Tuesday 29 March 2011

UK Probe Conference March 2011


Dedicated to the loving memory of my Probe-Buddy Ian Wright. Rest in Peace, old friend.

I’ve returned from the UK Probe Conference March 2011. Ustane and I have had a wonderful time as always. It was wonderful to see all my Probe-Buddies again and I’ll look forward to seeing them again in October. As always many things were unchanged, but a lot of things were different. Many thanks to Jean and Sam, and all the speakers and delegates. Unfortunately I don’t have time to do a full-length written review of the conference, but I have done a HPANWO TV reportage again. I was wondering if I’d be able to do anything original. This my third Probe reportage and I didn’t want to repeat myself. As it happened I needn’t have worried! Here it is: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-probe-conference-march-2011.html





Thursday 24 March 2011

Hospital Ghosts


See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/river-ghost.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html

I’ve had another peculiar experience that might come under the category of ghostly, in the same sense as the two background articles above. This happened at work, the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. I was on a Friday late shift, February the 18th, and it was about 6.30PM. I was tired because it had been a busy spell in the Accident & Emergency department and I was also slightly drowsy from a disturbed sleep the previous night. I entered the inpatient X-Ray reception area, which was closed at this hour, and sat down in one of the waiting chairs to relax for a moment. Then I saw behind the reception desk a sudden bright explosion of light, like a camera flash bulb going off. This was accompanied by a hissing, cracking sound. I jumped up and moved over to the desk, which you can see in the photo above. It looked normal; there was nothing I could see that explained what I’d just perceived. The following Monday I asked one of the receptionists who regularly man that desk if they’d noticed anything unusual there and they said no.

There are a lot of myths about ghosts. One is that they only appear at night. Not at all, ghosts can appear 24/7 and there are some very significant daylight sightings reported, including a famous encounter in a lift with a full-body, solid, speaking, dead President of Finland! Another contradiction to popular belief is that ghosts are not always identifiable as deceased people. Ghosts of living people are sometimes seen, known as “Doppelgangers” (I’ve got an interesting story to tell you about that in a moment, bear with me!). They often appear in completely unrecognizable forms or as amorphous clouds of vapour or blobs. Another falsehood is that ghosts are best sought after in graveyards; not true. One can certainly go ghost-hunting is cemeteries if you want, but these places are not the most likely place to be haunted. Ghost sightings seem to occur mostly in places linked to human suffering, especially people who’ve died by violent and/or painful deaths. Murder scenes are often reported as haunted, or houses where a depressed person committed suicide. Battlefields are another common ghost location; but from what I can gather, the absolute number 1 place to find ghosts is in hospitals. This is fortunate for me because I spend 40 hours every week inside one.

I think before I go on any further I should make it clear by what I mean when I write down the word “ghost”. This term has been used to describe what I reckon could be a number of very different phenomena. Ghosts also appear in the traditions of all cultures across the world. So what is a ghost? The popular conception is that on occasions when a person dies some remnant of their presence remains behind in this world, like a shadow, imprint or afterglow which causes the ghost effect. This might well be what some ghosts are, but not all of them fit into this category by any means. Ghosts sometimes simply appear as “recordings” of past events. A witness might be walking down a modern street in London and see a column of Roman soldiers march past. These soldiers will be oblivious to the surroundings of the witness. Some of these kinds of apparitions are “insies” rather than “outsies”, in which the witness will see the troops marching and look around to suddenly find themselves on an old Roman street with the buildings and people transformed. As with the “outsie” sighting, the people in the vision will usually not react to the presence of the witness, indicating that they can't see them. This kind of ghost is something very different. It’s as if the witness' mind flips into a state of consciousness where it can perceive events long past in the area its senses are observing. This might be what I experienced when I saw phantom horses in a local park near my home. This happened in January 1989. I was sitting in the rec of the park at about 6AM waiting to meet my then-girlfriend Jenny who used to go jogging in the early morning (Believe me nothing else would get me up at that time to go jogging on a cold winter’s morning!). Then I saw 3 horses walking calmly nose-to-tail out from the darkness behind me. They looked strange, kind of transparent like chalk engravings. They walked out of the park gates and off down a road. Jenny was walking up the road at the time and saw them too, but she was much more disturbed than I was and refused to talk about the incident. A week later she terminated our relationship. Another kind of ghost sighting is when one sees something that does not fit in with any known individual or occurrence in this world at all. This could be because they’re related to events of which no living person has any knowledge, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. Another kind of ghost is when a recognizable person appears in the exact same form as they did when alive, with a solid-looking body and normal voice. This is what took place with the sighting of the President of Finland. In this case the apparition looked exactly as he had when alive. He was able to speak in his usual voice and was capable of touching things, like the lift buttons… and yet he had died previously! (Janet and Colin Bord Modern Mysteries of The World). So we’re dealing with an entire syndrome of phenomena that might have little or no relation to each other. Ghosts are not all “dead people”.

