Unwelcome Ghosts

Unwelcome Ghosts

I see ghosts. Not often, but sometimes when I enter an older house for the first time, I'll sense the presence of someone

other than the people around me. Most of these "ghosts" - I prefer "souls" - are harmless and seem more curious than threatening. I find that if I gently ask them to look behind them they will suddenly see the light that's been there all along but they were too intent on their old lives to see it. Once they focus on the light, it grows in size and intensity and draws them into it. I feel their presence leave and what remains is a sort of shadow of a shadow for want of a better way to describe it. There is also a feeling of peace that comes over the space as though some movement just out of sight suddenly stopped. 

One such incident involving a ghost occurred one night during a violent storm. I was half-asleep in my reading chair, the drone the of rain against the glass-paned doors lulling me to sleep. Suddenly, a huge gust of wind hit the house and the floor lifted under me! I was fully awake instantly, all systems on alert! Another gust lifted the floor again and this time I saw a man with spade-shaped greyish beard glaring at me from the stairwell. He was unusually tall, intent to the point of seeming angry, and in his left hand he held a rusty iron bar. He was wearing a dirty blue shirt and looked to me as though he had just recently lost weight because the shirt seemed too big for him. In the next second I heard him say, "Moira, (or possibly Mara)  get out!"  The man's eyes were fixed on a spot to my left and behind where I was sitting. As I turned to follow his gaze, I saw a young woman in a pale yellow dress with tiny flowers on it, sort of gauzy looking, reminiscent of dresses from the 1930s. She had short reddish hair and a large mark of some kind on her right cheek. I had the feeling the mark was the result of a blow she had suffered at the hands of another man. Suddenly, a feeling of utter despair came over me and, as I watched in amazement, the woman turned and walked through the wall.  As she did so, the man looked even angrier than before and turned toward me. The intensity of his glare was unsettling to say the least. This had gone far enough as far as I was concerned. Despite his threatening look, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I was about to mentally utter a banishment when I had a sudden memory.  Sometimes one can dispel heavy energy through laughter!  It had worked once before some years ago when I was faced with a frightening apparition who challenged me... 

An Angry...Something

I recalled the incident as vividly as I could and I saw myself in the bedroom of my old house. It was late summer and I had awakened suddenly to find the face of woman hovering in a corner where the wall met the ceiling. She was decidedly unfriendly and, worse, had me pinned to my bed despite my efforts to strike out! Perhaps this was what is called "sleep paralysis" but the presence in my room was so malevolent that I didn't care what was causing the paralysis, I just wanted her gone!  I saw her eyes focus on me and I heard her say something. It was some sort of riddle. She said, "First, there was the shepherd. Then, there were the sheep. Then, was there was the black sheep. Which are you?" 

Say what? Despite my fear, I remember thinking: I hate riddles!  I try to communicate clearly what I think because life is too short for mind-games in my book and I don't appreciate others playing them on me. Nevertheless, the presence continued to stare at me from the corner of the ceiling. She was beginning to piss me off! To hell with this! Nobody interrupts my sleep to play mind games! Mustering as much courage as I could, I considered her  question and mentally answered her. "Am I a white sheep or a black sheep?  I'd say that depends on who in my family you ask!"  So there. Take that, ghost!

I was already laughing at my cheekiness and, instantly, I felt an intense fury coming from her. She had not expected an act of defiance, I guess. My answer totally surprised me, too. I had never before been able to 'fight back' when I was frightened and I've no idea where my answer came from. It just came out and a second later the image was gone and I was back to normal - well, relatively speaking...

As I remembered that incident and I reached the 'punch line' of the story, there was a very loud "cracking" noise from the area where the man had been standing. The noise startled me into opening my eyes. Where the angry male ghost had been in the stairwell, there was now a distinct blue light that gradually faded to nothing. I'm afraid I was so full of energy at that point, however, that I didn't sleep the rest of the night but as the morning light trickled through the window in my bedroom, I was finally seized by a deep fatigue. The next thing I knew the clock showed 11:22 AM. The sun was shining and the night was long gone. 

Twice now I have been able to dispel a threatening energy with humour so I guess this is a lesson I am meant to pass on. If you're ever confronted by an angry ghost, try to remember something funny and laugh out loud!

© Delia O'Riordan 2012 - 2014

Do We Survive Death To Live Again?

Do We Survive Death To Live Again?

Although I referred to Destiny of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton in previous posts, I hadn't written a specific review of it so I decided to rectify that omission today.  I have had several 'out of body' experiences which may explain my interest in the 'life between lives'.  I should make it clear that Dr. Newton did not start out with any assumptions about what happens after physical death. He seems to have been a fairly conventional professional hypnotist and qualified counseling psychologist working with clients with common problems such as anxiety disorder, panic attacks, difficulty with anger, compulsive behaviours - a standard smorgasbord of complaints that most counseling psychologists help people with everyday. Dr. Newton also offered hypnosis as a method of breaking unwanted habits, regaining memories after trauma, etc. In the midst of his busy practice a patient who was being regressed to birth to release the trauma of that experience suddenly 'slipped into another life' without warning. Since Dr. Newton didn't believe in life after death, much less in multiple incarnations, he was alarmed at this development and brought the patient back into the present lifetime and then out of the trance state.  However, this disturbing experience was not to be a one-off in his career.  When regressed to the birth process, other patients also slipped into another lifetime or into the even more bizarre memory of a spiritual existence between lifetimes. Thus began Dr. Newton's 30 year long odyssey in the realms of life after life.

