my mother and my father, my aunts and uncles, my brothers and my sisters, my teachers a...

Back in 1996 when Dervish was Crystal Connection and was located on Paul Street we went in to do some Christmas shopping. Mary asked Jonathan for something light to read over our Christmas Holidays in Kerry. Jokingly, I think, Jonathan placed A Course In Miracles on the counter along with some other stuff we were buying. Without even looking at it Mary bought it. We brought it to Kerry and brought it home without even looking at it. It had been recommended to me a few times but whenever I went to buy it the language in it put me off. Sometime in January my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to read the introduction. Needless to say I was fascinated. So I started reading the text, doing the lessons and reading the supplementary texts all at the same time. I finished the 365 lessons in 375 days - that's dedication for you. And kept studying the text for a further 9 years. I then decided that I had enough. I dropped it, but not what I had learned from it. A couple of yea...

Take your relationship with God personally, for ultimately it is the only one you've got. All others are training. These teach us that our belief in separation cannot be overcome by getting physically closer to each other. We can only really communicate with our minds. Our minds are limitless. We are as God created us. We are the Holy Sons of God Himself. Call your witnesses. See enemies, see separation. See friends, see Oneness.

Around the middle of the Twentieth Century child psychologists came up with the idea of 'dual unity' based on observations of children with their parents, primarily their mothers. This was a very special time for us as children. As far as we were concerned there was only one other person in the universe and we believed that we were totally special to that person. As we grew older we discovered that there were other people in her life - maybe the arrival of a younger sibling or maybe we just began to notice that there were other people in her life. We got to a stage where we were on our own. As we got older still we began to form our own special relationships, possibly in an attempt to get back the feeling of dual unity, of being the only person in the world that mattered to someone else. Are we being selfish when we limit ourselves to special relationships? Yes! But these special relationships are where we learn most about our selves, where, when the going gets tough, we ...

When I first came across Einstein's theories of relativity I thought they had to do with relationships. Well, not really. There's a special one and a general one. We all spend our lives looking for special relationships - soul mate, spirit mate... We keep looking for that special person, or sometimes thing, that will make our lives complete. We have a relationship with everyone on the planet and with everything in the universe. We are all one. And every gift we have is shared with everyone else. This idea that we all own everything is impossible for someone who totally believes in separation to accept. We tend to think of gifts as things we give to each other. However, if we think of them as ideas then its easy to see that they can be shared without us losing them. In fact, the more we share our ideas the more they grow in us.

How Long is a split second? It depends! The assumed average is about 0.1 seconds. So, a split second decision takes us on average one tenth of a second. The reason I ask and answer is that I've always been fascinated by the present and how to live totally in it. I'm writing this now and you are reading it now, but the two nows are different. When I want to exercise my old grey matter I start doing arithmetic calculations in my head. This morning's (now-then-past) one was how many opportunities I had to become present. In every second I have ten, in every minute 600 in every hour 36,000 and in every day 864,000. That's as far as I got with the mental arithmetic. I had to resort to a calculator to figure out how many opportunities there are in a year. There are 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds in a year and that means there are 315, 569, 260 opportunities every year to become present. Most of these we miss by reviewing the past or rehearsing the futu...

A Course In Miracles, Lesson 297 states "Forgiveness is the only gift I give." In one of my early posts I offered a blessing. This blessing contains the gifts of God - Love, Life, Light, Peace, Joy, Truth, Power, Strength, Free, Safe, Open, and Holy. The gifts God gives are given to His Creation. I, the part of me, that believes I'm separate cannot offer these gifts because I see myself as separate from Creation. However, I don't have to offer them because God has already given them to everyone and everything. What I can offer is forgiveness because that is a function of the separate part of me. I forgive the world and I forgive myself. Forgiveness used to mean to me that I had to prostrate myself on front of another separate entity and beg them to forgive me for my transgressions. Or, I had to confess my sins to a priest and beg him to give me Atonement. This usually meant doing penance that involved pain and suffering. Atonement means becoming one with God...