The problem with ghost-like phenomena is that if you want to study them in a proper manner then it’s extremely difficult. Very few universities take the subject seriously. It’s regarded as a “fringe science” or even a pseudoscience. There are only a small number of academic institutions in the world who have departments which will pay for you to investigate ghosts. Even parapsychology faculties like the Arthur Koestler Unit in Edinburgh, which studied my mother for her precognitive abilities (See: http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/index.html), don’t really go there. A scientist may be unwilling to take on studies into ghosts because of the significant peer-pressure scientists live under. Mainstream scientists seem to have a very nasty streak in them towards other scientists who have unconventional ideas and interests. The late John Mack relates the emotional trauma he suffered when former friends and colleagues disowned him simply because he thought, and expressed the thought, that alien abductions were scientifically real. Therefore it’s privately-funded, amateur organizations and individuals who do most of the work in this field. In one sense those who reject ghost-hunting as a proper science have a point; this is because it’s so difficult to gather data from these phenomena. Most sightings are eyewitness testimony only. Occasionally, as in the case of my horses sighting, more than one person will see the same ghost, ruling out hallucination to most researchers. There are many films and photographs of ghostly activity but these are almost always denounced as fakes by academia; sadly in this day and age with Photoshop it’s hard to prove the academics wrong on that. One useful alternative is to record environmental changes with specialized instruments; you can purchase toolkits with these instruments from magazines like Paranormal, see: http://paranormalmagazine.co.uk/ , and any serious ghost-hunter would need one of these. (My friend Brian Allan, see the HPANWO Links column, now writes for this magazine) Sadly ghost investigation has been given a bad name recently by a number of very popular but highly sensationalistic TV shows that use stagecraft and fictionalization to produce bogus ghost phenomena. This has led to an explosion of “paranormal tourism” in which groups of young people visit haunted locations for entertainment purposes, often misleading the house’s residents into thinking that they are serious researchers, taking advantage of the lack of regulation in this practice. “Never be tempted to fake anything!” said another friend of mine, a well-known supernatural researcher, when I last spoke to him a few weeks ago. Some investigators do fake data, not because they never really experience genuine ghostly events, but in order to boost their profile after a run of unsuccessful studies. They justify it to themselves with platitudes like: “I’m only going to do it just this once. Just one little fake ghost to get my research grant; after that I’ll never fake anything again, I promise!” My friend said that we must never ever let ourselves fall into this trap; it’s simply not worth it. We must be totally honest in our conduct or else we’ll taint our own careers and ghost-investigation in general for years to come, with its existing rather shaky public image; researchers faking results is exactly what the debunkers love! Let’s not play into their hands. The frustration of this kind of research is what generates this dilemma because real evidence is so tenuous and exclusive. I also feel as if we’re being tantalized as well, because all the most striking events will inevitably occur when it’s not possible to prove them. I myself have seen, along with the horses, an image of Ustane’s father on a train, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html . I’ve been in a car that was paced by a cloud of sand-like substance, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-trip-to-haunted-house.html , I’ve seen a “cut-out” apparition by the River Thames, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2010/10/river-ghost.html and several other incidents... But it was when there was no way I could prove them! If there had been a way to prove them then maybe they wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. The great South African paranormal researcher Lyall Watson, who died in 2008, came up with a theory which he christened “The Cosmic Nanny”. He believed that there is some kind of overseer to all supernatural phenomena that doesn’t want humanity to ever know, with absolute certainty, that they are scientifically real. In his books Watson relates his frustration that many times a decisive piece of evidence goes missing or instruments fail at crucial moments. He always recommends posting such data in Special Delivery mail so that at least when it gets lost, as it invariably will, you can make a bit of cash in compensation! It's as if the phenomena themselves don't want to be proved. The cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes (See the Centre for Fortean Zoologogy in the HPANWO Links column) also relates what he calls “The Psychic Backlash”. He found that when he investigated ghostly incidents he was struck down by a run of serious misfortune: ill health, the death of both of his cats, the breaking down of his car and other things. I think Watson’s and Downes’ experiences are related.

