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The road is long
and the load heavy
that winds
its way to Rome.

There on my bicycle
around my twentieth year
Cycling home,
Winds on my chest,
after an early shift.
Heart in pain,
My mind conjured from its depths
A mental image
of that statue,
of Dying Seneca
That stands in the Louvre.

Can you see it?
Others though think this statue
may be of an Old Fisherman.
Let’s feel its Seneca though,
Seneca Stoic Sage
Who counselled
wild ferocious Emperor Nero.
Seneca
was also a playwright
or were there two different men?

If they are the same man
some say he found a kind of catharis
Through writing his blood filled
almost blood thirsty
tragic plays- or
perhaps they were
also a needed compensation
For his calm stoic natural ethical wisdom.

For some it seems
such a different hand the author of the plays
than the calm noble wise proponent
of natural stoic wisdom.

Yet Look deeply
at Aristotle’s doctrine of Catharsis.
And the benefits of diving into and showing
Greek Tragic plays.
It would then make full sense for Seneca
to ramp up the floods of blood
for his savage Roman Crowd.

I saw something in the statue
of a man caught
in the sufferings of life though.
He seems to want to speak
but does not feel he can.
How many times must wise Seneca have
felt like this counselling
the wild murderous Emperor Nero?

I felt a little like this in that moment
flowing through the air on my bicycle.
Caught in the cycles of life, between anger, pain,
stern counsel and accpetance.
For I had felt a betrayal of sorts
Had been committed.
For my Father
Had handed over
one of my short stories
to an Aunty,
who happened to be a psychiatric Nurse
who then happened
to hand it to one of her Superiors
a Psychiatrist,
a modern so called Doctor of the mind.
All without my knowing or consent.

The purpose? Perhaps you can guess
worried people
Wanting expert insight, to check
Signs of mental unbalance in me.

The verdict?
An all clear,
a lucid and insightful work
that could be followed
from beginning to end,
not the rumblings
of an unsound mind.
Anger or acceptance?
Perhaps in those days
I suppressed overly.
The waves of life
Roll through us.
We manage as we can.
Like old dying Seneca,
or an Old Fisherman,
or Young Tom.

​The script is not written by us
We come into life as life dictates
but yet we choose
how we play out our part.
Ramana Maharishi “All is predestined”
See the blinding insight in that,
Freewill left untouched
as St Julian of Norwich spoke
"All shall we well"

​Dionysus

You are the Lord and guide
of ancient mysteries
And have drunk of the nectar
of this world’s deep wells.

Host of revelries in the warm or frosty air
Trees, sun and moon look on
As initiates are led to ecstatic rebirth.
I see you in the heart of the leader
And the one who yearns to find his guide.

You plunge into the lake in all seasons
Yet rest with the robin red breast in frost.

You dance the earth a thousand times
Pine cone atop staff
Sap moving,
charming the riddled air.

I would do well to whirl
with you around a favourite tree.
Apollo smiles as we cast off burdens
and free them into the either.

I see you, I do,
in the glisten of the eyes of revellers
As they walk home in the early hours
Arm in arm.
Who knows what passed between them?
What was felt, found or lost?

Yet in this sorry world
We trudge on through
so many lost moments.
Awareness like a fading light,
What can be done?
People take cover
inside frozen lamp posts of the psyche
Or spin and burn like moths in the flame.
Frozen or burned out,
We cower
with a paralyzed snake of fear,
tightly binding our mortal frame and mind.

Only you, oh Dionysus
have the way to charm
our snakes from us,
for you are the guardian
and way finder of our fears.

You have a way of nudging
& tipping us into a place,
An edge where we see
and feel both wall and sky,
A place of clarity of bondage and release,
where we fall, where we die.

Expanding, rebirthing, courageous
we can perhaps
lift this snake from us
& you then show us
how to take it to a rich meadow
where this snake
can be one with the earth and sky.
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Oh Dionysus,
help us to see the sunrise and sunset again
& help us to find our lost songs.
Revive our frozen limbs,
waters melting, toxins purging
and set warm blood surging,
life tingling, life honouring,
spiralling
through our mortal frame.

It’s around 5am and I’m alone in the house. Lying on my side in bed I feel the subtle energy vibrations come in delicate waves, first gentle like a whisper from the Soul and then building up in waves. When they’ve reached a sufficient peak, like a large wave that will run high up the shore, I start to roll out of my physical body. But as I roll to my side, I feel I meet the barrier of the wall. I know to test and persuade myself I can roll through by pushing the wall with my non-physical finger. I do so and pushing through, I roll out of my physical body and through the wall.