The idea behind Santa Claus and many other great ideas gets distorted over time. This is usually attributed to greed, to materialism or even simply to someone has to make a living out of it. The idea that Santa Claus represents is that giving and receiving are beneficial to our well-being and so benefits our health. The problem arose when this giving and receiving became associated solely with giving material gifts. Gifts that we can touch and hold, gifts that we can like or dislike, gifts that represent how much we like or dislike the receiver, gifts that we feel obliged to give. One global initiative site that I follow suggested that I give them a donation to make we feel good this holiday season. The real gift was never supposed to be what was given, but the thought behind it. "It's the thought that counts" was the expression used to console us when we were disappointed in a gift we received. And it is the thought that matters. "It is the thought that coun...

What do I want to say? I'm not sure. Something about the idea that we all believe we are bodies. Writing nothing these days. Everytime I sit down at the computer with the idea of writing some of the thoughts running through my mind, I freeze. Today, I'm going to persist. Even, if, I have to sit here all day and type one word a minute. The subject of this post has been buzzing me for the last few days. One way for me to begin is asking myself what is the meaning of those words and take it from there. A thought is what I think. Is the thought mine? No matter what I think someone else has thought about it before me. Any idea, even crazy ones, that I think is original, comes up with many pages when I search the Internet. There's nothing original. It's all been done before. It will all be done again, over and over. If I reverse this thought and accept that everything is known and that there is no such thing as original then all I am left with is the experience of being...

On Wednesday night I posted two very sad songs to Facebook. Sean Curran asked the question. "What's up with all the sadness?" My response was "Just something I get into every so often when I need to remind myself where I am." That was the quick response. I have been thinking about it a bit. Then Tantra Maat posted the Choir of the Crickets that slowed down cricket sound and made it sound like a human choir. I said this to "Zarkia" and she told me about a slowed down version of the theme from Jurassic Park. So what is it with certain sounds and our emotions? Sound directly affects our heart. The Institute of Noetic Science and Heart Math have shown that there is a brain in our heart that is directly connected to the brain in our heads. And under certain conditions the heart-brain overrides the head-brain. And then I started to read A Course in Miracles, Lesson 182. "I will be still an instant and go home. "This world you seem to live i...

The World is not going to end. Many dates have been predicted for it's ending. The latest one that we survived was 21 May 2011. The next big one is the 21 December 2012 at 11:11am, and is based on the Mayan calender 5125 year grand cycle which started on 11 August 3113 BCE. Even though we believe that many ancient cultures were sun worshipers, there is mounting evidence that they were sun watchers and believed that the state of the sun determines the state of the Earth. Detailed studies of Celtic, Egyptian, and Chinese calenders and thought systems have confirmed this view. At its simplest, the Mayan calendar is just a calendar. Our calendars cover one year and each year we get a new one. The Maya designed one that covered 5125 years. And at the end of this Grand Cycle the Mayan clock will reset from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. For example, 23 May 2011 is 12.19.18.7.2. So just like there was mounting fear at the turn of the century when clocks changed from 23:11:59:59 on 31...

Faith "Keep the Faith" was a common mantra. I have lost my faith in religion and many other fear driven illusions. I asked myself over and over what I have faith in: a power outside myself, an unknowable source, a thought system based on separation. I now place my faith in the oneness of all life, everywhere. I still have delusional doubts but quickly remind myself that I am part of this wonderful oneness. Trust It has always seemed funny to me that we put absolute trust in total strangers, yet don't fully trust our near and dear ones. I suppose it is to do with feeling responsible for them. When we don't trust someone, it implies we don't trust ourselves. To really learn we have to do it on our own, we have to have our own experiences, and we have to trust that we are always in the right place at the right time. What's in a number? First posted 8 November 2011 At eleven seconds, eleven minutes, and eleven hours on Friday the eleventh of November 20...

A Course in Miracles, Lesson 102 talks about our belief in pain and suffering in the following terms: "It has not gone as yet, but lacks the roots that once secured it tightly to the dark and hidden secret places of your mind." In teaching Peace of Mind Healing I emphasise that all pain and suffering comes from our thinking and that what we need to do is change our thinking. The most common response to this is "that's easier said than done". And I usually reply "don't I know?" I don't know whether its the dreams, doing the lessons again or just simply life, but I still find myself in conflict with a lot of the stuff going on in the world. Despite my attempts to not be inundated with news (I don't watch news on TV or Internet, and I don't read newspapers) I still get to hear about some of the tragedies from friends or casual conversations. Most of the time I'm superficially at peace and happy, but there is that underlying somet...