Anyway, back to hospitals. I once saw an intriguing interview with an American doctor called Mitchell Gibson. The interview is no longer available online but here’s another one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EvJs6VKPT8 . Dr Gibson, the black man in the photo above, was a doctor at a hospital in Philadelphia, but his psychic abilities allowed him to see the ghosts of patients who’d died wandering the corridors of the hospital. This led him into the field of the noetic sciences and spiritual research. Presumably if the patients’ ghosts were wandering the corridors of Gibson’s hospital then they must also wander the corridors of the John Radcliffe, only I usually can’t see them. Is there any way I could? Well to carry out an official ghost investigation I’d need permission from the hospital’s management and I doubt if they would entertain such an endeavour. The study would inevitably involve using the working areas of the hospital which are highly restricted. However there’s no reason why I can’t make efforts to discover ghostly goings on unofficially and privately during my periods on duty. I’ve written several times about electrosmog; mobile phone masts, HAARP etc. One of the theories connected to electrosmog is that it is designed by the Illuminati to suppress the increasing ability of humans to perceive things through the sixth sense as the energies of the world change as we approach December 2012. As I have said on many occasions, the Illuminati know that the Supernatural is real; they just don’t want us to know that. The theory is that the HAARP and mobile phone masts are how they maintain that secret. I’m not sure if I agree with that or not, but supposing it is true; how would we overcome this blindfolding of our spiritual eyes? It would be to go somewhere where there is no electrosmog. Unfortunately nowadays there is no place on the entire surface of the Earth which is not contaminated to some degree by electromagnetic poisoning; HAARP affects the entire world from its transmitters in the north polar regions of the planet. However, there are locations where electrosmog cannot reach. One is underground. It’s true that HAARP's ELF- Extremely Low Frequency, transmissions can penetrate a certain way into the ground and ocean, in fact one of its publically-acknowledged purposes is to communicate with submarines; however this is limited in the ocean to a few hundred feet and underground, which is many times denser, the range is probably much less. Underground is one possibility; in fact scientists searching for illusive subatomic particles have to set up laboratories down deep mines: to eliminate electronic noise, because nowhere else is radiologically pristine. The Homestake Experiment to detect neutrinos for the core of the sun was done in a deep gold mine for this reason. But a thought occurred to me just a few days ago that you don’t have to go underground to find somewhere where electrical noise can’t reach you. There are certain places that are “radio-shielded”; these are spaces surrounded by a layer of heavy metal, usually lead, to prevent radiation from passing through. Usually this is because the space contains a source of dangerous radiation that its users don’t want to get out, like a nuclear reactor or radiotherapy head, but when that source is switched off the interior of the space becomes a place where radiation from outside can’t get in, because the shielding is two-way. Luckily hospitals contain several such places: X-ray chambers. These have a thick layer of lead shielding built into the walls, ceiling and sometimes the floor in there are rooms beneath it. The doors are shielded too and I know because they’re extremely heavy to open and shut. I was trying to call one of my Brother or Sister Porters the other day in one of these chambers on the walkie-talkie radios we use to communicate and I couldn’t get a signal at all. I wonder if maybe I should keep an extra special eye out for incidents of high strangeness when I’m working in these areas. It’s a shame I can’t enter the radiotherapy chamber at the nearby Churchill Hospital as this has even thicker lead shielding because the radiation levels inside get much higher than those used in radiography. My hypothesis is that being in a radio-neutral environment will enhance a person’s psychic abilities. We’ll see what happens.