Once Is Not Enough...

In Destiny of Souls, Newton examines 70 cases that are representative of the variety of 'between lives' experiences of most of his roughly 1000 cases. As an agnostic, I was not prepared for what these 70 clients revealed. I could accept an afterlife in which consciousness gradually faded into oblivion but what these clients revealed was far more sophisticated and far more demanding of us than I could have imagined.

As a lifelong student of whatever interests me I could accept that this life is a sort of school but in preparation for what? The answer revealed by Newton's clients seems to be a succession of lifetimes - many thousands in some cases - designed as challenges to gradually refine our consciousness to the point where we can participate in the ongoing work of... creating universes and populating them with younger consciousnesses who will eventually be re-absorbed into the massive consciousness which is all there is and the source of all that is!  Preposterous? Whether you 'buy that' or not, the revelations coming from Dr. Newton's clients are remarkably consistent across cultures, generations, and genders in such numbers that we cannot write them off as co-incidence or mass fantasy. His clients were unknown to each other and him,  came from all over the world, and most of them were atheist or agnostic or just plain uncommitted. The few who had religious convictions worked to reconcile what was revealed in their sessions with what they "believed". For some that proved impossible but their memories of the life between life experience re-assured them that there is a spiritual reality that underlies material life. Case after case revealed a bit more of the process that we apparently are all undergoing but the essential steps of the process apply across the board. That consistency of testimony found in people from wildly different cultures, different religions, no religion, different generations, and highly varied educational backgrounds, people who were appalled by what they reported as well people who were intrigued, suggests that there is a genuine phenomenon shared by them and possibly by all of us: the continuation of Consciousness after physical death and a common core of experiences that points to possible re-births throughout many lifetimes. My confidence in the aboluteness of death was seriously eroded by the accounts of these 70 people who are just a sample of the thousands who have reported similar information.

I found Destiny of Souls worthwhile reading. I can't explain away these cases. Dr. Newton's methods are fully transparent with no 'leading statements or leading questions' so I can't fault him there. He did not ask for this bizarre twist in his career but he could no longer dismiss it and finally wrote up the cases from transcriptions of  thousands of hours of audio/video recordings.

Would I recommend it? Yes, especially to "sceptics". It is food for thought no matter your views on life after death.

© Delia O' Riordan 2012 - 2014

www.psychic-delia.com

When "Good" Men Do Very Bad Things

When "Good" Men Do Very Bad Things

Imagine for a moment that I am a Conservative Republican Ideologue. My creed is a simple one: de-fund, de-institutionalise, de-unionise, de-regulate, and then,  with utter insouciance, deny the responsibility for the consequences. It's November 1980. Heartland America is going mad for a political candidate who "talks their language", the language of small government, lower taxes, big business, and,  of course, farm subsidies  - the one form of government funding that the Heartland approves. Add in the charisma of the gun-toting Hollywood cowboy with a passion for Zane Grey novels that can be read in one sitting and you have the perfect candidate: Ronald Wilson Reagan. 

Reagan swept into office on a wave of hysteria that promised to roll-back the so-called "welfare state" and usher in the New American Era of self-reliance, lower taxes and smaller government. In addition to his landslide victory at the polls, Reagan entered the White House with a gift from the outgoing Democratic President:  a balanced budget. But wait, that wasn't all. Reagan also inherited a Budget SURPLUS!  From a "tax and spend Democrat", no less! Jimmy Carter had done what no Republican President in the 20th century could do. Carter disproved our favourite accusation against Democrats, that they over-spend to fund big government. Almost no one noticed the Surplus that Reagan inherited because a publicity stunt the day after the election stole the world's attention. The Iranians suddenly released the American hostages held in Tehran since the fall of the Shah in 1979. What a co-incidence! What a stroke of luck! Except that it wasn't. The deal had been negotiated by the Carter administration for the release earlier in 1980 but Reagan's strategists intervened and negotiated the continued imprisonment of the hostages until the day after the election instead of the planned release in October 1980.  Read that again. Reagan negotiated to KEEP the American hostages imprisoned in Iran until the day after his election!  It is an act of Treason to undermine a sitting President's international agreements for any reason but for a Public Relations stunt? Was Reagan charged with Treason? Of course, not. He claimed the credit for the release and there began the Myth of the "great communicator" who could't read words of more than three syllables without a teleprompter. 

Conservatism Triumphs

Fast forward eight years to George Herbert Walker Bush's election. Reagan's presidency ended very differently from President Carter's. The Reagan legacy was the largest DEFICIT in American history. In eight tumultuous years  Republican President Ronald Reagan had drastically cut domestic spending by the federal government yet he had raised taxes eleven times!  A Democrat who did that would be pilloried! When his popularity showed signs of waning, Reagan did what all good Conservatives do: he created the perception of threats to American interests in foreign lands, as in the 1983 "rescue" of medical students from the "strategic threat" posed by the island of Grenada, population uh...about 91, 000 proving that no threat was too small to escape America's notice! 7,600 American troops were involved in the invasion of the island and 5,000 were awarded medals afterward. Reagan basked in the increase of his "approval ratings" and racked up another triumph for his up-coming re-election campaign in 1984.

