Appreciation of truth through meditation.

I include this chapter to provide details of a hitherto neglected technique to instantly improve your quality of life. in these fraught and stressful times it is essential that we regain full control of our own minds because without control over our emotions, moods, and thoughts, we are at the mercy of those who know how to push our buttons, whether they be the government trying to tax us within an inch of our lives, or the banks fiddling the interest rates leading us to worry about whether we can still afford to make the payments on our family home, or the local malcontent trying to infect us with their own misery. We need to defend ourselves and truly the most effective way of doing this is to not let things ‘get to us’. We all know this. But we also know this is easier said than done.

We need to learn to put some distance between our true selves and the outside world of uncertainty, pain, worry and stress. It is not the events of life which dictate whether we are happy or not but how we deal with those events. Some people can have all the money and luxury in the world but be deeply unhappy and depressed, they take things for granted, while others may have only enough money to live on a day by day basis but can may be delighted with their lives.

From visiting third world countries like Egypt I have learned that it isn’t what objects and wealth you possess in the outside world that dictates your level of happiness, but what you have on the inside. What I’m talking about is inner peace. Many people in third world countries can scarcely afford to feed themselves but they have inner peace in abundance. This is largely due to the fact that many of the third world countries have not become wholly materialistic because there are not the markets and capital or need for these products, so people retain their native spirituality. It seems to me that the more one focuses on what they can own and buy in the outside world the more they neglect their inner wealth.

 The more you own the less you are. You define yourself by the things you own but they start to own you. You think fondly of your new digital high definition 3D TV, your new car. Your thoughts and your consciousness gets  projected onto machines and gadgets which inevitably soon lose their lustre, become common place and are soon superseded by new models. They are not permanent. No doubt it is enjoyable to think about some new gadget you’ve bought but sooner or later you get used to it and it no longer evokes the same feeling of excitement so soon you are not as happy as you once were. This is the same psychology involved in becoming a so called ‘shopaholic’, the initial thrill of buying new clothes for example disappears within a couple of days of their purchase as the clothes have been worn for a few days and no longer feel new, particularly with their first wash the sheen of newness disappears, and the genuine shopping addict will need to buy something else to regain the transitory feeling of happiness. Of course, it goes without saying that this is a pretty fruitless way to attain happiness but for some people it really is all they have, precisely because they have forgotten to ‘be’ happy themselves. They cannot achieve happiness from within so they constantly need something to make them happy.

Many people replace the quest for ‘something’ with the quest for ‘someone’. This is a perfectly normal and natural human impulse, to have a partner, to feel love for someone and to know they are loved in turn and perhaps start a family. But due to the pressures and temptations of modern life, often the strains and pressures of life get between the loving couple and the relationship cannot weather the storm or the world, or indeed, some people have a materialistic attitude to loving relationships and find, just like the shopaholics, that after a few months or years, the sheen of newness and excitement of the relationship, seems to fade, and so they dash off in search of someone new who will allow them to feel the fleeting thrill of the new again.

So many marriages these days end in divorce because people are so desperate to find their happiness in other people, when really they need to find it in yourself first. You cannot find love in others, you must have the love in yourself first and share the love. If you depend on another person for your emotional wellbeing, then whenever you perceive that they are not giving you what you need or feel entitled to, you will need to move on to the next partner in order to get your supply. Again, this is another form of addiction. All of these people running around looking for some feeling that they have been told they can either buy or obtain from other people, but they are not told that the surest supply of this wonder product comes from within: happiness.

All we have to do in order to be completely and perfectly happy is to obtain genuine inner peace. To be at peace is to be happy. When we are deeply in love with someone and we wrap our arms around them in a cuddle we feel at peace. Time seems to fade into irrelevance and no pressure or worries plague us. This is the feeling of love and it is the same as true peace. We feel comforted by our partner and their presence gives us confidence and a feeling of total security,  but we are perfectly able to obtain this feeling ourselves without the necessity of either obtaining it from the presence of another person or the presence of material goods.