So far all the ghost stories at my hospital have occurred outside the X-ray rooms. There are several I’ve heard, but two in particular are very convincing. One took place in the A&E Department about two years ago. There’s a side ward to the department that’s called the EAU, Emergency Assessment Unit. This is where we keep patients who’ve been in A&E for long periods. One evening at about 7PM a nurse ran out of the area screaming with fear. She’d seen a ghostly apparition in there while looking after the patients. I came on duty at 10PM and a few people were still talking about it. The sighting had taken place at the same time that an attempted resuscitation was going on in the Resus room; could this be a Mitchell Gibson-type experience? The second significant incident occurred at night on a temporary corridor linking the main hospital the Trauma Unit. A nurse who serves in the West Wing Operating Theatres was walking along it when a humanoid phantom walked straight into the corridor through one wall and crossed perpendicularly out through the other wall. Understandably the witness fled the scene and reported her encounter to her colleagues. I’ve managed to track down the witness to the first event, but the second incident is still an ongoing study; I’ll keep you posted as much as possible.

I spoke above of how some people see ghosts of living people; well it has been reported that my own Doppelganger, a German word that literally means: “your walking double”, has been sighted. One of my Extremely Proud and Dignified Brother Porters told me that he saw a man in Oxford city centre who looked exactly like me, not just a slight resemblance; he actually looked just like me in every detail. There are a number of possibilities: maybe he actually saw the real me. No, I was definitely not in the area at the time this sighting took place. Also this person was dressed in a very smart suit and carrying a briefcase; anybody who knows me would never expect me to wear such a Conformist attire! It could of course be another person who looks just like me; they say everybody has a double, and indeed I’ve been compared in physiogmany to both William Hague and Al Murray- the Pub Landord. However my Brother Porter saw this person up close and swears that he was exactly like me; my Brother Porter almost went up and greeted the alleged Doppelganger. There are many disturbing urban legends associated with Doppelganger sightings, legends that inspire a plethora of horror films including the 1970 classic chiller The Man Who Haunted Himself, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066053/ . One of the legends associated with a Doppelganger is that its presence is a portent of the individual’s own death. This doesn’t scare me one bit, as such omens like this tend to be dramatic hearsay and meaningless in the course of real events. I’m in good health right now and not planning to do anything dangerous so I’ve every reason to hope that I’ll be around for many years to come! Don’t worry.

I had another experience in 1996 that was very influential in my views on what some ghosts are. It was the depths of the night, what Roald Dahl called “the Witching Hour”. I awoke suddenly from a shallow sleep to find that there was a small boy kneeling on my bedroom floor a few feet from my bed. He wasn’t solid, in fact he was translucent in appearance like those horses; I described him at the time as looking as if he were made of smoke, but smoke which kept its shape. He was about 4 feet tall, the size of a 5 or 6 year old. He was kneeling up, facing the bed with his hands clasped in front of his face as if saying his prayers. I stared at him for a number of seconds, then he slowly levitated into the air and drifted away. He began to fade away, but as he did so he turned and looked at me and our eyes met. Then he vanished completely. As I’ve said above this experience is impossible to prove; it could be a hypnopompic effect, this is where dreams continue for a short time after you wake up, but it’s something that I’ve never seen before or since; what if it was real? I’ve come to the conclusion that some ghostly phenomena are actually “bleed-overs” of events from parallel universes. I’ve written about parallel universes before and even serious scientists are taking the idea seriously with their “M-Theory”, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7SDrj4Tjvk . This idea is also the background to the excellent and worryingly feasible horror movie The Mist, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/11/mist.html and also one of my favourite books, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/02/northern-lights.html . What if two universes, with a similar physical makeup, ended up touching each other on their movement through the hyperspace medium? The result might be similar to those strange instances when your TV set (In the pre-digital era, see: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/12/digital-tv.html) goes out of tune and picks up two channels at the same time. You get an unearthly blend of two separate pictures and soundtracks on the same screen. Usually one is more distinct and the other is fuzzy and tenuous. Maybe this is what I saw in my bedroom in 1996. I wonder who the little boy was and what his world is like. Does it look very like ours or is it totally different? To me he appeared very and formless; made of smoke as I said, but perhaps that how I looked to him.