Safety Comes...At A Price

To make sure Congress and the world got the message that America's military might meant business Reagan, tripled the national debt in eight short years through DEFICIT spending by massively increasing military and black ops spending whilst convincing everyone he was serious about reducing the size of government. How? He de-funded essential government services resulting in mass lay-offs and the introduction of "out-sourcing" of government functions. Brilliant!  Private companies whose workers were paid by the hour and worked without benefits sought contracts from the Federal Government to supply the missing services. Of course, because of the necessity for private companies to make a profit the out-sourcing cost more than the original government services did but no one noticed because under Reagan, the government - at least those departments dedicated to human services - were shrinking in size. Of course, the military budget was expanding exponentially but national security was more important than national health. Everyone understood that.

Voodoo Economics On Wall Street

Reagan moved early in this presidency to de-regulate the banking system. Removing such un-necessary and excessive government interference in free markets, Reagan cut things like Federal Deposit Insurance for small banks which resulted in thousands of bank failures in the mid-eighties and the impoverishment of a generation of elderly Americans and middle class savers.

Despite his public claims to admire and even identify with President Franklin Roosevelt (1932-1945) whose administration pulled America through a Depression (occasioned in part by another Republican President's refusal to regulate Wall Street), Reagan led the dismantling of Roosevelt's "New Deal" and replaced it with a system of what George Herbert Bush (the Twig's father) termed "voodoo economics".  The Enron debacle, the Halliburton scandal, the collapse of Merill-Lynch, Goldman-Sachs, Lehman Brothers, etc., directly resulted from the extreme de-regulation of banking and investment firms. Part of "voodoo economics" was the practice of paying bonuses to Executives based not on their actual performance but on projections of potential earnings for the company in ten years' time! In other words imaginary expansion ten years later resulted in immediate payment of multi-million dollar bonuses for the senior Execs. Bush 1 may have called in voodoo but the Executives and Partners in Wall Street firms laughed all the way to the bank. Until the bottom fell out. In 2008 under Reagan's spiritual protege, the Twig: Dubya himself.

LEGACY OF AN "AMERICAN HERO"

When President Reagan rode off into the California sunset in 1989, America was in debt up its ears, fighting a losing war in Afghanistan that is still going on today, had the largest homeless population in the world, permitted the arming of both mentally ill people and criminals by weakening gun control laws, had the world's highest rates of murder and suicide in its domestic population, and left record numbers of unemployed people following the de-regulation of industries that moved their operations to other countries in search of cheap labour. All in all, not a bad showing for a Conservative Republican.

How did Reagan manage to do so much damage to the country that he supposedly loved and was prepared to die for - well,  at least, on celluloid...  Remember, I am a Conservative Republican Ideologue. I don't care what disasters Reagan was responsible for whilst he was claiming the moral high ground for my America. Who could forget proud moments like the one in Berlin that made my eyes run with tears of joy: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Those are the kinds of shlocky moments Americans craved and Reagan gave them to us.

Five years later that wall did come down. Ronald Reagan could and did take credit for it. But he also brought down a lot of other walls: the walls of small American Savings and Loan Banks that had been the trusted stronghold of the American middle-class since the Depression Era;  the walls of factories all over America leaving the workers job-less and penniless; the walls of mental hospitals which resulted in the occupants living on the streets, in stockyards, under bridges, and in abandoned tunnels in America's cities. How did he do all this and leave office as popular as ever? He did it indirectly through de-regulation and de-funding. The loss of half-century old safe-guards did the rest. Reagan did all this with the aplomb of the Snake Oil Salesman who just sells the product - he's not responsible for its effects on real people. 

Reference:

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/

American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System by E. Fuller Torrey

E. Fuller Torrey is Executive Director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, MD, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Available from Amazon for Kindle $2.61.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

www.psychic-delia.com

Secret Suicide or Medically Assisted?

Secret Suicide or Medically Assisted?

A diagnosis of any gradually debilitating disease is like being sentenced to Death Row without knowing when or how your end will come. It could be weeks,months or years away but in the meanwhile you will lose control of your body and possibly of your mind so that death becomes more desirable than life. No one knows how she/he will react to a diagnosis like Parkinson's or MS or ALS. It is the idea of the unavoidable gradual loss of control that frightens most of us who've been brought up on a steady diet of self-reliance and independence as the essentials of self-respect. The prospect of being a burden on those closest to us is completely unthinkable for many of us. Especially when we have watched someone we love die in that way. 

Robin Williams found himself in exactly that position when he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease several years after the death of his best friend, Christopher Reeve from organ failure after years of confinement to a wheel chair and complete dependence on others. I'm sure the irony of Reeve's identity in the media as Superman, a being of superhuman strength and abilities, was not lost on Williams any more than on Reeve himself.

Robin Williams witnessed the devastation of his best friend's life and must have felt Reeve's helplessness with the full sensitivity of an alter-ego. Reeve survived for a few years and there were moments of great joy when research, partly funded by Reeve's foundation, made progress in the restoration of some small measure of neurone function in research volunteers. There were happy times with his family and friends but Reeve steadily lost ground until his organs failed and that gradual demise was evident as the years went by. Death is inevitable for all of us but a long slow death is what most of us fear above all else. To lose the ability to move in a single moment must be absolutely horrifying. But is it any less horrifying to know ahead of time that one is gradually going to lose that ability? For those of us who live private lives, such a diagnosis would be devastating but imagine what it would be like for someone whose livelihood is based largely on physical expression and whose life is lived in the public eye? 

When Is Life The Same As Death?