I suspect also that our habit to rely less on our own inner resources and more on other people, leads people to rush headlong into relationships which perhaps on an a deeper level, people know are not ideal, or not really what they want, yet they feel the alternative of being alone and hence a lack of security and confidence, to be something they cannot contemplate, and so enter into an ill advised relationship with someone who won’t be able to supply them with all their needs and fill their sense of inner emptiness. And so we have divorces, broken homes, confused and unloved children, and a perfect recipe for the breakdown of society.

It could not have been planned any better.  It begs the question: Is our world ruled by fools or by cunning and malicious psychopaths? Our society is falling apart, love is fading from homes and relationships at the same rate with which the lusts of materialism are pumped into our homes by the plasma flat-screen high definition 3D TV set. We see beautiful men and women on our TV, immaculately made up and styled,  and this only serves to make us more aware of the imperfections of our own partners. We see the homes and lifestyles of the rich and famous and our own lives and homes seem drab in comparison, our lives seem less real and less valuable than those of the stars we see. We have seen how the introduction of television leads to the phenomenon of crime, as in the example of Bhutan. Not just because people want the things they see on the screen but because the things they see on the screen actually make them unhappy, unhappy with themselves. Happy people do not commit crime.

We can produce all the happiness we need in our lives: we can have instant peace and a sense of security on tap, without spending a penny or without asking anyone to give it to us. As the title of this chapter suggests the answer lies in Zen meditation. There are many forms of meditation and all sorts of things which people are asked to visualise, but by far the simplest and most effective is Zen meditation. However the one thing that Zen meditation is not is an instant-fix.  However you will see results almost straight away. The other thing that it isn’t is easy. It requires you to do something that they don’t want us to do and something many of us simply find ourselves unable to do effectively or for prolonged periods of time. That is: concentrate.

When you start Zen meditation and if you commit to it and do it say three times a week for at least half an hour each time then within 3 months you will be smarter, happier, more serene, less irritable, less stressed. You will sleep better, be able to think better and you will also notice dozens of other new mental skills that you will amaze you. The potential for development is limitless because no one really knows what the limits of the human mind are, but for the first time since your early childhood, you will truly be using your full mental faculties to their full potential.

As we have seen before, our consciousness is NOT our thoughts. Very young children do not ‘think’ because they do not have the words to construct thoughts. Similarly animals do not think for the same reason. However both are certainly perfectly conscious. Instead of thoughts children have completely untroubled and pure minds. They may cry because they are hungry or tired or because they are affected by negative stimuli around them, but a baby or a small child has no concept or worry or concern about the future. They just exist in a perpetual present. They do not project themselves into the future and worry about it the way we do. They do not project themselves into some other reality because they are dissatisfied with their own reality. Mostly babies, small children and animals exist in the easy untroubled happiness of the Zen state.

We can return to this state if we want to. All we have to do is start to separate our awareness of who we are from the thoughts constantly going through our minds and ultimately learn to stop the thoughts at will. With Zen meditation the angry, sad, jealous or painful thoughts will be stopped because we will be aware that they are not good for our happiness, we will be able to control our mind fully and not be at the mercy of the constant chatter of worry, anxiety, uncertainty or concern.

The constant chatter of thoughts in our mind is only a habit we have acquired because of the stressful nature of life, whether at school and the various rivalries and power struggles there, or the demand to quickly answer the questions demanded by the teacher or to think of an excuse for not being able to answer it. Or if someone seems upset with us for some reason we search our thoughts to find a reason to explain their attitude. And so we all acquire a certain level of constant mental activity in order to solve the various puzzles of social living and human relationships. In extreme cases, where stress is elevated to an extreme level then the trammel of thoughts becomes uncontrollable and sometime several trains of thought take place at once. This is a sure sign that if this level of stress continues then serious mental illness can follow when the brain becomes overloaded with ideas and associations. Physical illness often develops as a result of high emotional stress. 