Finally, here’s an article and video about other hospital ghostly goings on. See: http://www.angelsghosts.com/hospital_ghost_stories
And: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMk3kh-URHQ

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/liz-taylor-and-jose-arguelles-die.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/janet-street-porter-against-census.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-border-agency-not-just-borders.html
And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/back-umbrella-day.html

Latest HPANWO TV films: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/but-they-aint-normal.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/walt-disneys-underworld.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/kevin-annett-liverpool-lecture-12311.html
And: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/03/hunt-for-cm24_10.html


Monday 14 March 2011

Findhorn

The official website of the Findhorn Foundation: http://www.findhorn.org/

I first heard about the Findhorn Community in 2002 when I was reading a magazine I used to subscribe to called Caduceus (See: http://www.caduceus.info/) It described it as an “alternative, spiritual community” and it was celebrating its 40th anniversary. It was only the following year when I read Fritz Springmeier’s Bloodlines of the Illuminati that I felt a frisson of curiosity; the book described the Findhorn Community as a sinister “Vatican of the New Age” where the Rosicrucian overlords who ran it sent out secret messages to all New Age institutions all over the world with instructions on how to brainwash people. However at the same time I saw a 3-part fly-on-the-wall TV documentary about the place which portrayed it as a very benign and easy-going institution. I recorded it onto VHS and watched the tape over and over again, enthralled by it and intuitively drawn to find out more. Among other aspects of the Community, the TV show followed a group of people involved in something called “Experience Week”. This is where the Community brings in guests, 12 at a time, to spend a week living the Findhorn life in a mixture of tuition, spiritual retreat and working alongside Findhorn residents in their jobs. I booked myself onto an Experience Week in May 2005.

The Findhorn Community was founded in 1962 at the seaside village of Findhorn in northeast Scotland by a couple who ran a hotel in the nearby town of Forres, assisted by a friend. One thing that was not revealed to me during my visit is that Peter and Eileen Caddy had an existing interest in the Occult and that Springmeier is correct when he says that Peter Caddy was a Rosicrucian. Eileen was the only surviving founder at the time I visited; in fact she died in December the following year. In Findhorn she is revered in a similar form as an Indian avatar. Eileen’s inspiration for the Findhorn Community began when she began telling people that she was hearing voices from “God”. These voices told her to tow her caravan to the remote and desolate dunes beside Findhorn and establish a home for people to develop spiritually. She set up a vegetable patch in the dunes and everybody thought she was crazy to try and grow vegetables on dry and barren sand dunes, but to their astonishment Eileen not only succeeded in growing them but the vegetables produced grew to record sizes and very high quality; they won multiple prizes in every vegetable competition going. Word spread and more and more people came to the area, members of the newly-emerging hippy movement, setting up their caravans beside Eileen’s. Soon they began to build houses and Eileen turned her old hotel on Cluny Hill into accommodation for them too. The Community continued to burgeon until it reached the size it is today: a population of over 3000 living mostly in a large “Ecovillage”. They have no formal credo, but practice all manner of spiritual and religious persuasions, emphasizing personal development rather than doctrine. They also practice ethical social and community structures, healthy living and environmentally-friendly farming and energy generation. They recycle everything they can and pollute as little as possible. All their electricity comes from a set of huge wind turbines, see photo below. Since my own Experience Week they’ve introduced their own local currency, the “Eko”. In this I wholeheartedly support them.