​I am now in sacred darkness and I express the intention “May I visit the underworld for healing and grounding” As I began to descend, I also express the intention “And may I visit Persephone”. For those that may not know in living Greek spiritual myth Persephone is the Queen of the Underworld, spending the dark part of the year down in the Underworld among the dead and the light half among mortals on Earth.  
I descend and descend, free falling down through the abyss of inner space. It is hard to describe the sensation… I feel no fear and it’s not eerie. Its like free falling in darkness. I feel the sounds of wind and the resistance and rush of the air around me. I am travelling at great speed further and further down. It feels warm like the comforting warmth of the inner earth. I move my energy body around as I fall.

After a long journey I find myself lying on a non-physical bed on my back. I feel sensations begin to move over my energy body. It swells and moves and there are buoyant waves sensations with a feeling of tender sea shells spreading over my body. The sensations are pleasant and I feel and know I am receiving healing. After a while my energy body begins to slowly rotate first one way and then the other. Providing some kind of energetic alignment and orientation.

Then I feel a female figure climb on top of me, and as she then lays by my side I see a beautiful face of a women with pale blue lunar like eyes. She starts to get up and her face is exquisitely beautiful. A young Greek looking young women with natural tanned skin, large eyes, full lips and high cheek bones. Perhaps she sensed I was focussing too much on her beauty and she begins to change her form to an older lady around her mid-forties with the lines of a richly lived life on her face.

From the corner of the room I am in, I hear a very high-pitched women’s voice to my left proclaim “I” which startles me and I almost come back to my physical body, before slipping into another scene where I am in a very large banquet Hall and an elegant, slim, tall middle women aged is with me wearing a red dress.

She is very tall and at one point during the experience as I focus on this, she seems to get even taller to around 7 feet, towering above me. She wore a red dress with what looked like red flowers and pomegranate berries on. We talked about many things, with fiery compassion she seems concerned to give me guidance concerning my work, how it is better to focus on and honour one thing. And we talked at length. To one of my questions about how to cultivate abundance her only response was to fall back into a banquet scene where there were suddenly dozens of people joyfully sitting eating around the table being served food. The huge wooden table was plentifully laid with things like roasted vegetables and plates of feta cheese.

​As she sat there with them with her arm around one, she smiled with such soulfulness and she was truly with them in supportive love. The message seemed to be to perhaps ask me to feel and cultivate abundance by encouraging a feeling of love, sociability, togetherness and community among people.          

I have long savoured the in-between state… the state between sleep and waking where the body has fallen asleep but the light of the mind is still awake. This is the eternal abode of the mystic and is well known across the world’s traditions. I also find it to be deeply restoring for the energies of the mind, body, spirit. This state is sometimes pointed to with evocative words like ‘turiya’ in the Yogic Tradition in India, which means the mysterious ‘fourth state’, beyond waking, sleeping and dreaming…  
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In connection to this evolving and wondrous and yet very natural state, two curious things happened this week. Firstly, in one experience I was falling deep into a trance state in meditation and going deeper I began to feel my energy sinking into the mystic and then I heard  the most beautiful chanting. It was the voice of a women singing beautiful Sanskrit like chants… it was so clear as if I was wearing headphones and listening in on a divine concert. The sounds almost seemed to lift me into an out of body experience or perhaps I needed to life into this state to hear the sounds. The sounds felt deeply nourishing and were connected in some way to my heart centre and throat centre. As I had been doing some deep chakra energy body work prior to this experience. Of course, some may seek to categorize and sanitize such experiences by simply labelling them as hypnogogic hallucinations but I feel something deeper it often going on…

For instance consider how the ancients of the Western Esoteric Traditions considered these experiences:
For In my second experience, I was practising library divination simply allowing myself to be led to a particular book and intuitively open a page and see what is there for us. I opened 2nd/3rd CE Century text ‘On the Mysteries’ to these intriguing words from Iamblichus speaking through his pseudonym the wise Abamon:

“..when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done, or the voices are heard between waking and going to sleep, or even when wholly awake. And sometimes an intangible and incorporeal spirit encircles those lying down.. when circling it makes a whooshing sound, and diffuses itself in all directions… and does wonderous works by way of freeing body and soul from their sufferings ” And

“possession of the eyes, a seizure similar to a blackout, a state between sleep and wakefulness, and presently a stirring or complete wakefulness, and presently a stirring or complete wakefulness, all of these are divine and fit for reception of the gods, and they are sent by the gods themselves, and such things precede it, a part of the divine epiphany.”    

This is the first time in a long time I have seen such a clear reference to this wondrous, nourishing state in the ancient Western tradition. Perhaps others have also talked about it. If you know of any please let me know! 

