Month: August 2007

This was my first Bank Holiday since retiring, so the first one which didn’t really mean much. But, exceptionally for a Bank Holiday, we had good weather after a week or so of bad weather.

We took advantage of it, and and I took my mother to St James’s Park on Saturday, down by the River near where we live in Battersea on Sunday, and to Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park today where I had probably my last swim of the Summer in the Serpentine.

We were today discussing the vermin problem in my mother’s sheltered accommodation, which has affected her flat, and one in my block which has affected the flat below mine. In my mum’s case it is mice, in the flat below mine it is rats. We both said we felt very uncomfotable about it, and couldn’t relax. The council Pest Control have been to treat both flats, and others which are affected. In my mum’s case, for the second time. I have also written to her Housing Association, on the recommendation of the Pest Control officer who visited her flat, to ask them to seal off the gap thru which the mice are coming.

I have a way of consulting my partner on the Other Side for serious problems or dilemmas which are really important or worrying me. I did so tonight, and got reassurance straight away. The words ‘relax’ and ‘tranquility’ came thru, as did the message that in the case of my mother’s flat the measures to deal with the problem would ‘triumph’ and in the case of the flat below mine the problem had reached its ‘conclusion’.

I now feel I can relax a little more easily, since George has constantly looked after me and my mother since he passed over.

The other problem I have at the moment is no hot water due to the boiler packing up yet again, this time just before the Bank Holiday Weekend. It was a gorgeous day Saturday, and the engineer who called wasn’t in my flat more than about 5 minutes. It was only air in the pipe from the boiler to the tank which was causing the problem, and he asked for a bowl in order to bleed the pipe to get rid of the airlock. Instead he suddenly apparently decided he wasn’t going to hang around on such a good day on a Bank Holiday Weekend, and said someone would ring me in the week. He muttered something about needing a new pipe, which is ridiculous if it is only air in the pipe. Anyway a new pipe to the tank would be a job for the council, and he said no, this was the responsibility of the boiler contractor. So I now have to ring them tomorrow and try to get them to get rid of the air in the pipe before I go away. I’m sure it is quite a simple job, but that the engineer who called had no intention of doing ANY jobs that day, just making notes of what had to be done by others later on.

 So quite a pleasant weekend, nothing very exciting. I could have done without the man in the flat below telling about his rat problem, and showing me graphic pictures of the dead creatures and the holes they had made in his wall beforehand. This was information I really didn’t need to know!

I rang a friend, Tom, this evening, and he told me that an old man he’d been looking after for years, who was suffering from terminal cancer, finally died in hospital yesterday afternoon.

Reg had been in  hospital for months, and his flat had been vacated ever since he went into hospital. He has no living relatives apparently. Yet Tom received three calls on his mobile from Reg’s home phone number around the time that Reg died in hospital.

The flat was vacated by Reg and the phone line disconnected, so nobody could have dialed Tom’s number from his home phone – except it seems Reg’s disembodied spirit around the time of his death!

IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS INCIDENT 

August 23rd: More information which makes this event even more remarkable:

The phone had indeed been disconnected ages before. Tom used to joke with Reg that nobody had ever phoned him from the Other Side to say they’d arrived safely.

What happens the very day Reg passed over? Tom’s mobile didn’t actually ring. What happened was he received three missed calls messages – they read as follows, dated the day Reg died in hospital, from his home number which had been disconnected weeks/months before: Reg calling….. Reg calling….. Reg calling.  Tom has a witness, his friend Mark who was visiting, and who saw these three messages on Tom’s mobile the day Reg passed away.

A TV program on Five Life tonite investigated the case of a little boy, Cameron, from Glasgow who ever since he learnt to talk had persistent memories of a previous life on the Scottish island of Barra.

At the end of the program, after a visit to the island and tracing a surviving family member from his alleged previous life, there were some remarkable discoveries. The little boy correctly described how planes landed on the beach, the house he lived in, the name of the family (the Robertsons), the kind of phone they had, the gate to the beach, and the dog which lived next door. All this was 100% accurate, and there is no way the little boy could have known any of this.

Two things they were not able to verify. The boy claimed his father in the previous lifetime was named Shane or Sean Robertson (I’m not sure of the spelling) and that he (the father) was killed by a car.

The surviving relative, Gillian Robertson who lived in Glasgow, verified that for about 20 years the house by the beach on Barra was used by the Robertson family as a holiday home. But she had no knowledge of a Shane/Sean Robertson, of anyone being killed by a car or any boy who died. However it was never verified just how close this Gillian Robertson was to the branch of the family Cameron remembered. It was just assumed she might have been his sister, as he said he had several brothers and sisters in the previous lifetime.

I would count this as strong evidence for reincarnation. There is no way the little boy could have known all these facts – the family had never visited Barra. It took a lot of searching island records to find the house in question and any trace of the Robertsons.