On arrival I registered and had an introductory meeting with the eleven other people whom I’d be sharing Experience Week with and our two “focalizers” a young Japanese woman named Mie and an older man called Ian who’d lived in the Community since the 1960’s. They began by explaining the basics of Findhorn life, like “attuning”. This is when a group of people stands in a circle before any meeting, or “sharing” (The Findhorn populace have a whole lexicon of their own terms for almost everything!), and holds hands to sense each other’s energies. We also agreed to keep any conversations we had with each other confidential, in the same sense as it’s done at my hospital. The next matter was the notion of what they call the “I-statement”. This is where we always say things only as they relate to ourselves; this makes perfect sense I thought, but later on I was to learn it wasn’t quite that simple. I was sharing a bedroom at the Cluny campus, the Caddys’ old hotel, with a short and cubbish Danish man called Gio. He immediately nicknamed me “the Big Bald Buddha” which I found completely inoffensive and quite amusing. At first I balked at the fact that there were no locks on the doors to the dormitories; I had to leave my camera and travelers’ cheques in there and I’d never done that in any hotel and not locked the door! But then I realized that this is a cipher of life in Findhorn: trusting others, an almost forgotten concept in today’s conventional society, has to be relearned at Findhorn and relearned fast, to our benefit. All buildings in Findhorn have a room known as a “Sanctuary”, a silent and comfortable room full of chairs and cushions that used for meditation, healing, singing and other intense spiritual functions. Meditation is a big part of life at the Community and the standard sessions were half an hour at 6AM, at breaktimes between work details and in the evening. Unlike Zen and other forms of meditation there is no actual instruction in the practice. We just “Sit quietly and be still” as Eileen Caddy used to say. Along with the meditation was the early morning choir known as “Taize Singing” in which the Findhorn folk would chant hymns, popular spiritual harmonies and Shamanic earthy music. I attended one of these events and it did feel magical. I spent 4 of the 7 mornings during Experience Week working. Yes, it was definitely a working holiday. We all sat in a circle and picked a card after meditating with our “Work Angels” and I picked out “Homecare”. This is what the Findhorners call housework and cleaning. This was one of the nicest things about the Community because I’m used to my hospital where domestics are subjected to humiliation and degradation. At Findhorn the “Homecare Haven” occupies a huge room on the first floor and instead of lowly uniforms the cleaners wear butterfly badges. I spent the morning hoovering the carpets and washing out the bathrooms. The Cluny campus, just like the Ecovillage, is spotless and beautiful. In the evenings I went to classes teaching various kinds of dancing, Biodanza and Four-Rhythms, and we played spiritual awakening games that involved such strange activities as pretending to be a baby being born and a certain animal, linking arms as if we were a sea snake and rippling and undulating; I had an amazing feeling, if you’ll excuse the cliché, of being one with everybody else in the snake. One afternoon we took a trip into the foothills a few miles from the Community and strolled round a beauty-spot called Randolph’s Leap. This was called a “nature-sharing” session. We were encouraged to be silent and keep to ourselves in this remote river valley. It was sublime, but I didn’t see any of the Elves, Pixies and even freshwater Mermaids that are wont to live there. I speak without sarcasm because I know many very serious people who claim to have encountered these very creatures. We also had a go at tree-hugging, another stereotypical hippie pursuit. I felt great fondness for the ancient oak and fir trees in the forest, but didn’t experience any particularly powerful resonance as I embraced and kissed their moss-covered, knarled bark. The Findhorn people are very much the kind of folk I like and identify with: gentle, deep-thinking people who talk to you even if they don’t know you, watch Teletubbies even if they’re 35 and who weep at the sight of a particularly lovely sunset. But there is also something very dysfunctional about them and I learned a lot about the New Age and how it fits in with the overall big Conspiracy during my week there.