Schizophrenics often claim to hear voices telling them to commit various terrible crimes and the surprise is that one would do so merely at the behest of a voice in your head, but this is how powerful our inner world is. You may yourself have noticed that if there is someone you particularly dislike, and you allow yourself to think negative thoughts about this person, then inevitably your thoughts will externalise into speech and either you will express your dislike of the person to someone else, or indeed you will find yourself directly expressing your feelings to the person themselves, leading no doubt to conflict of one kind or another.

This is as Jesus said when addressing the ancient equivalent of the freemasons, the Pharisees, he said: ‘You brood of vipers. How can you, being evil, speak what is good? For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart!’ Matthew 12:34. And in Matthew 15:18: “Those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart; and they defile the man.’

 
Although it is difficult to control your feelings about someone, it is possible to control your thoughts  about them. With practice, the next time you see that person in your mind’s eye and start to think  negatively you will be able to stop yourself and say to yourself: ‘why am I thinking like his?’ ‘what purpose does this negativity serve?’. Indeed it serves none at all. Negativity only makes you yourself feel bad, angry or aggressive, and increases the likelihood that you will project these emotions on the people around you who have done nothing to offend you in the first place, damaging other relationships in turn.  In an emergency conflict situation remember the following words:

“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.” Thomas Jefferson.
 

The practice of Zen meditation is very simple and involves simply trying to stifle your thoughts completely until you reach the Zen state of mindlessness of Nirvana. With continued practice you could attain ‘real’ Nirvana in less than 6 months. It is the best feeling in the world, better than any drug intoxication you can imagine.

Find yourself somewhere very very quiet to carry out your meditation. There must be no audible activity around you at all because this will certainly break your concentration. Sit cross-legged on the floor and close your eyes. The purpose of this meditation is to reach a point where you no longer have a constant dialogue going on in your head. Initially it will be very difficult to do this, in fact the task will seem impossible and it will be mentally exhausting, but the plus side is you’ll feel very relaxed afterwards. You could also try this if you have trouble sleeping, it certainly help sufficiently tire the mind so that it seeks rest and is ready to relax.

Just try initially to sustain inner silence in your mind for a few seconds, it will be tiring, but persevere and over the next few days and weeks the periods of sustained silence and total inner peace will become longer and longer. If any thought comes into your head RESIST the temptation to explore it or become involved in it. Actively attempt to block it out. Some meditation techniques advise you to observe the thoughts and watch them come and go but this doesn’t achieve a great deal  in my experience, you need to learn to master your own mind and no longer be at the mercy of the many negative thoughts and feelings of anxiety and worry about the things society is forever trying to make us worry about. The news and certain TV shows work very hard to create a fevered pitch of worry, anxiety and high drama because if we are infected by these thoughts then we are in their playground and we can be controlled. For example the government will be able to introduce more CCTV camera and more stringent infringements on our liberty because we will have been infected by the same degree of panic as they have, as schizophrenic robber barons who are unfolding their new-world order control agenda and are hoping that the public as a whole won’t decide to do something about it.

So they need us scared of terrorists, that way they can have their naked body scanners at airports and random police identity checks so we start learning to become scared of them too. Then they will have their power over us and essentially this is all they need. They already have all the money in the world but they don’t have total carte blanche to do what they want and in order to get this they need us to learn to do as we’re told. It seems many of us are learning to do just as we’re told at an alarming rate of knots.

When I learned that naked body scanners had been introduced at not just London Heathrow and Manchester airports, but also at many other regional airports too, I asked myself why no one protests these terribly invasive things. I needn’t have bothered myself because I later found out that that 90% of people asked supported naked body scanners in airports. It is clear that the endless threats and fears pumped out by the media have terrorised the British people to a level where they are willing to acquiesce to anything if they are told it will make them safe. What a sad bunch we have become. Did we defeat Nazi Germany and totalitarianism only to have it follow us home and move in with is?