That 'television' means remote viewing I have mentioned somewhere before. (See post of 22 April 2010 - Ego, Mind, Memory, Emotion). Last night I woke up at 3:00 am. I had a dream that I was in Germany in a crowded beer garden. I was sitting at a bench looking down a long corridor and waiting for a woman I had met in a previous dream. Awake, I began to think about the dream and the lesson I am learning in A Course In Miracles. The lesson is "I am Spirit" and it is basically about transmitting feelings of peace, healing and saving via the Holy Spirit to anyone who is open to receive it. This led me to wonder about the television analogy. I checked the Internet this morning and they say that there are more that 15,000 channels world wide. So, if I had access to them all I would be able to flick between thousands of channels. Obviously, the word channel got me thinking about spirit 'channeling'. Extending the analogy, not only can we do remote viewing, but w...

Safe I may believe that the weather, the state, the church, or the banks are out to get me. What I see going on in the world reflects my state of mind. Think 'doom and gloom' get 'doom and gloom'; think 'safe' and get 'safe'. Whenever I get bothered I say to myself "Your peace is with me, Father, I am safe." If the word 'Father' offends you, use Source or Buddha or some one that you know is always in peace. Open We live in an open universe. And within it we are all connected. What is happening to other people can and does affect us. Equally well what is happening to us can affect others. With our minds closed we think we are victims of random occurrences. We are not, because there is no such thing as random. As the Cylons kept saying in Battlestar Galactica "There is a plan." To see the plan we open our minds. Holy It took me a long time to realise that 'holy' is not limited to religion. Holy is reverent radianc...

Power We all have access to an infinite amount of personal power. Power is our potential to change our thinking. The more we think peace, the more power we have to create peace all around us. Energy follows thought. If we put our power into conflict it is wasted. When we put it into Oneness it multiplies and grows. Become aware that we all together have the power to change the world. We are powerful creators. Strength Strength is our ability to move mountains (Be careful where you drop them!). We often use anger to get us strength. This has serious consequences for our bodies. Using strength has no affects on the body. However, it means that we can't keep playing the 'games people play' because we have seen through the illusion and are no longer convincing as a gamer. It allows us to detach from the drama. Be strong. Free If we accept the idea that we have free will, then we must be free. While we believe that we are bodies we are limited to the range of the body...

Peace "Peace reigns in the heart of silence, be still and know that we are as God created us." There are many things that keep us out of peace, our problems, our grievances and everyone else's problems and grievances. It's always a question of what we buy into. Search for injustice and we find it. Sit in peace and we get it. Get it! Joy Joy created me happy. Joy is often confused with elation, that feeling we get when we win or our team wins. Body neutral, Being centered, mind peaceful, enter joy. Wholeheartedly joyous really is the only natural state, all else is ego drama. Enjoy! Truth We can know and experience Truth, but we cannot tell the truth. We can be honest about our perceptions, our feelings and what we are thinking. Whenever I'm interrogated I usually make up a story and tell it with a smile on my face. The interrogator is never sure what to believe. "To thine own Self be true." Even though you don't have to be honest with anyon...

Love When I say "I love you", I mean that I totally accept anything and everything that you think, say and do. Love is total acceptance of what's going in our lives. Love is not "I own you", nor "You'll do what I tell you". Love is everywhere, all around us, all the time. Remind yourself often that "I am always in Love". Light We live in a radiant universe. Everything in it is made of light and radiates light. When we look using eye/brain we see light and dark and think that we need an external source (sun, bulb, candle) to be able to see anything. On 22 December 1990 I sat in total darkness. After 20 minutes I began to see a light. There was no external source. These days, it takes a couple of minutes to get into it, and its always there. Life Life is eternal, outside time and space. The idea of separation drives our identification with bodies. When we look at ourselves as bodies and look around at other bodies we see signs of ...

In accepting the Western, Eastern or other body-based view of the world we enter into areas of futility. We will do a lot of work, we will study a lot of different systems, we will figure it all out in many different ways at different times, we will adopt a lot of different diets, and we will try many different exercise and body fitness regimes. We may even resort to purgative or masochistic means. We will possibly feel better, but hopefully, in the end we’ll discover that it’s futile. Any system that puts the body at the centre or uses the body as its centrepiece is subject to failure. Because we all know that sooner or later bodies die. Our ancestors’ bodies are dead, our grandparents’ bodies may be dead, our parents’ bodies may be dead or dying, our bodies may be dying. In fact, if you believe some of the common sense approaches, death and taxes are the only things guaranteed in this existence. Futile Fairytale One (E or e is used throughout to avoid using he or she - "e...