Robin Williams' comedic art depended to a great extent on impulsive physical movement. Robin was a visceral performer with characteristic body language that was his signature style. I, for one, cannot imagine him being still during a comedic performance. His unique comedic style inhabited his whole being, not just his mind. The manic energy of his deliveries seemed to rise upward from his feet to the top of his head and outward, erupting into the space around him as though his skin could not contain the energy that drove him. I'm sure that many of us wondered about those manic outbursts of comedic genius. When the manic energy was spent, what then? 

As one who has struggled with hypo-manic-depression in my own life, part of me is always "monitoring" manic energy in myself and others. Robin Williams, like many entertainers, was transformed by manic energy when he walked onstage. A huge surge of adrenaline made his performances possible. Add to that the dis-inhibitory effects of certain drugs, and the manic energy takes on a life of its own. Williams' comedic art depended on that manic energy and his ability to direct it effectively. The diagnosis of Parkinson's disease meant the loss of a big chunk of Robin Williams' identity.  That combined loss of capacity and the chemical changes wrought in the body's chemistry by Parkinson's would be sufficient to trigger the depression that is always lurking under the manic high. And apparently that is what happened to the world's favourite "class clown". Depression of such an appalling depth that death seems preferable to life is difficult for most of us to understand. But not for those who have lived in a state of depression for years at a time using what precious energy we can muster just to get through each day. Depression communicates itself in many ways but expecially through the eyes when we try to act as though all is well when it isn't. Depression saps life from our eyes and eventually, under the right circumstances leading to despair, saps the life out of the body, too. What we need to ask ourselves is whether suicides might have chosen to continue to live if the option of Medically Assisted Suicide existed in our society. How many would still be alive if they knew that when they could no longer function in the ways that were most important to them,  they could rely on a compassionate end to their suffering? When you can control nothing else, controlling how and when you will end your suffering becomes crucial to your decision to continue living for a while longer.

I believe it is time to legalize Medically Assisted Suicide for both the chronically ill (MS, ALS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, etc.) and the terminally ill under the circumstances and timing of their choice. It should be a human right to end one's suffering when it is no longer tolerable. That is not cowardice or "sin"; it is the act of a fully responsible human exercising the right to control her/his exit from an intolerable existence. That is what we do in a compassionate society.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

Suicides Are Cowards...and Other Lies

Suicides Are Cowards...and Other Lies 

In the wake of the suicide of Robin Williams reams are being written and pundits are pundit-ing in an orgy of opinion that is largely derived from religious taboos that have become deeply embedded in Western culture. How many times must we flush before the cliches like "Suicides are cowards" and "Suicides are selfish people" go away? It's time to put aside "received wisdom" if for no other reason than that there is no such thing. Wisdom is very much an individual achievement. It results from thinking deeply about our own perceptions and experiences - our own, not the regurgitated bromides of the unthinking. Death happens to us all and yet no two deaths are the same, ever. Because each of us has a unique set of experiences that make up a life. The same event can happen to millions of people but their experience of that event is as individual as her DNA. Thus, many people suffer from Depression but no two cases are ever identical and no two people will have exactly the same experience of this painful state because it results from a combination of our unique neurochemistry and our particular sensibility. 

Suicides Are Tragic, Not Cowardly

When we see the manic brilliance of a Robin Williams riffing onstage totally off script we are delighted by the spontaneous outpouring of comedic genius.  We overflow with a pleasure-love cocktail of endorphins and oxytocin that releases tension in our muscles whilst providing us with an opportunity to express a public affection that is usually reserved for intimate moments. But, as thousands of people have said over the past few days, we also recognise the deflation that comes after the manic performance. The performer, too, has been bathed in hormones but they are of a different sort: an adrenaline high brought on by the compulsion to express a hidden rage against the pillars of conventionality between which we are all chained in childhood before we have the means to express our knowledge that people are hiding their real feelings from us. Their real selves hide behind a set of expected behaviours that prevent any deep experience in the moment in favour of "putting the best possible face on it". That is conventional wisdom in action and we have all been programmed to accept and participate in it. All of us except those who have kept faith with the child inside who continued to see the disconnect between uncomfortable reality and the"scripted" responses we see in those around us. 

We all have a choice to make in this regard: be loyal to our real and honest feelings about experience or betray ourselves through dis-loyalty to the Self and become self-loathing game players who "go along to get along".

Unfortunately, 'going along" means abandoning our originality and our creativity in order to play a part in a drama not of our making. Self-loathing expresses itself in many ways from self-neglect and self-destructive behaviours addictions to blaming others for the pain we create for ourselves. This latter "coping mechanism" leads to the endless violence and blood-shed that makes up what we are taught to see as "the real world". We recognise violence and destruction are a form of insanity but what we fail to see is the insanity of "normality" that causes the introversion of a rage so deep we dare not acknowledge its presence. But those who are still in conflict with the controls imposed on them childhood - usually arbitrarily and unthinkingly by parents who are also hiding their pain as they were taught to do - act out the unacknowledged rage around them by turning it against the world. 