Recently I found myself in a dream in an underground sports hall like room and becoming lucid I noticed that I really did not like the lighting above me on the ceiling. It beamed down a cold-hearted glare at me and I began to feel more stressed. In daily life too I particularly have an aversion towards bright LED lights in the evening that supress the release of sleep hormone melatonin, increase our stress hormone cortisol, and throw off the natural circadian cycles of our body, mind and spirit.

Of course things are malleable in dreams but in this lucid dream all my trying, intending, requesting or commanding did not have the desired effect of making the lighting any dimmer. In fact as I grew more wilful in my demands and more irritated the lights actually became jarringly brighter and more unpleasant.

As if by an act of compassion the dream then shifted and I was shown some sand in a bucket that I could change the colour of with gentle intent and positive faithful spacious expectation.

I was still irritated though and so I went upstairs and I encountered two women sitting in a reception area. I asked them if they could contact one of my Karmic Guides to access some wisdom about what was happening with the lighting. They agreed to make the call and their call was answered and this is what I was told

“This is Hell, wanting things to change but then your frustration mirroring back to you the opposite of what you want. It’s important in situations like this not to feel that you are a victim”.

There was more that was communicated but these succinct words landed home with me and reminded me of the comment of the great spirit voyager Emmanuel Swedenborg who once wrote that beings in hell cannot really communicate effectively with each other as being locked in their own anger they just make each other more angry.

It is also possible to see this in the world around us where effective communication and deep listening is sometimes thin on the ground!
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Of course we also live in a culture that often expects to be able to change or have anything with a flick of a switch, but sometimes the right conditions need to there before change is possible and if a heavy Karmic wind has blown us or our culture far off shore it may take a while and a lot of processing before we notice that we have come back again to the home of the heart. The home of the heart is heaven. 

During a recent dream I noticed that my Dad, who is still alive, was standing in front of me. Becoming aware that I was dreaming and knowing that my Dad had found it difficult since the passing over of his sister, I decided to ask if my Aunty Audrey, (my Dad’s sister) would like to come and see us. Almost instantly she came walking down some appropriately manifested dream stairs and her and my Dad emotionally and lovingly embraced.

My Dad seemed to find the experience somewhat overwhelming as he disappeared off to the side and I began to have a good chat with my Aunty about how she has been getting on in the spirit world. As I talked to her she was wearing a kind of uniform and a kind of broche perhaps signifying that she has a specific role somewhere in the spirit world. She commented that she was always getting into trouble due to her not following the rules properly. This in fact would have lovingly been very true to her character in life! She was good strong spirit and had spent her career working as a mental health nurse.   

I remember that when I asked if she wanted to come I definitely asked from the heart. Around a week later I was in another dream and was due to give a viol concert. However I don't actually play the viol in life, which may have caused some challenges during the concert! and perhaps with this in mind and being aware of the possibilities that lucidity offers, I decided to take a different course of action.

And so, being deeply immersed often in his music in life I asked to meet the great Johann Sebastian Bach.

It was interesting what happened, as the music room where I was in the dream suddenly fell completely dark as if the candles had all being blown out, and I began to hear a little bell ringing. I then was taken through the darkness on a journey, moving this way and that as the great power of the dimensions of space, time and consciousness move us somewhere new. But then as I half expected I might be, I was simply taken all the way back to my sleeping body. 

You see although it may have become incredibly meaningful, in that moment with the resources of my mind and intention I didn’t really have a good reason and meaningful necessity to disturb the greater master, and I had asked from the head not the heart. What wants to happen comes from the heart.

What wants to happen in the soul comes from the heart.      

 Often Lucid Dreamers affirm their experience of Lucid Dreaming within the dream by letting other dream characters know what they’re experiencing is a dream. The Lucid Dreamer may say things like “You know that this is a dream don’t you? That you are a dream character…”

​When we say things like this often there is a slight bias in favour of the supposedly real physical waking life. But why do we often assume that our physical reality is any more REAL than their existence? Or that in some way they also need to wake up the nature of their dream?  

When we talk to Dream Characters like this, how often do we actually honour the existence of all these beings that populate our dreams? And significantly how often do we reflect on the important work that they are doing?

On a slightly different note it can also happen that when people journey into the spirit worlds and inform people deceased people that they meet that they are in fact dead, a typical response might be something like “Ok I am dead but do I look dead to you? I’m pretty active and alive in my own world”.  