Time speeding up based on Phi ratio. I decided to do some calculations based on Phi ratio and 5125 year Mayan Calendar Age. We ended the 16th cycle on 25 August 2010. Each cycle becomes shorter and shorter. The one we are in now is 324 days. We get to the 40th cycle on the 21 December 2012 and the cycle length will be 12 minutes and decreasing. Each cycle repeats all of the opportunities from the previous cycles. If we accept this theory, it means that we will have 24 opportunities in the next two years to learn from past mistakes and, most importantly, not repeat them. Update 20 June 2012 Thoughts of the Summer Solstice 2012, this morning, reminded me of this. We started 19th cycle on 2 June 2012 and it's 76 days long. Mind you, the last 12 will happen in the last couple of days before 21 December.

When I was young we all wanted to be Billionaires. I guess the underlying idea was that by becoming rich and famous we would not have to work. There is an infinite amount of all the states we really need all around us all the time (Love, Light, Life...). Become present and say this simple mantra "I am always in Love" a few times and you'll begin to realise that you are a "Love Infinitee."

We do it to ourselves. All pain and suffering is caused by our minds - the ego part. At best the body is always neutral. It responds to what we are thinking. If we think attack thoughts about anything or anyone we get pain somewhere in our body. If we think peace our body returns to neutral. The effect is not always immediate, because some of the sources of our pains and aches are buried deep in our minds. And some of them are even 'compartmentalised' (that concept again). The Presence Technique to use when there are pain and aches is "Scan the Body".

"...would you hold it against me?" My recent lessons in ACIM have been to do with grievances. Simply summary - holding grievances keeps me out of heaven. So, I'm letting them go. I'm also getting much quicker at catching myself getting into them. For every grievance there is a blame game guilt trip process. The lesson title is "Love holds no grievances."

Teaching "Peace of Mind Healing" in Cork college of Commerce and maybe Colaiste Stiofan Naomha next week. First class is introductions and explanation about becoming present. I get people to look at a view, any view and tell me what they see. And then we'll do the scan our bodies. The main idea is to get people to accept that there are no right answers because we live in a subjective universe. I get people to make observations. I emphasise that all observations are subjective. What I see and what you see may not be the same even though we use the same words to describe it. And even the words we use are subject to our own interpretation of them. The "Word" or "Logos" was always one that fascinated me. Recently I came across an explanation that the original Greek word 'logos' meant ratio or proportion. The idea that the Greek philosophers were trying to get across was that there is a common ratio inherent in everything. They referred to this ...

Recently, I've been having strange dreams. It's not the first time in my life that I've had this type of dream. They are not nightmares because nightmares are defined as "a dream arousing feelings of intense inescapable anguish, fear, horror and distress". I've decided to call them compartment dreams after the psychiatric concept of 'compartmentalisation'. This is a very big word that describes what we do with experiences in our lives that we can't handle when they are happening. We lock them up in a part of our mind that we can't normally access. Anyway, these dreams have nothing to do with my life, that I'm aware of. In them I'm doing totally out-of-character things. When I wake up from them I'm still totally immersed in them, and it takes me a long time to realise that it's just a dream. When I wake up the following morning, I remember that I had one, but have absolutely no recollection of the content. The good news is ...

You might be wondering if I am ever going to update my blog. I am, but I just have to get through Ruishk and David's 'crisis' with the Church. Anyway, I sometimes wonder if the direction of my blog is the right one. Then, along comes confirmation. I was writing about Carrick on Shannon and I was in one of the Charity Shops in town. A woman was asking for directions to Carrick on Shannon. This is the first time ever that I heard anyone in Cork talk about Carrick on Shannon, never mind looking for directions to it. I was trying to come up with a sentence that showed the different uses of words. I chose 'will' and wrote the following. "Hello, my name is Will. It is my will that you will do what it says in my will." That afternoon in GF, I treated a young American who's name was Will. As the title says - there is no such thing as random. We are always in the right place at the right time.

Everything depends on what we look for. All words and images are of the 'ego'. (Ego is that part of mind that believes that it is separate from mind). Every idea has a range of interpretation. How we interpret an idea depends on the thought system that we have learned. The following words are my mantra or my prayer - Love, Light, Life, Peace, Joy, Truth, Power, Strength, Free, Safe, Open, Holy.I offer them to you and to everybody, many times each day.