Those to blame are the media for scaring us with  hundred ways to die very week. If it isn’t the meteor from space it’s swine flu, or bird flu, or SARS, or mad-cow disease, or a pole shift, or melting glaciers flooding the planet, or a plague of zombie, or anthrax in the mail, or anyone of a thousand promoted terrors designed to weaken our minds and make us stand in line and do as we’re told. Line up and take your shoes off, line up and take this vaccine full of mercury, line up and get a dose of dangerous  x ray radiation as we ogle your naked body.

It will get much much worse if we let it. And the way things look right now with the whole population stuck to their TV sets drinking up the fear, it’s going that way. There was a time when to be fingerprinted meant you’d been arrested by the police for breaking the law and they had the right to add your fingerprints to their lists of other felons. Now if you happen to be a child of three or above at a certain school who wants to borrow a library book you will be fingerprinted.

The next logical step in this chain is for schools to collect children’s DNA. Then what? Perhaps with developments in technology they will be able to read our whole lives just from our DNA sample. When we die, how much we weigh, the colour of our eyes. What our favourite movies are, whether we are likely to be a good citizen or whether we will insist on trying to maintain our privacy.  

Yet the things we ought genuinely to be worried about such as a new world war are the very things our rulers seem to want after calling for tough new sanctions for Iran and claiming that they already have a nuclear weapon, the next step in the rhetorical rise to Armageddon is to join US hawks like Hilary ‘I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!’ Clinton.

In 2007 Hilary voted on the Kyle-Lieberman amendment supporting military action against Iran. In 2008 she threatened to ‘obliterate’ Iran if they invaded Israel. A bit like going up to a blind man and saying ‘I will smash your teeth in if you look at my girlfriend’. Clearly psychotically aggressive, clearly inappropriate. And now Obama, the black messiah himself is in a bullying mood because of the goading of his Wall-street pals who know the only future for the United States Of America is the spoils of foreign conquest. We need to remove ourselves from this toxic and hypocritical system and that means disengaging your mind and attention from the million and one harmful illusions, lies and new horrors they fire at us.

 
The search for beauty is the preoccupation of  every human and living creature in this material world. We search for beauty outside of ourselves for what is within we fail to appreciate and generally take for granted. It seems for most of us, that we must seek personal happiness and validation outside of ourselves. And so we venture further into materialism and further from the source of personal wisdom. We can never ‘know’ another person as we know ourselves. We can never achieve wisdom from another person because knowledge and awareness lies within our own consciousness. Some of us corrupt what is within, due to a lack of insight or personal damage of some kind, and what is within themselves appears rank and poisoned and the inner beauty is lost.

So we project our love and desire outside of ourselves, like plants reaching their leaves to the sun, we hope to find sustenance and a purpose for living in someone else. This makes no sense spiritually because the person in whom you are trying to find this beauty is also looking for the same thing in you, yet the fact that both of you are looking for something which you lack, in someone else, means neither of you possess what you are searching for, because if you did you wouldn’t have to look for it in others.

 
Superficially, women are attractive and men are handsome, yet this only appears to be the beauty they are searching for, but it is only a configuration of physicality, it is more materialism. It has no deeper meaning and is only a cipher for beauty but not the real thing. The attractiveness and charm which some see in others is often enough to make them love them, but rarely is it enough to make the person possessing these qualities love themselves to the point of self completion.

The person having the qualities of attractiveness or charm knows that these things are not the real person they are, yet they seem sufficient to make the other person love them. These things are merely tools to enable the person to obtain emotional, sensual, material or financial security. But love is the dream, but it comes from within the self. Why is another person needed to produce a feeling which originate within the self. What is love? Love is a form of attention. Love takes the attention from ones own personal inner problems and gives one something to focus on outside of the self.  But what happens when attention goes outward? The material world expands and grows as the all knowing inner being reaches out into the void.