​Coming back to dream characters how do we even know what these beings really are? We may think they are just insignificant animated figures of our own personal psyche but perhaps there can be more too it than that…

A couple of days ago I had an illuminating lucid dream experience that really made me reflect upon this. I was in the midst and throws of quite an intense dream narrative with characters streaming around. They seemed almost like office workers who were seeking to meet a tight deadline, with one figure assuming a kind of managerial role. Suddenly intuitively some kind of message that the dream was seeking to communicate to me dawned in me and I said “Ah, everyone at some point wants to be King”.

At this point all the intensity and restlessness of the dream dissolved and to my surprise and amusement all the dream characters suddenly stopped and very warmheartedly began to congratulate each other. They embraced each other and patted each other on the back, agreeing that they had played their roles well in the dream narrative.

This was so interesting to me! as it was a very vivid expression of the feeling that once we get the lesson…. The feeling tone of the drama can dramatically change. It is actually very current neuroscience to suggest that our dreams are often seeking to help us process certain feelings, hang ups, challenges and emotions.
So, what happens when the purpose of a dream has been fulfilled? Perhaps we can see it like music where a strong dissonance that was seeking to help us evolve comes to a wonderful resolution. And we can all feel a sense of release and satisfaction.

Again the refrain, what really is a dream character? Sometimes saying that they’re ‘just’ dream characters can feel like it totally misses the point. Perhaps there are animated beings that the greater system of consciousness sends to help us evolve in our dreams. Perhaps they are sometimes animated aspects of our own psyche that deeply want to help us evolve. Perhaps they are sometimes independent beings that have walked into our dream space who have their own agenda. Helpful for us or not. I have had edgy characters show up to me sometimes who have made it very clear that they are not a part of me and that I had better
honour them by using their own name.

As ever we are simply explorers on the great sea of consciousness, and any answer to these types of questions about say the nature of Dream Characters is really only a provisional theory, that we ideally hold lightly until we grow and learn more.       

We are all part of the process of creation. With our actions, thoughts, emotions and intentions we influence the collective whole. And this process of creation can be very noticeable during our night journeys. While in the OBE and Lucid Dream State I have sometimes noticed the structures and you could say domains of Being that others have helped to create. I’ve seen the teaching mansions of well-known teachers in the spiritual world and and how their disciples on the other side carry on the work embedded in their teachings.

A couple of nights ago I had an Obe that made me very aware of this in terms of my own work. Lying in that familiar state of the Mind Awake Body Asleep State I received the call of the Vibrations. This time like the feeling of all of the body being plugged into a cosmic electrical current. Allowing the Vibrations to grow in intensity I tried to roll out but seemed a little stuck. Of course, being patient with the process in the end from lying on my side I sat up with my Astral Energy Body and began to walk through my Astral Bedroom.
Going to the window and looking outside at the large drop below and knowing I would soon fly out into the vibrant Astral air I tested the state by seeing if my fingers would push through the glass window. Moving through I knew I was not in the physical and so jumped through the window and flew out into the radiant early morning night sky. I was quite content to fly around in the starry sky and then thinking how it seemed so quiet without others around I soon heard my name being faintly called off in the distance.

​Looking to where the voice came from, I saw a man begin to beckon me with this hand to follow where he was moving to. I began to fly in his direction. As I did so I felt the warmth of a hand holding my right hand.  Looking to my side I saw a graceful woman full of love helping to guide me to where I needed to go. She seemed concerned I focus on the destination rather than her and she beckoned me to keep focussed on where we were flying to.

I whooshed down in my flight to an open door and moving into a room I was met with around 30 people in something like a classroom setting. I was told that these people had been my students and as I began to talk to them it seemed to be intimated that at least some of them were humans that had died and were now on the other side. One man of around 65 in appearance said something like “well unlike you I will not be waking up the next morning”. I began to ask them as they had come together with this shared focus what they were working on and exploring and they began to show me what they had been developing in an adjoining room that seemed to be in a state of decoration/manifestation. After waking from this experience, I felt my physical body pulse with vibrant energy. Moved by the emotion of the experience I began to reflect on the responsibility that teachers like myself hold in the world. With thousands of people following our courses or/and reading our books a small proportion will be transitioning into the other world on a regular basis. So, in a very real sense we could say that we have responsibilities to our students both in this physical word and the world of Spirit.

Perhaps our students that have passed over do congregate in groups around our teachings and we can go to them in our journeys, and that even now with the physical and non-physical in their interpenetrating dance, our work supports their growth and evolution across worlds. 