The emphasis is on choice. We always have the ability to choose how we look at what is going on. Even though I do not always achieve it, my goal is always peace. When I find that I am not in peace, I just watch the screen or scan through my body. I usually find that I recover my peace within a few moments.

From one plane to another - thoughts going round and round. The part of us that can't see what is really going on finds it difficult or nearly impossible to trust the part that does. And, thus, has a real problem with letting it take control. How do we undo decisions that we had no part in making. For that matter, how do we undo decisions that we feel completely responsible for. Our parents had sex and we were conceived and later we were born. The society, the religion, the social class, the bodies we were born into, we had nothing to do with. A few questions arise who or what is this "I" of which we speak? how do we know that we have no part in our non-decisions? how do we know we were completely responsible for those decisions we think we made? can we go back? Can we really go back? To go back in time, if there is a solid space/time connection, we have to go back in space. We have difficulty overcoming the simple gravity of planet Earth. How are we going to shi...

I was tempted to make the third Constantly "Constantinople" but that would have been misleading as this post has as little to do with Constantinople as it has to do with New York, New Delhi, Beijing or Cork. We are constantly changing - round and round. Constantly framing impressions. Our view frame is surrounded by a frame of reference that is made up of stored images. Surrounded implies a 2-D matrix, but it may be just a continuum like a circle. A first impression is never a first because it is always compared with some previously stored image. Constantly watching people's behaviour. Constantly judging their behaviour against some socio-moralistic code. This code was learned during our formative years and persists through most of our lives. The judgement is made instantly and then the tolerance factor comes into play. Tolerance is based on the idea that we are all learning. But it always comes after the judgement. So! How can we drop the judgement? Or maybe the ques...

I've been thinking about Lessons Bloody Lessons and decided that the title is a bit misleading. It's a throwback to a time about 5-10 years ago when I thought I had learned enough. And I got really mad, raging mad about the idea of always having to learn more and more lessons and that they would never end. So, I suppose, now that I've realised that I've always had this really cool internal teacher (the Holy Spirit in Christian terms, the Buddha Within in Buddhist terms) and that I can learn my lessons when I'm ready, it's not so bad, really. The key word in learning from life and enjoying it while you do is "enthusiasm". Whatever you're doing be enthusiastic about it. If it's a boring job, what we call a real chore, then learn to do it on auto-pilot, and put your enthusiasm into thinking about what you really love. It could be something from the past or the future, it could be a place you'd love to be or have been. It doesn't matter w...

So, having said that we are here to have our learning experiences, we'd have to learn what it means to be a Human Being. How many people do we need to cover the complete range of human experience? Even hough we are all unique human beings, there are patterns that repeat themselves over and over again. When I was in UCC a fellow student claimed that we only need 200. Suppose that he hyper-underestimated and that we really need 20,000 or even 20,000,000. I don't think that it's anywhere near this number, but for argument's sake we'll take a number somewhere in between, like 80,000 - the population of a reasonably small city. But, there are 6.4 billion of us, that's 80,000 time 80,000. So why are we doing it over and over again? Maybe we are a very stupid species and can't learn from each other. Maybe we are being led astray like in the Pied Piper of Hamlin story. As human beings we have been given access to the complete range, from here to eternity, from...

When I was a trainer in DDC I decided to offer a class in Time Management. I came across and bought a video by John Cleese called Meetings Bloody Meetings to help me get the message across. Hence the title of this post. I went through a phase where I though I had learned enough bloody lessons. But it kept being shoved in my face that we're never finished learning lessons. Well, to hell with that. So when will I be finished learning? When I wake up in the morning in peace, spend the whole day in peace, fall asleep and sleep in peace. Sounds boring? Not really! Because the idea of "walkabout" entered. In walkabout mode we just go about our lives enjoying what is presented to us without any expectations. We're not trying to do anything, just being and enjoying it. Having fun! Well, anyway back to the bloody lessons. I wake up in the morning, and I'm in peace. I go through the day. At some stage I discover that I'm not in peace. Maybe I'm angry, mad, sad...