The fact that Gillian Robertson had no knowledge of a Shane/Sean Robertson in the family who died in a car accident, or of a boy who died, is not necessarily conclusive. How many of us keep in touch with all our family members? I certainly don’t. We don’t even know when the boy died in his previous life, he could well have grown up to be a man and died in his 30s or 40s. There were two James Robertsons in the family, so he could have got the name slightly wrong. We just don’t know how big this Robertson family was, or how many of them spent time in the house on Barra.

There is also the very real possibility that Gillian Robertson knew more than she admitted, but couldn’t face up to the traumatic possibility of reincarnation maybe involving a brother or another member of her family. I think this is extremely likely. Who would want the past dragged up in this way, especially if one’s religious or atheistic beliefs didn’t hold with reincarnation?

What was discovered is that the Robertson family came from Glasgow, and only spent summers in the Barra house. Therefore looking thru the records of the island would not necessarily throw up the death of either the boy in a previous life or that of his father, which could well have occurred in Glasgow, or elsewhere.

There were definitely more facts which fitted than those which didn’t appear to. And the program also dealt with the case of another boy in the States who had memories of a previous life as his grandfather, correctly identifying his grandfather in a school group photograph, and the first car his grandfather owned.

There are many such cases of children remembering previous lives, memories which tend to fade away by the age of about 6. They cannot all be put down to remarkable ‘coincidence’. Something very strange is happening here.  An investigator suggested the boy from Glasgow could have been getting confused by two previous lives. Who knows?

The fact remains that a little boy in Glasgow correctly ‘remembered’ a house on a remote island and details of the surroundings and who lived there. How on Earth did he get this information? The mystery remains.

An ironic title. You never see a policeman on the beat nowadays. They are either holed up in police stations, doing ‘paperwork’ so they tell us (in the computer age? Seems highly unlikely to me.) Or they are flying around in police cars/police vans so fast they can’t see what’s happening on the streets. (I speak as a member of a police family. My maternal grandfather and two uncles were police officers.)

Yet get a few peaceful demonstrators together, like the Environmental Camp at Heathrow Airport, and the police are there in droves, stopping and searching peaceful protestors.

Meanwhile gangs rule the streets, and teenagers are being stabbed or shot. 18 have been killed so far this year. Older people who, in the total absence of the police, have gone out of their homes to remonstrate with unruly teenagers have also been killed. The police then appear on the scene AFTER all these murders.

We keep hearing that police are being put back on the beat, but I rarely see them. They need to be patrolling 24/7. The gangs need to be rounded up and cleared off our streets, so teenagers and others won’t be intimidated by them. What are police for if not to insure that anarchy doesn’t rule on our streets?

 If necessary send armed officers to do the job, and if they can’t do it, bring in the Army. Bring them back from Iraq and Afghanistan and put them on the streets here to clear up the gang warfare. Stop and search by armed police officers and/or the Army should be a daily routine, and nobody should object to this in this age of street gang warfare and Islamic terrorism. We should all be prepared to be stopped and searched by police/army whenever we go out.

As our jails are already full to overflowing, internment camps should be set up in remote areas of the UK, perhaps on uninhabited islands. We’ve got to clear up this anarchy on our streets and protect our teenagers and other citizens.

The police are not doing their job properly, and it is up to the Government to make sure they do. I would be prepared to see armed police officers permanently on our streets if it would stop this anarchy and no-go areas which seem to rule nowadays.

It has now come to the point where we must be prepared to see armed police every time we leave our house. They would be there to protect us. Or else bring in the Army to do the job. This would be far more useful than the anarchy they are creating in Iraq. Here they could stop the anarchy which already exists on our city streets.

I speak as a pacifist. But although I’m against indiscriminate killing which takes place in war, and against war itself, and against all weapons of mass destruction, I have no objection at all to armed policing operations to protect the general public. Or to armeed international policing operations under the auspices of the UN to protect populations everywhere from anarchy, genocide, etc.

The present situation is very dangerous. If the Government and major political parties don’t draw up plans to deal with this anarchy on our streets, then extremist political parties will inevitably gain more and more votes. It is up to the Government, police and the military to clean up our streets without delay, whatever it takes. Otherwise this increasing anarchy will lead to an extreme rightwing political party coming to power.

Note:

The following correspondence relates to those who seek evidence for life after death. These are divided into two main groups: Spiritualists, who take a religious approach, and Survivalists who are scientists, atheists, agnostics, etc. who take a completely rational approach but are convinced by the growing evidence of survival.

Tony

Email from a fellow Survivalist:

Tony, You sum up the destruction of the once scientifically minded Spiritualist movement very well. This is why our deadly enemies are having a field day. I shudder to think what Arthur Findlay must make of these religious fanatics who have successfully infiltrated the Arthur Findlay College.

Michael

My reply:

The thing that worries me is that we who are investigating survival thru mediumship and scientific experimentation in order to gather evidence, are now in danger of splitting up into small factions attacking each other. We should be trying to convince those who either believe that death is the end, or who base their belief in the after-life on ancient religious texts (the fabled 72 virgins, expectations of sitting at the feet of the mysterious Three-In-One, angels with harps floating on clouds and all the rest of it.)