 
The reality is short lived because true love requires timeless understanding and a still mind. Within a human relationship these things are unobtainable in this world which by definition is constantly in flux and full of a thousand distractions. There are financial pressures, communication failures, misunderstandings. It is easier to find love in yourself and keep it there than it is to search for it in someone by reaching across the void to another consciousness. Why reach across the void at all?

So we all reach out of ourselves because we feel dissatisfied with our own inner beings, and we seek to expand our inner light into the darkened void. The consequence of this is human reproduction, which is actually a form of entropy, or widening chaos. Materially, having children is natural, from a spiritual perspective however it is not. 

 
Reproduction is the consequence of our failure to find God, it is a consequence of a spiritual hunger for completeness which we think the material world can solve for us. But it cannot, it can only offer the temporary excitement of desire followed by a slow loss of the self at the expense of assuming a role as head of a family.

We fracture and divide ourselves. And so from the original harmony we have ‘difference’, we have tribalism, peoples, nations, conflicts, wars which are inevitable when different universes occupy the same world. Reproduction is shattering the hologram into a thousand more holograms.
 

Marriages are not easy and often fail because eventually we realise that we can never really find love outside of ourselves, except as a kind of dozing domesticity, but if we really look into ourselves we will realise that what we were looking for was inside us all along. 

 

Consciousness is a field. As individuals most of our experience of consciousness is very limited and narrow  field. Our friends, our job and hobbies, our desires and our anxieties, all enter our consciousness and preoccupy us. Essentially in this way we have limited our consciousness, the way a magnifying glass examines a very small part of a plant such as a cell, but is incapable of simultaneously being aware of seeing the whole plant itself. This is why we are mostly unable to understand the universe and what consciousness and life itself represents.  We cannot see the wood for the trees is an expression which represents the inability to perceive the totality of a concept or situation due to excessive regard for the finer details and minutia.

Some species exist within a larger field of consciousness than we do at most times. Bees, ants and birds usually, despite their apparent smaller size than us, actually have a larger field of consciousness. The complex tasks which ants and bees undertake such as the discovery of food, cleaning their nests and the feeding of their young, are all carried out by a field of consciousness which uses the individual ants as relay stations, or circuits. Birds tend to have a more defined individual identity when both parents for instance are feeding their young. At such times their field of consciousness is limited to the maximum radius from the nest at which both parents find it necessary to discover food. At other times however, during mass migrations, the field of consciousness of the extends throughout the whole flock which has taken to the air and creates a stronger  egregore like entity than each individual bird. For humans too the field of consciousness modifies and also gives strength to the individual. Being in love for instance is the merging of two consciousness fields, being next to the partner with whom you are in love is when this ‘togetherness’ can be felt as more than a physical sensation but that somehow there is something within you which is complete or feels more expansive.

Sports fans, particularly in the UK, football fans, feel this most when their team has just scored a goal, also when the fans are singing in unison. One feels part of the crowd, the individual is still aware of him or herself but also feels joy at being part of something bigger. Indeed in these moments I would say that they feel love also.
I believe that the feeling of love is actually the experience of enlarging our field of consciousness. For instance there was a time when young people in the UK would use a drug called Ecstasy for the feeling of euphoria and being ‘loved up’ that it provided. The funny thing was there was no particular romantic feeling associated with this feeling of euphoric joy, it was more a love of everything and everyone.


This same effect is possible through meditation. However through meditation there are arguably greater possibilities  due to the greater clarity which an undrugged consciousness is capable of.
If drugs are used the nature of the consciousness expansion is of somewhat a choppy nature, like being on the deck of a ship during a fierce storm, one finds it hard to maintain a calm and serene inner experience as the ground and the sky seem to be constantly in motion and there is no dry land beneath your feet on which to ground your experience.

During meditation the possibility of return to dry land instantly and quickly rationalise and consider your experience is very easy. It  only requires thinking about them. Meditation however is not easy for some people because it required the cessation of thought and most people are so used to thinking all the time that they are not even aware there is an off switch for their brains. What is required is a realisation that when the ancients said  ‘as above so below’ they were mistranslated. What they really meant was ‘as within so without’.