Comedy and Violence

The irony is that both the comedic genius and the violent miscreant have a great deal in common.  Hugely talented people like Robin Williams act out the insanity of our cultural conditioning by making us see the absurdities we are taught are "normal" or "real". For a brief moment, the child inside Robin pops out and like a precocious five-year old expresses deep truths that we recognise at the same time as we join him in rejecting and skewering them within the safety of a darkened theatre. That is why we flock to see people like Robin and Whoopie, Billy Crystal and Dan Ackroyd,  and performances like those of the Ballet Trocodero de Monte Carlo. They take our social shibboleths and turn them upside-down and shake them to reveal the absurdity inside and do it in a way that lets us know we are not alone in perceiving the insanity that passes for normality. But that gift comes at a price and for some performers, the cost is their own emotional balance. When someone we associate with high humour retreats from us into his or her private world of unresolved psychic pain, we nod our heads in recognition of the darkness we always perceived beneath the mask of manic wit. Suicides do not want to die; they want to end the chronic pain of struggling to live in a mad world. Suicides are not cowards; they are mortally wounded combatants in a war they cannot stop and cannot seem to escape in any other way. Thank them for their gifts to us whilst they were here and think of them with compassion now that they are gone.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

http://www.psychic-delia.com

Psychic Parrot Reads Minds

Psychic Parrot Reads Minds

It wasn't all that long ago that the idea of animal consciousness was dismissed as impossible. Traditional scientists claimed Consciousness as a uniquely human trait to exclusion of the rest of nature. Animals had "instinct" but not "cognition". "Instinct" however was not actually defined,  it was a label for species-specific behaviours like spider web-weaving or avian nest-building. But labels do not explain anything and so "Instinct" remained a mystery. We could observe the products of its existence in animal behaviour but not precisely what Instinct is. Unfortunately for humans, we can likewise only observe the effects of Consciousness and we still do not know what it actually is or where, precisely, it resides. Now to add to our ignorance we have the phenomenon of animal psychic abilities such as telepathy and even remote viewing!

Enter two scientific researchers, Aimee Morgana and Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. Aimee had been working and living with a N'kisi an African Grey Parrot.  Most of us will have encountered a "talking" parrot at some time in our lives. It can be an eerie experience to hear a voice that sounds human but turns out to be coming from a bird! We may marvel at the novelty but we soon write it off as "only instinct" and "meaningless".  However, having lived with an uncannily perceptive dog for 16 and 1/2 years, I did not need to be persuaded that animals are both conscious and intelligent. So, ok, I get that they are somewhat aware and demonstrably intelligent - some more than others, as is true of humans.  But telepathic communication?  Even between humans this phenomenon is not understood. We can only see the outcome of it.  Again, I'd have no trouble accepting that domestic animals can learn to "read" our moods, but our minds? That took a bit of convincing.

Psychic Pets

Aimee Morgana decided to study the potential for inter-species telepathic communication after viewing a documentary on the work of Dr. Sheldrake who has conducted experiments with dogs that seem to know when their owners were coming home, even under conditions of random return in which  the owner follows no previously established pattern of behaviour and does not choose when to return home. The return time is

 determined by random programming of a computer as part of the experimental protocol. Sheldrake's experiments, conducted with a number of owners and dogs, yielded convincing evidence in favour of doggy telepathy under random conditions and with no environmental "cues" such as train whistles or car engines to help them. So ok,  dogs have this weird ability to anticipate the very moment when the owner decides to return home. They did it time and again on un-manned cameras left running in their homes so obviously they have the ability. But  how do they know? Are out pets somehow "connected" through the field of consciousness with their owners and when the owner thinks of something that is relevant to the pet, the pet receives some sort of internal signal to that effect? Dogs are mammals and therefore related to us in all sorts of ways one of which may be this strange ability to know what we are doing when we are separated from them. I saw that happen so I can believe it. But what sort of telepathic connection could there be between humans and birds?

N'kisi, African Grey Parrot and Psychic

Despite my skepticism about the abilities of parrots to do anything beyond simple mimicking of human speech and random sounds in the environment, I decided to follow Sheldrake's work on N' kisi.  It seems that N'kisi's owner, Aimee Morgana, had successfully used a language teaching method commonly in use in schools and as a result N' kisi soon had a working vocabulary of 400+ words. Stop and let that sink in for a moment. 400+ words. Lots of parrots can repeat sounds including words. But N'kisi's is a working vocabulary which means he comprehends the meaning of each word and it's use in context! And he's a bird. With a brain the size of a walnut!  How is this possible?

Aimee Morgana, N'kisi

A few years into her research, Morgana noticed something interesting about N' kisi's understanding of language: he was spontaneously putting words together to form statements, actual comments on what was happening around him. His statements were not random couplings of words. They made sense and followed sentence structure for speakers of English. N'kisi demonstrated both an understanding of individual words and how to use them in a meaningful context. This was unexpected development and required addition of new testing protocols to determine if these utterances were pure luck or a pattern that indicated a new level of communication with the bird was possible.

Ms. Morgana continued to work on building up N' kisi's vocabulary. He had acquired a working vocabulary of about 950 words when N'kisi revealed a new skill: he was somehow "reading" Morgana's thoughts in real time and giving voice to them and commenting on them! For instance, if she were looking at images in a magazine, N'kisi, on his perch in his cage and out of the line of sight of the magazine, would  suddenly pipe-up with "Good food" or "Hungry?"  just as Aimee was looking at an image of food in the magazine! Now, this could be written off as co-incidence if it happened only once or even a few times but N'kisi demonstrated a consistent ability to "read" Morgana's mind even when she was in closed room 55 feet away so he could neither see nor hear her.  N'kisi went on doing what humans call 'remote viewing" AND then he started to do the same with Morgana's husband as well!  By January 2002, Morgana had recorded 630 such incidents. 