I am reminded of the far left political factions which spend so much time attacking each other for heresy, they have very little influence on the general public. So we don’t really want to get too deeply into arguments similar to whether it was Leon Trotsky or Joseph Stalin who betrayed the Great October Socialist Revolution, or in our case, whether Spiritualism betrayed the scientific approach to seeking evidence of survival by adopting the trappings of religion in general, and Christianity in particular.

However, it is worth remembering that since we survive death, if Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, etc. were all historical figures, then they too survived death. This does not make them ‘divine’, but they may well continue to exist in some form or other. So we should not be too dismissive of religious people who claim to have ‘seen’ the founder of their religion, it is possibly merely further evidence of survival. But we should also bear in mind that any Catholic, for instance, who sees a vision of a woman will automatically assume it’s the Virgin Mary, whilst a Christian, Moslem or Jew who sees the vision of a man will probably assume it is one of the founders of their particular religion.

What we all agree on is the important thing, i.e. the gathering of evidence of survival thru mediumship, scientific experimentation and study of OOBEs and similar phenomena.

Spiritualism in UK at least has gotten itself into a terrible muddle. The 5th Principle of Spiritualism about Personal Responsibility, for instance, is in direct opposition to the Christian belief in salvation and ‘redemption of sins’ thru the fabled death and resurrection of the founder of the religion (who in any case, according to the latest evidence, probably survived the crucifixion and died in the Far East at the age of about 80.) Yet many Spiritualist centers in UK insist on calling themselves Christian Spiritualist churches, and even display Christian symbolism such as that barbaric instrument of execution, the cross, and pictures such as Christ as the Light of the World.

The 1st Principle of Spiritualism about the Fatherhood of God is the really troublesome one, since it perpetuates the ancient myth of a male super-being who knows everything and who created life and the universe. It is this 1st Principle which divides Spiritualists from those of us who take an entirely scientific approach to the study of survival.

Atheists and agnostics cannot possibly accept this 1st Principle of Spiritualism, nor the trappings of Christianity which the movement has adopted such as Christian hymns and terminology, and the Lord’s Prayer. Spiritualism in any case should be all-embracing, basing its belief in survival on evidence. It should embrace those of all religions and none. It is very sad that, in UK at least, it has aligned itself firmly with monotheism and Christianity, which as I describe above, is incompatible with the 5th Principle of Spiritualism about taking personal responsibility for our actions.

Despite all this, it is very important that all those working to gather evidence of survival work together, or at least do not spend so much time attacking each other for committing ‘heresy’, that we lose sight of our main objective: to spread the word that survival of death is a reality which can be proved by study of the growing scientific and other evidence.

Most mediums describe themselves as Spiritualists, and most believe in the traditional idea of a monotheistic ‘god’ as described in the 1st Principle of Spiritualism, though some would argue that this ‘god’ is not male. Despite the trappings of Christianity, most Spiritualists do not believe you will end up in the fabled Hell if you don’t accept Christ as your personal Savior. So they do themselves no favors by expecting Hindus, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, etc. to swallow all the trappings of Christianity when seeking evidence of survival.

Spiritualism is also tainted by all the charlatans which have discredited the movement in the past. The image of loopy old women groaning in darkened rooms whilst pieces of cheesecloth, trumpets and tables are dangled in the air from wires, persists.

The scientific approach to discovering and examining evidence of survival must be pursued, and I would encourage the establishment of more non-religious scientific centers dedicated to demonstrating and investigating some of this evidence open to the general public, who now have an increased interest in this subject as religion loses its influence and relevance.

We should be able to unite and investigate this fascinating subject, and not worry too much about whether the medium demonstrating clairvoyance, clairaudience, physical phenomena or whatever is a Spiritualist, a Survivalist or a member of the Aetherius Society convinced that Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed are whizzing around in flying saucers based on Venus.

So long as they are genuine mediums producing convincing evidence of survival, we should cooperate in examining this evidence, and demonstrating it to the wider community.

However it would be wise for the more scientific minded Survivalists to take on the task of convincing scientists, and leave it to the Spiritualists to concentrate on Christians and those in other religions.

In this way we can perhaps cooperate to defeat the two common myths: one that death is the end, and two that we are ultimately all bound for the mythical Heaven or Hell described in ancient religious texts.

Proof of survival is what we must concentrate on. Other questions such as whether there is a God, many gods, or none, can be put on the back burner, or left to individual preference.

Personally I feel that Charles Darwin’s approach in ‘Origin of the Species’ was basically correct, but am not convinced that Natural Selection can adequately explain the complexity of the various life forms and their internal organs. Nor do I believe there is evidence of an all-wise Creator who planned all life-forms. I feel the truth lies somewhere in between, and that the fact that we survive death is the vital clue. In other words Darwin’s theory of evolution continues to apply after death. From very simple beginnings all life-forms are evolving, gathering experience and learning. This process continues after death.