What is inside every person is the same as what is outside. Consciousness.  Most people base their consciousness inside their own heads so, after thoughts has been stifled through concentration , one can start to enlargen and broaden the space inside their heads.
 

What happens is that you experience a feeling of the observational point which is you growing smaller within yourself and also of your field of vision and consciousness expanding. You start to glimpse the size of the universe itself and the everyday world, despite being just next to you waiting for you, seems to be an immense distance away.

You are now INSIDE YOUR OWN MIND. And this is infinite. As it grows and widens something else will happen, you will start to get the feeling of falling into yourself. This is the final break through and although it might seem frightening, a bit like dying or surrendering yourself to some force, it isn’t. It is only a state of expanded consciousness and all you need do to instantly return back to the so called ‘real world’ is open your eyes again.

 
As you fall into your own field of consciousness you will start to spin and move as your consciousness becomes aware of its own energetic natures and twists and turns in its own eternity, you will also experience a satisfying feeling of all knowing all understanding and love. Simple because for the first time in your life there are no thoughts and no boundaries anymore.

 
You have found heaven. Nirvana. The abode of peace. You have merged with the consciousness field of the greater universe.

Gone the next: a trueish story.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, it’s the strangest thing.”

Ollie sat up more than straight, his arms hugging his knees, ready to spring into the air and start pacing back and forth. It was only his arms that held his legs back. He was doing his best to reign himself in, for my girlfriend’s sake I suppose.  He had a habit of scaring people who didn’t know him, when he spoke he tended to get highly animated, springing about and waving his hands in the air, to those who didn’t know he could seem like a whirlwind of chaos, or just a plain old loony. I knew him better however, he overflowed with energy and its seemed always to be escaping from him, people often turned away from him, like he burned too hot and they needed some shade.

But now he was disordered, that much is clear. For many years he’d been my best friend though I’d hardly seen him for anything longer than a couple of weeks these last few years, it might seem strange for me to say we were still best friends but we were: it made no difference how long he disappeared for, or where he went. He told me stories, incredible stories that I promised him I would never repeat so don’t ask me to do so here and now. I'm only going to tell you what I know about this case.


 For months that became years he would drop out of all knowledge, we’d known where he’d gone, but that by then was the remote past, the phone numbers and addresses he had given us soon became worn out coordinates, a snapshot. That’s how I would describe my feelings now for Ollie, my thoughts of him are like snapshots, I don’t see him as something fluid, but as a series of static images and ideas of the man who was my best friend.

The last adventure of his, where had he gone to? Jordan. I’d had one e-mail from him a couple of months after he’d left wishing me happy birthday, I answered him back telling him how great it was to hear from him and asking him if he’d had any chicks drop their Hijabs for him, the usual silly lad banter, we meant no disrespect of course. He told me he was working on it but that it was proving harder to get into than a tin of sardines using only a banana. He was happy though, make no mistake about that, always was a happy person, like a blessed snail he took paradise with him where ever he went: he didn’t have to look for it. And so for six months I heard nothing, for the first time ever he didn’t return at Christmas, nor did he return in the summer, then the year became two years, and I thought in all seriousness that I would never see him again. Then a knock on my window while I was eating my sugary cornflakes, it was Ol! I almost couldn’t believe it, at that weird morning time of day when no one ever comes to see you, before going to work! He told me he’d just flown back and was really jet lagged and strung out, he said.

“Sorry about the crazy time of day, it doesn’t mean much to me anymore though but I really need someone to look to and talk at. I mean look at and talk to. That came out the wrong way didn’t it? or did it? it works either way I suppose, I can’t think now which is more appropriate.”

And I let him in, and felt a little uncomfortable, for about five seconds until we started talking and it was as if a million years of silence could have passed between us and all we would need would be those five seconds were we weighed our friendship and discovered that it hadn’t lost a gram of its value and that nothing would ever change between us, we were still best friends.