A train of thought is a sequence of concepts, a process. In slow motion an event is a process. There is no such thing as a random happening, no such thing as chance, no such thing as chaos. We just don't have enough information to see the control system at work, or we do not have the ability or the willingness to understand the bigger picture, the grand scheme. There is also a vested interest in keeping the concept of chance or chaos going. If we knew it all, there would be no fear. Without fear why would we need security for the future, why would we need security for the present? Why would we need to pay insurance, why would we need systems of control, hierarchies of management or government. Anyway, another mangle (I've decided to call these misquotes and mixed sayings that come into my mind mangles). "Ego is a voluntary incarceration of a boundless mind." Looking at bodies (man-watching) may be futile. It could be - trying to interpret a mind by inferring...

A paradigm is a thought system that is so ingrained in a society that no-one ever questions it or even sees the need to question it. A New Paradigm is a bit of a contradiction. I was talking to a friend yesterday. His son has got married. He wanted to have a simple wedding and spend his money on a 6-month world trip with his wife. His wife wanted the all bells and whistles wedding, which she got. The son now feels trapped - all his money is gone, they even borrowed for the wedding. He's got a €385K mortgage and a €20K loan for the new car. Looking at it an other way he could say that he's got a beautiful wife, a great house, and a marvelous new car. The New Paradigm being introduced is based on the Law of Attraction. This basically states that what you think about you get. Think about disasters get disasters. Think about abundance get abundance. There are many books and sites selling it. The major one at the moment is "The Secret". The only problem with most of them...

Been reading a few different conspiracy theory books - Icke mainly. Read Sitchin's End of Days as well. And, of course, I watched Conspiracy Theory again. Icke's major theory is that the dinosaurs never became extinct, that they evolved into humans. Very like the Super Mario Brothers movie, except that he maintains that they are alive and well and living all around us. He does go on and on about the horrors that these cold blooded reptiles get up to with us warm blooded mammals. By the end I was accusing him of genetic discrimination. I suppose the cynic in me says "What the hell difference does it make who we've evolved from as long as we've made it here". Then I remembered seeing huge similarities between the whale anatomy in the National Gallery and ours. So much so that I commented that maybe we are devolved from the whales. The conclusion that I've come to is that all conspiracy theories are based on the ultimate conspiracy of them all - the one t...

I watched Altered States last night and after that I watched Being John Malkovich. Altered States was very different from what I remembered. Being John Malkovich was a kinda weird, not quite black comedy, maybe grey comedy. The funny thing was that they were both about mind stuff. In Altered States Dr Jessup was proving that the state of the mind changes the state of the body. By sensory deprivation and magic mushrooms his body would transform into homo erectus. When he did he wasn't in control of his behaviour anymore. He nearly lost it a few times but in the end his love for his wife saves them both from a fate worse than death, as the cliche goes. One of the funny things about Altered States and my mind was that in the beginning he was just describing in words the scenes he was seeing while in the sensory deprivation tank. These descriptions I had turned into images in my mind and remembered the imagined scenes as part of the movie. I was a bit disappointed that the scenes w...

As I arrived in GF, Clivid attacked me, saying, “Hix is gone! You made her do it...” I was shocked and wasn’t listening to him anymore. Had Hix committed suicide? I looked around at the others and none of them looked too happy. I asked, “What happened?” Will answered, “Hix left you a letter and asked us not to answer any of your questions until you had read it.” He handed me the letter and I wondered if it contained a suicide note. The envelope was addressed simply as ‘To David, please read aloud at your next Thursday session’. As I opened it my hands were shaking. The letter was a few pages long. I began to get my hopes up, suicide notes are usually only a paragraph long. The handwriting was beautiful, nothing like I would have expected. Dear David, Thank you very much for what you have done for me. You have opened my eyes to a different way of thinking and given me a new perspective on the world. I asked Clivid not to attack you after I was gone but he kept saying that...

I had started reading one of the books in the house’s library called the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. The Tibetans proposed a simple technique, the same technique that Mi-Li-Sam had shared with me. Their argument was simple. If we were going to run in the Olympics we would not arrive at the stadium on the day of the race without any preparation. We would have trained and worked hard and would have had to run many races to prove that we were up to Olympic standards. They said to regard death in the same way. Death will be the biggest single event in our lives and we had better prepare for it. To do this we need to catch ourselves falling asleep, because sleep is like a little death. Every night I did this and only caught myself falling asleep once or twice. But, what was very interesting, is that I was aware of things happening either before I woke up or just after I woke up. I would wake up and keep my eyes closed. Even though I knew I was...