In N'kisi''s own words:
The only way to get a feel for how strange and yet commonplace N'kisi's ability  is, one needs to see a verbatim transcript of such communications.

Example 1: Aimee:
 “I was thinking of calling Rob, and picked up the phone to do so, and N’kisi said, ‘Hi, Rob,’ as I had the phone in my hand and was moving toward the Rolodex to look up his number.”

Example 2:
“We (Aimee and husband) were watching the end credits of a Jackie Chan movie, edited to a musical soundtrack. (N'kisi was in his cage which was covered.) There was an image of Chan lying on his back on a girder way up on a tall skyscraper. It was scary due to the height, and N’kisi said, ‘Don’t fall down.’

Example 3:
”Then the movie cut to a commercial with a musical soundtrack and, as an image of a car appeared, N’kisi said, “There’s my car.” (N’kisi’s cage was at the other end of the room, and behind the TV. He could not see the screen and there were no sources of reflection. Emphasis mine).

Example 4:
On another occasion  Aimee wrote:  “I read the phrase ‘The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice’. N’kisi said ‘That’s called black’ at the same instant.”

Example 5:
“I was in a room on a different floor, but I could hear him. I was looking at a deck of cards with individual pictures, and stopped at an image of a purple car. I was thinking it was an amazing shade of purple. Upstairs N'kisi said at that instant, ‘Oh wow, look at the pretty purple."  That is a complete and grammatically correct sentence spoken spontaneously by a parrot!

See You In My Dreams

Intrigued? I was! But the best was yet to come: N' kisi next began to "read" Morgana's dreams! With his cage in her bedroom at night, Morgana slept in her bed a few feet from the cage. N'kisi would normally sleep at least part of the night whilst his owner slept. But the bird began to awaken and comment on the content of Morgana's dreams - as she was having them! His night time murmurings were recorded on camera and audio recordings in any case but the correspondence between the bird's comments and the content of Morgana's dreams were completely unprecedented and certainly unexpected. It was at this point that Dr. Sheldrake became involved in testing N'kisi in double-blind experiments with very tight controls for "hits" and "misses".  The result was that N' kisi demonstrated overwhelming evidence of the ability to connect with and comprehend the mental activity of his owner. The results went way beyond what probability theory indicated was chance. There was at least one psychic parrot in the world...

To read Dr. Sheldrake's comments on N'kisi, visit his website HERE

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

Image credits: Courtesy The Nkisi Experiments, Aimee Morgana and Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D.

Psychic Choices | New Thought

Psychic Choices | New Thought 

The New Thought Movement actually began in the middle of the 19th century in America but the concepts that it embraced had originated 5,000 years or more in Vedic India. Amongst those ideas is the "Over-soul" or unified consciousness which embraces all there is, the idea that material existence is an illusion and that the "Real" is in fact a Void from which all that is formed in a sort of Big Bang (Vedic Theory pre-dates Big Bang Theory by 5 millenia), the idea of Karma (an early formulation of "cause and effect" principle), and that the idea that the purpose of human life was to be re-absorbed into the Void from which the next cycle of material being emerges. 

New Thought, Then and Now

The originators of New Thought in the USA included  Prentice Mulford, Emma Wheeler Wilcox, Ralph Waldo Trine, and Florence Scovel Shinn amongst others.  Ralph Waldo Trine examines these ideas in his book In Tune With The Infinite. This influential book was a firm favourite with - of all people ! - Henry Ford who claims the book was the catalyst for his successful manufacturing industry and an expression of his personal philosophy! 

New Thought places a great deal of emphasis on the quality of our thoughts and the direct and indirect effect they have on us, our lives, and on those around us. A central insight of New Thought is the idea that "Thoughts are things", i.e., the act of thinking is creative in a literal sense: our thoughts can affect material reality.  This point of view, although ancient in the Vedas,  is only now being seriously studied in Consciousness Research and Quantum Physics.

Thoughts Are Things: How To Use Them

Our thoughts are a form of Energy and as with electrons and neutrons, they carry a "charge". If we accept the idea that energy creates the material universe, the importance of the ethical and constructive use of thought becomes clear. In an effort to explain this concept in practical terms, Florence Scovel Shinn wrote The Game of Life and How To Play It, a practical guide to New Thought  and how it can change our lives. I have found her book  to be one of the most succinct expressions of the principles of New Thought, easily accessible for the modern reader despite having been published over a hundred years ago. If one reads New Thought books carefully, it will be apparent that living by its principles is not a superficial exercise; it requires a complete re-thinking of our deepest assumptions about reality and our place in it. The mere repetition of "affirmations" or an enforced and phony "happy clappy" attitude is NOT what New Thought is about. Like the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and the Buddhist Mindfulness taught by the Dalai Lama, Sogyal Rinpoche, and Pema Chodron, New Thought is an attempt to move our thinking away from the illusion of the solidity and finitude of matter and focus it instead on the indestructibility of the energy  that  is the real essence of matter. At the molecular level of existence as pure energy, our thoughts can indeed influence material reality .