Across last year we’ve been keeping honey bees in our garden. It’s been a very meaningful journey for us. I built a Kenyan Style Horizontal Bar Hive out of an old Oak Futon which after many years use had become irreparable. The Futon was reborn as a wonderful hive but it was our first ever year keeping Bees and perhaps I did not adequately think how to minimize the onslaught of the dreaded Varroa Mite. Our focus over Christmas and New Year was on family commitments and I should have listened because I did sense once or twice that the Bees were seeking to communicate something to me…. Sadly when we checked the Hive the second week of January the colony had not made it. Weakened by Varroa Mites and inspecting the inside front of the Hive near the entrance I found a huge, nearly 3cm long Common Wasp. At first I thought it was a Hornet and so capturing it I took it inside for closer inspection. Later that afternoon I was at a Tree Meditation Event communing with the energies of Nature and that night I had a dream…

In the dream my partner called to me from another room in the house “Tom you had better come here” and going out into what seemed like a conservatory I/we were confronted with a huge 7 foot man. He seemed very pensive and ominous like a kind of intruder and was dressed in poor clothes and looked sad, something like a Somalian Pirate.

I felt fear and his fear but somehow being able to still access Love I was able to hold my hand to my heart and say to him “We are people of the heart”. He seemed to feel and understand what I meant and relenting he put what looked like a razor blade down on a table behind him.

He then shape-shifted into a magickal dance of a Spirit of Nature. At this point in the dream I properly realised that what I was witnessing was the energy of the Spirit of the Common Wasp that I had wounded and captured awaiting proper inspection and was currently in an airtight plastic container in our store room.  
As it Shape-shifted in my dream it was almost like a mating dance…. First the spirit becoming paler started to remove it’s clothes, revealing breasts and then the dance became even more erotic showing geometric shapes of great pulsing symmetry.   

Earlier in the dream the form manifested in a form I could understand as a poor huge man something like a Somalian Pirate. A pirate that had sought to take over or take advantage of a weakened ship of my Honey Bee Hive. That was aggrieved that I had taken it captive and had actually wounded it with knife. A wound was dealt from a feeling of grief, anger revenge for killing so many of our honey bees. I had seen dozens of their dead bodies torn apart all near the entrance of the Hive.

Later that morning after I had had the dream I went into the store room to collect the Wasp and release it back into Nature. It had been very docile for a while but it started to buzz and flap its wings with delight as if it knew I was about to release it. When I released it flew with tremendous purpose on its homeward course, back to its brother and sisters. Perhaps its children…  

Later the morning after the dream reflecting, I also felt the symbolism of the dream had to do with taking sides… why did I so favour the honey bees over the huge common wasps? Don’t they all have a valid and sacred place in the Dance of Nature? Do we treat other spirits and human in a similar way? Endlessly taking sides and mindlessly deciding what is better or worse?  

A little while ago I was dreaming and becoming lucid entered a huge open field of grass. Wondering what to do I decided to ask to meet the great mystic and teacher Pythagoras. I am not sure why in that moment his name came to mind but I had recently created a course on Ancient Greek Mysteries so perhaps it was fitting that his name emerged into my mind with a sense of purpose.
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Walking around I intuited that I'd need to visit the Underworld to find him. In Ancient Greek thought the Underworld was the home of the dead, both the unwise and the wise, the hero and the ordinary citizen. And so, I let myself fall and descend down through the crusts of the dream earth. After travelling through the darkness, I found myself in a set of dark rooms. The walls were tiled with clear black material that looked like a kind of hardened resin. There were circles and symbols on the tiles and what looked like mathematical equations. I began to peer into the tiles and the dream narrative, like quickly drying resin began to slow down, and then eventually pause. I feared this could signal the end of the lucid dream in that the mental juice that was fuelling it seemed to have run out. But then I just relaxed and becoming absorbed into gazing at the tiles I became open to possibility... What happened next while literally took my breath away.

Suddenly the Lucid dream got going again in a big way and a hidden door to the dark room opened up and I walked into an environment that felt completely stable and almost indistinguishable from physical reality. The shift caused me to literally gasp for breath as I sought to balance and adjust to the new scenario. I often tell people on my lucid dream workshops that although dreams may often seem like a very visual, impalpable, ethereal experience actually all the senses can come alive in lucid dreaming, touch, taste, smell, hearing and yes, the sixth sense as well! And although some environments may seem fleeting some can feel very stable  indeed! To experience it emerge so unexpectedly and dramatically though really took my breath away.

And so now I found myself in what seemed like a doctor’s waiting room with a magazine sitting on a coffee table. I went outside and I met a friendly woman who pointed me towards a group of horses that looked strong, passionate and wild in a kind of stable and paddock like setting. Maybe there was some kind of teaching here in the other meanings of the word ‘stable’ and a nudge to find a kind of stability that is able to alchemically mix with all the strength and passion of a powerful horse? Or perhaps the vegetarian animal loving Pythagoras had a love of horses?