 As I ate my cornflakes and snaked my tie around the shoulders of my jacket in readiness for work, and my girlfriend got ready was just finishing her coffee and getting ready to leave the house, he sat stood there wide eyes and electrically charged, still carrying in him the flux and smog of Tokyo. He was still somewhere over the Pacific, I had no idea when he got there or even what he was doing there, all I knew was that the major part of him was there with me in my front room at half past seven in the morning and I was very glad about it. I felt reassured that he was safe under my roof, I say this and I measure my words carefully, but I always felt that the threads that held Ollie’s life together were of the thinnest flimsiest and finest material that could ever exist, he used to say that he lived in the astral web and every time I was with him I felt it. His whole life was no more solid and substantial than a silken spider’s web, shimmering silvery in the moonlight, but a few heavy drops of rain could tear the whole thing apart.

I can tell you no more than that, this is strictly a subjective feeling, call it instinct or intuition whatever you like but I’ve always known that he would soon be gone.

Jo came into the room, looking perfectly fresh and ready for her job at the accountant’s in town. She smiled at Ollie:

   “I’ve heard so much about you but I never thought I’d actually get to meet you. Where have you been?”

   “Japan.”

   “How was it?”

   “It was,” he paused looking for the right words, “very very interesting. I went out there to get the east-west fusion thing going on, find my soul, something like that, and also get to the bottom of that sushi thing.”

   “How did that work out for you?”

   “Well I found a way of controlling my own perception of reality through meditation and I tracked down the location of my own soul, which was cool, but a man could spend a whole lifetime to understand the profound mysteries of raw fish.”

   “I think it sounds disgusting personally. I mean, I couldn’t stand the idea of eating raw fish.”

   “I miss it already, the prospect of eating meat again sickens me, still its all relative ain’t it.” He said with a wink.

   “Yeah, I suppose, okay I gotta go to work, see you later people.”

When she was gone he seemed to become himself.

He looked seriously at me and spoke:

   “It’s the strangest thing,” he had said, “wherever I go there are always this group of people around me.”

   “Sounds good!” I said.

   “No, it isn’t, I can’t really explain it but I’ll try.”

And he did try and I think perhaps he succeeded, then at other times I don’t know what to think. Anyway I didn’t go to work that morning, not after what he had said to me, I was spooked, scared for him and myself for having heard his story. I didn’t like it in the least.

   “It’s not good because these people who surround me are not my friends, in fact they pretend not to know me but they know me alright, they are my enemies and they follow me everywhere.”

I smiled, and feeling light I cracked a little joke, thinking perhaps that this was what he was talking about, I said:

   “What do you mean? You’re not telling me that you upset the locals eh? That some nice proud tea drinking Muslim has sent his family on to you for breaking into his nice chaste daughter’s Hijab and they had followed him on his travels. Or did you spill A Yakuza’s pint?”

He smiled a cracked and strained smile. That wasn’t it, it seemed.

   “Yeah,” he seemed distracted and elsewhere, “something like that, I think.” He paused before adding, “I don’t know. I don’t know who they are, where they’re from,” He looked down at the carpet, “or what they are.”

   “What do you mean?” I asked carefully.

   “I don’t know, there’s so much I don’t know. All I can say is I’m glad to be back, on firm ground with my best mate.”

He gave me a look of such intensity that I couldn’t match its gaze for more than a few seconds, his eyes burned with something: knowledge, wisdom or madness, I couldn’t identify it but it was a very powerful something. It worried me because I couldn’t understand it, where had he been?

The  more he talked the deeper my confusion became.