Resources: 

The Field by Lynne McTaggart

Return of the Rishi by Dr. Deepak Chopra

The Reach of the Mind by Sir John Eccles

In Tune With The Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine

Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The resources cited in this post are available in Delia's Happiness Shop HERE.
http://www.psychic-delia.com
© Delia O' Riordan 2014

Dragons of Synchronicity

Dragons of Synchronicity

It all started as I was idly checking to see what was showing on the TV and, within seconds of each other, two programmes featuring dragons popped onto the screen. One was the movie, Dragonheart, an all-time favourite of mine that was on a local channel. I was tempted if only to hear Sean Connery bring Draco to life.  On the other hand, a documentary based on Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden was on the Discovery channel at roughly the same time. Since I own a copy of Dragonheart, I decided to watch the documentary. I briefly thought about the co-incidence of two programmes airing at the same time both focusing on dragons but then got lost in Carl Sagan's characteristic tonselly voice giving his "take" on the dominant Western creation myth and the theory of evolution weaving back and forth between antiquity and the post-modern world of science. But what stayed with me long after the programme were images of dragons. They were always with me, curled up in the hidden recesses of my unconscious mind making an appearance now and then in the form of unacknowledged fears or momentary anxieties that I quickly dismissed and moved on. Don't get me wrong, I loved dragons as a kid but then who didn't?  A day  after I watched The Dragons of Eden, I was in a charity shop browsing through the used books shelves when an out-of-print novel I had been looking for found me instead. It was perched precariously on the edge of the shelf just above my eye level. The book was Tea With The Black Dragon by R. A. McAvoy, a delightful story by a much admired writer and story-teller.  I snapped up the book and decided to start reading it over lunch at a local restaurant that specialized in light fare on the lunchtime menu. The synchronicity of this third occurence of a Dragon in the space of a day fleetingly passed through my mind as I made my way to the restaurant.

Dragons, Dragons Everywhere

I was about to order a quiche when a list of the day's specials was wheeled in to the shop. The wheeled blackboard immediately caught my eye. It sported a very brightly coloured chalk drawing of...guess what? Oh, yes, a Dragon! Whoa, we were way past simple co-incidence by now. I stared in amazement at the fanciful beast. He was meant to draw attention to the daily special: Dragon's Breath Curry. I kid you not! Tempting as it was for a minute, Curry is not exactly my idea of a light lunch so I gave that a miss but wrote a note on the amusing synchro in back of the book I had just bought. By the time I arrived home a few hours later, the Dragon's Breath Curry was a receding memory - until later that evening when I picked up my mail. As I was lifting it out of the mailbox, a flyer fell out so I stooped to retrieve it. It was an invitation to a class in something I have always wanted to learn: Oriental Silk Thread Embroidery. And the item to be embroidered was - wait for it - Yep, a Dragon!  By now I was getting a bit spooked. Why were dragons - of all things - suddenly springing up all around me as though insisting I pay attention? This was the fifth one in the space of 24 hours! I knew better than to ignore such multiple incidents of the same archetype popping up within a short span of time so I raised my antenna to a higher than usual level of alertness and realised I would have to investigate this strange Synchronicity to discover what it meant.

Keeping A Tame Dragon

Personally, I like Dragons. I even have one in my kitchen. He's a lovely  and very colourful fellow who accompanied me home from Bali some years ago. I wasn't sure what I would do with him but I discovered that

Dragons like to have jobs (so they don't get bored, I guess). Anyway, my dragon has wings so I guess that means he doesn't mind flying. For the past six years he's been floating from the kitchen ceiling and has an excellent view of everything that goes on. Thus far, everything has gone well - no burnt toast or anything so I think he's doing a good job. I also gave him an octagonal shaped crystal to protect the house during the times when the kitchen is empty. He doesn't surrender it easily even for cleaning so I guess he takes that responsibility seriously, too.  All in all, an impressive showing for a creature who is about 6000 years old.

Hating Dragons, Loving Dragons

Not everyone likes Dragons, of course. The Dragons of European/Anglo origin are generally highly unpleasant characters!  They are a relatively recent cultural artifact as Europe was at one time a "New World" but they were preceded by various gods and goddesses like those of ancient Greece. Most of us know the story of Zeus, a blood-thirsty, vengeful megalomaniac of a god who exhibited all the worst of human character flaws. Gods of this ilk demanded constant admiration, worship and appeasement to keep his violent proclivities in check. The gods of Western imagination were dangerously fickle and more likely to visit catastrophe on humans than to provide wisdom or protection.

The Chinese, on the other hand, found an alternative to these capricious gods. In the Chinese context, however,  dragons go back to at least 4000 BCE. There is no definitive history of the idea of the dragon but cultures all over the world had different versions of creatures that are clearly all representations of the Dragon. They reasoned that it would take a creature with a huge body, large eyes that could see even in the dark, the ability to fly, scaly skin like fish so it would be impervious to water, horns on its head to break through barriers, paws like a lion for strength, could breathe fire if it had to, and had the talons of an eagle to fight with. But these imposing beasts were not hostile to humans. In fact, if humans honoured them the dragons would help and protect us in all domains of our existence. Specific Dragons dwelt in the  realms of earth, air, fire, and water. By honouring the power and influence of the Dragons in each realm, humans could be guided by Dragon Energy to a life of balance and prosperity. What's not to like about that?  The Oriental Dragon is a being of dignity, nobility and, most of all, beneficence. Oriental Dragons are human-friendly, even protective of us - which I for one find a rather comforting notion. Couldn't we all use a fire-breathing defender from time to time ?