As I said, Fritz Springmeier alludes to the Findhorn Community briefly in his book. I also met a man in an Inverness pub during my stay there who warned me not to let them “convert” me to anything. I think both he and Springmeier are going bit too far. Generally I’d say that Findhorn and its people are fairly harmless. Also there’s no evidence that I can find to directly link the Community to the New Age conspiracy in general, which I’ll describe in a moment; but there were elements of their personalities and culture which aid the New World Order agenda. One thing that struck me was that although they are very spiritual and that the central purpose of Findhorn is spiritual growth, that despite their use of wind turbines and organic food they’re very impractical people. I’m just like them in terms of my interest in the spiritual side of life, but they differ from me in that they will not consider the Conspiratorial areas that run alongside my spiritual research. I went into their bookshop in the Park and was amazed and very dismayed to find that there were no titles by David Icke, not even his “fluffy bunny” earlier books. They’re not the kind of people I felt I could discuss the 9/11 Conspiracy with, even though they’re very anti-war. I couldn’t raise the subject of GM crops and Monsanto even though they’re committed to organic food and farming. Every watt of electrical power they use comes from their wind turbines, but would they be interested in my research on the Free Energy Conspiracy? No. I was sitting at a table where two of my co-Experience Week-ers, an American couple, were discussing the recent US Presidential Election in which George W Bush had defeated John Kerry and they said: “It’s a great shame Kerry didn’t win. That election was so important!” I was dumbfounded at their naivete, especially since in other ways they were such a wise and insightful couple. I wanted to tell them that it didn’t matter a fiddler’s toss who won or lost that election because both candidates were in the Skull and Bones Society and members of the Bilderberg Group, but something held me back. I remember during our otherwise lovely afternoon at the Cullerne Gardens we were doing the silent attuning before work and were interrupted by the roar of a plane taking off from neighbouring RAF Kinloss airbase. After we finished the attuning Ian’s face took on a rhapsodic smile and he said: “Wasn’t it wonderful to listen to the sounds of nature! The birds, the wind in the trees… and, yes, the aircraft too; that’s a sound of nature as well.” I felt like laughing bitterly. The sound of a Nimrod revving up its jets for a reconnaissance tour over Afghanistan to hunt down a dead man with a beard is not my idea of a natural sound! This is the problem with Findhorn: they are spiritual, but spiritual in a very ungrounded and isolated way. I’ve seen a lot of this in the New Age. In a way it’s a reaction to Conformist society which is too grounded and spiritually atrophied; like so much else the solution to a problem tabled is often an attempt to become its opposite, a “cancelling out” exercise, rather than attempt to find a balance and negate the excess while preserving the positive elements of the situation. I’ve written before about how I think this is why Feminism is portrayed as the answer to Male Chauvinism, and black extremism is the answer to white extremism etc etc etc. This is a dangerous fallacy. The danger can be seen in the obsessive escapism of Findhorn. To use the example from the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism: they’ve found their Yin, but have cut off their Yang completely while with the rest of us it’s the opposite. We need our Yang as much as our Yin, without it we lose the ability to think rationally and take practical action to apply our spiritual lessons to the world we see and live in. One of my favourite comedy series on TV is Red Dwarf. (http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/news/index.cfm) This show is not only very funny, it explores many philosophical concepts. There’s one episode called Demons and Angels in which the show’s protagonists come across two copies of their own spacecraft; one has only Yang elements of the original and the other has only Yin elements. The Yin ship which they call “Highs” is a kind of spacefaring monastery in which the crew spend all day reading, acting out plays and reading poetry, however they are incapable of doing anything else. The Yang ship, the “Lows” are very practical indeed! They're brutal sadistic pirates who torture and try to murder the characters from the original ship. The “Lows” are clearly similar to the Conformist Illuminati-occupied world, although even more extreme; and the “Highs” are like Findhorn, or what Findhorn could be considered as in its most extreme form.