Making Dragons Into Enemies

In Western culture  psychologists maintain that Dragons are vestigial memories of frightening human encounters with Monitor Lizards or other species of large reptiles deep in our evolutionary past. In the view of evolutionary psychology, these real-life experiences with individual beasts became generalised through myth and legend into personifications of human fears. Whereas the Chinese and other Oriental peoples be-friended their dragons, Westerners turned them into enemies to be hunted and slain. Aggression, violence and ruthlessness thus came to be regarded as essential to human survival and the idea of co-operation with natural elements was limited to the healing arts and, later, to agriculture. To this day the Western imagination conjures ever more vile and enormous scale-covered monsters requiring ever bigger and more destructive weapons for humans to kill them.  In other words, rather than overcoming our fears, they have increased with our capacity to inflict destruction on the world around us. But there is an alternative and my benign Dragons represented it: respect for and skillful use of the natural energies around us, letting go of the need to control in favour of adaptation and acceptance. There is no final control of nature in any case; it is always far more powerful than we are so why not work with it rather against it. No one gets off this planet alive and we're a long way from "colonising" space which itself may depend on changing our attitudes from conquering nature  back to exploring it for its own sake - not for more natural resources to exploit. Rather than taking our battles into space, we should learn what our own planet has to teach us first. Where better to start than with the benign protection of Earth, Air, Water and Fire Dragons?

© Delia O' Riordan 2014

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Psychic Toxins | The Effects of Thought

Psychic Toxins | The Effects of Thought

What is a psychic toxin? Any destructive or self-defeating influence over which we exercise control qualifies as a psychic toxin. Most  of these toxins take the form of "negative thoughts" about ourselves, our environment, our relationships, our world. Since thoughts are often "father to the deed", the quality of our thoughts can affect our actions and if they become consistently negative, they can drive us to extreme acts of destruction.

For  the most part, our thoughts seem to be random. We interact with the world randomly through our senses and our brains sort out the useful information from the "chaff" or "mind junk" that passes through our consciousness barely making a ripple.  Our senses absorb the raw data of our experience but our senses don't 'get' language. Our minds 'get' it, and what's more, our minds 'get' it on more levels than we are aware of. So what does that tell us about the language we use for thinking?  We know thought can affect our mood, that's obvious. Think about a politician whose ideas you oppose. What did you feel as you thought of that person? Most likely, your body chimed in with its response to your unspoken thought in an habitual way. Thought triggers a chemical reaction and the nature of the reaction depends on a store of information about the object of the thought. When we detest someone, that thought triggers a flood of chemicals that stimulate us to oppose that person - and his or her thinking. There is already a kind of neuro-chemical warfare being played out in our brains and the other person doesn't even know we're thinking about him or her! It's a one-sided war where the enemy exists in our imaginal world (mental images) as powerfully as in the external world. If there is sufficient negative emotion involved, we release a toxin into the world and the universe.

Psychic Toxins

Whether we are conscious of it or not we have just used visualisation to affect our material reality. Thought accompanied by emotion-laden images has a stronger effect than thought accompanied by emotionally-neutral images. Try this little exercise to see what I mean:  Visualise an ice cube or a fork or a window. They are just things and, as such, they are neutral as images. It is not until we give things a context that they begin to acquire power. For example, an alcoholic may immediately imagine the ice cube in a glass of whiskey and long for a drink. A compulsive eater may see the fork laden with cheesecake and feel the urge to eat. A depressed person may see a window and have the urge to find a real one to jump out of. The point here is that both thoughts and images are potentially destructive, neutral, or constructive. It all depends on Context.

Mindful Being, Being Mindful

Think about all the things that we study in school. How much time was devoted to learning how to use consciousness more effectively? If you were lucky and went to a 'progressive' school you might have studied something about how we learn, how we process information, and how we store it in memory. That's fine, but it's not the same as learning to make better use of consciousness.  For that, until very recently we had to consult philosophical rather than scientific sources.  When we release the contents of the mind - literally free ourselves from thought - we experience the state known as Being. Being is a state that is free from judgement of any kind. It is pure experience without taint of interpretation - that comes later. Learning how to enter the state of Being at will is actually the process of waking up to Consciousness.  It's a paradoxical state of being. In order to experience pure consciousness, we need to do something akin to putting the brain to sleep! More accurately, we must leave the usual state of chaotic mind noise (Beta Consciousness) and enter a more relaxed state (Alpha Consciousness) and finally a much 'deeper' state of being without thought (Delta/Theta/Gamma Consciousness).  It is from this deep state that we can gain control over the seemingly random quality of thought.

Healing Silence

In the state of just existing in consciousness we are detached from the physical world and, to a great extent, from our bodies. That is, we let the body's autonomic nervous system do what it was designed to do: keep all metabolic functions operating without our having to think about it. So, how is this different from "normal" chaotic thinking? The difference is that in this state there is NO thought. It's not just the absence of random or chaotic thought. It is the temporary cessation of all thought. It is a profound, healing, and generative form of silence. In this state we are in direct contact with the energy of consciousness that created and maintains the Universe. For us  it is the state of effortless, hyper-conscious Being.  Because all thought ceases temporarily in this state, our emotions are at rest. We are free of all judgement and hence free of stress because it is in judging conditions and other people that we create the stressful reactions that release psychic toxins into our world. Think how different the world would be without toxic mental activity.  With meditation, toxic mental activity ceases and when we experience the profound peace of this deep state we want more of it and gradually leave toxic mental activity behind. What a lovely gift to ourselves and the Universe...

For more information on the issues raised in this post  or to check out the books illustrated above, look  HERE.

© Delia O' Riordan 2014