As part of the Experience Week activities we had a meeting… sorry, sharing with a lady called Mari Hollander who was the current director of the Community’s management body at the time, the Findhorn Foundation. I was surprised and disappointed to learn that despite its very alternative everyday activities the Findhorn Foundation is a fairly conventionally-run business. It is a charitable trust governed by a board of trustees including an aristocrat, Lady Diana Whitmore, and somebody with an OBE, decorated by the Queen! The 3000 plus residents are actually no more than employees, every bit as much as I am at the hospital. I had hoped and even assumed that Findhorn was some kind of workers’ cooperative (See: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/09/workers-cooperatives.html), but it is not. I asked Mari about this and she replied that the central goal of Findhorn was to nurture that “vital spark” in every person and that more down-to-Earth missions were not their department. This is frankly a complete admission of all the suspicions I’ve laid out here.

It was a long time ago, back in the 1950’s and early 60’s, that governments turned their beady eyes onto the emerging New Age movements. They commissioned the Tavistock Institute, Rand and Brookings Reporters and other psychological think-tanks to give them an assessment on how such a social phenomenon could be suppressed and the people brought back into mainstream churches, which they controlled of course. The verdict was: They couldn’t be. The New Age was unstoppable and would eventually equal, if not surpass, conventional religious beliefs. The only solution for the governments was to get inside it and transform it into something amenable to their control systems. This was the origin of organizations like the Lucis Trust, as Terry Boardman discusses here: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2009/11/alternative-view-3-part-4.html . It involves such slippery individuals as George Thurman, Alice Bailey and Adreija Puharich. Puharich is particularly interesting because he brought to the living rooms of billions across the world, one of the most famous names in the New Age: Uri Geller. I’m afraid I’ve yet to see Geller perform a feat that any half-decent stage conjurer could do by slight-of-hand and illusion; prove me wrong on that one if you can! Yet Geller became synonymous with belief in the Paranormal for millions across the world. Puharich has an interesting background: He was an US Army officer at Fort Dettrick, headquarters of America’s biowarfare programme and later moved on to… Intelligence operations, as you might have already guessed! There are many similarities between Findhorn and another New Age bastion: The Brahma Kumaris Global Retreat Centres; see: http://www.bkwsu.org/ . This organization began in India about 80 years ago, but has its international headquarters at a converted stately home in Nunham Courtney, Oxfordshire; just a very short distance from where I live. I went through a phase in the 1990’s when I was very keen on their work and teachings and used to attend every event I could at the centre. Their Harcourt House headquarters was like Cluny, immaculately clean and exquisitely decorated and ordered. The staff all wore pure white suits and glided around the place like Tolkienian Elves, whispering sweetly to each other and the guests. This didn’t stop them discussing their mortgages and stocks and shares, as I overheard two of them doing in the canteen one day! I was very disillusioned that they sounded so conventional when “off-camera”. The lectures, group work and meetings were just like the ones at Findhorn, all love and light, films of dolphins, ding-a-ling music, to the point of it being really rather treacly. I think that even before I became Conspiratorially-aware I could sense that something was wrong. For instance, the courses there were very cheap and many were totally gratis. The house and massive garden must have cost a fortune to maintain, so the same question I asked of the Jehovah's Witnesses I asked of Brahma Kumaris: Where's their money coming from? See: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2011/02/jehovahs-witnesses-and-mod.html . This intuitive splinter-in-the-mind worked its way in deeper when the people at the centre proudly boasted of their affiliations to the United Nations and the Lucis Trust. It’s no shock to see that the Findhorn website also publicizes its UN links. It was almost predictable that when I read Eileen Caddy’s obituary by the musician Mike Scott in December 2006’s Caduceus it gave the Findhorn founder her full title: Eileen Caddy MBE. Yes, she has been knighted by Her Reptileness in London (Although Eileen herself didn’t get her medal face-to-face; the Queen's Lord Lieutenant in Scotland delivered it to her). This is not to say that Eileen Caddy is a knowing manipulator or is involved directly with the Illuminati; in fact if you read her quotes there is some remarkable sweetness and wisdom there. She may very well be the gentle and helpful lady she appears to be. It’s just that her organization may well be assisting a government plan to actually misdirect and subvert the natural spirituality in all of us.

My Experience Week ended on a stressful and disturbing note. I was describing my overall impressions of my stay at Findhorn to the group in our last sharing and I used an idiomatic catchphrase like “…you know” or “It’s good for you”; suddenly Mie interrupted: “Ben, could you say ‘I’ please?” I was annoyed at being broken in my stride and said: “It’s just an expression”. “Nevertheless I would like to hear you say ‘I’.” said Mie. I complied and wished to this day I hadn’t. At least I gave them a piece of my mind in the feedback form; I said that: “Sometimes I felt that there was too much direction over language. I know we agreed to make I-statements, but I didn’t realize you meant it so literally.” There definitely is a tight control over language there; in fact I look back and can see the signs of thier own form of Political Correctness and George Orwell’s Newspeak. Control of language is essential to despotic regimes because by our speech runs our thought. Control a man’s tongue and you have his mind! The last person to speak in that session was a Portuguese lady called Carla (Not her real name). She was probably the person I’d become closest to of all the twelve I’d shared the long Findhorn Experience Week with. We had had some wonderful conversations and there was a very manifest amount of mutual attraction between us. Carla immediately started weeping profusely and told us a terrible story: Although she was from Portugal she was living in Brussels, Belgium. Her house was built on an energy vortex where a number of Leylines converge. This is a subject I don’t write very much about, but it is real and I do take it very seriously. Carla had chosen the house deliberately because of this and was carrying out Magickal rituals in her front room to pour positive healing energy into the Earth’s aetheric body. Recently she’d been brutally harassed by a very intimidating group of people. Her English became broken because she was so distraught, but there was no doubt that the people harassing her were Black Occultists trying to stop her Earth healing work. At one point she used the French word Macon, “Mason”! She said that she came home once to find “evil masks” left lying around her home. She started relating more information, but breaking down while speaking; her meaning was lost through her tears. We all tried to comfort her, but the others all had that New Age naivite, as I’d said and didn't really understand what was wrong. Ian and Mie just sat and watched, completely impassive. Later on, before we left, I tried to discuss it with her again, but she wasn’t willing; as if she regretted her outburst. Back home I emailed her. I wanted to keep in touch with her for personal reasons too, but I also asked her (very cryptically; you never know who’s reading your emails!) that she could trust me to help her with her problem at her house if she wanted and if she wanted to talk about it she should. She never replied and I’ve never heard from her since.

Latest HPANWO Voice articles: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2011/03/uk-border-agency-not-just-borders.html
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