   “I arrived at some restaurant, some mad Japanese place where the waiters dress up as ninjas and jump out at you carrying your desert skewered on the end of a shiri-saya blade. It was early, the Japanese corporate piss up crowd hadn’t finished their overtime yet and the westerners were, well god knows were the westerners were. I was literally the first person to enter the restaurant that day and that was the way I liked it. When I’m eating I find the presence of other people distracts me from enjoying my food, you have to put on a show when you eat communally, well I do anyway, not that my table manners are bad, it’s just that ideally I would prefer not to bother with them, just make like a pig before a trough and get stuck in. Actually the funny thing about Japan is that they have table manners, among the most refined and complicated on earth, but then they do things like eat sushi with their fingers and drink their soup from the bowl and make a loud slurpy sound when they do it. In fact to confuse me further I was told quite reliably by a  Japanese business man that if you don’t make the required slurping noise when drinking cha or soup or eating noodles, then your Japanese hosts feel insecure, you don’t seem to be one of them. Apparently making the noise, just making the slurp noise, bridges the culture gap between east and west. 

 

So there I was looking forwards to an uncomplicated dining experience with only myself to judge and approve myself, I spread my shoeless feet out under the table and relaxed.  I’d just ordered a beer when I noticed a western couple being guided into the restaurant. They sat at the table just opposite me so that they were looking  directly at me. That kind of thing was normal, some westerners abroad like to latch onto other westerners, they gaze at them and smile at them just as if they were members of their own family, they’re the weirdos, worth steering clear of, then there are the others, those who flee from other westerners. They’re the sane ones in my book, they go abroad for a good reason, they travel in search of enlightenment through confusion. When they go abroad they don’t want to learn the language nor do they want to understand the country they’re in. For them it is a total drag to perfectly master and understand the language and customs of nation. They immediately become embroiled in taking a point of view and actually having to think about the stupid things that happen in the country. They’re more than happy to be in a country where they understand a great deal of absolutely nothing. The language is a musical jabber and nothing more, the symbols and shapes on the morning newspaper tell them nothing of the death and dissatisfaction that invariably reign. They are blissfully unaware of its sordid and foolish politics, the crafty caprices of politicians, ignorant of the ignorance and  prejudice that blights its people. They do not care and they don’t have to care.

However in time, the great evil of knowledge will dawn on them and they have nowhere to escape, their eyes and ears will be assaulted on all sides by news!

They will become a partisan, they will have to take a position and have an opinion, was there ever a more burdensome asset to modern life? All the naïve blind charm of a people seen only upon its virtues will vanish as they dig deeper and deeper until the inevitable disillusionment. So the best thing they can do once they understand the language, the politics and the culture is go elsewhere and bask in the bliss of total confusion again. I am of the latter category. I flee from knowledge and from other westerners. Their gaze was a burden to me, of course back home they wouldn’t look twice at me but they seemed to be in need of a friend that night. They weren’t the only ones. More and more people arrived until the restaurant was almost full.  Within two minutes of me sitting down an ordering a beer the restaurant had gone from empty to almost full. I could see too that the ninjas were a bit disorientated by this too, as more and more newly dressed and trained bewildered ninjas were pressed into service to deal with the anomalous surge of diners. It was a little strange but I put it down to some bizarre coincidence, that was until I noticed that they all seemed to me looking at me at one time or another.”

   “Well,” I said, “maybe it was because you’re a westerner, a good looking one too.”

   “Yeah, well, not to be immodest but  I had thought about that but that doesn’t explain why wherever I go there’s always a crowd about two or three minutes behind me.”

   “Maybe it’s your private fan club, I’ve heard that Japanese girls are very impressionable.”

   “But it wasn’t just Japanese girls, it was all sorts of people, distinguished old Japanese men and their neat and petite yukata wearing wives; loud mouthed and leery English teachers, even small and extremely quiet Japanese children, it was like a total cross section of society would turn up wherever I went like a shadow. First I thought it was amusing, like I’d go to a pub, it would be more or less empty and totally quiet, I’d order a pint, cross the deserted dance floor and  I’d sit down at a table and sip my pint. I’d look down at the front page of my English Japanese newspaper, recline back in my chair, music would come on and look up from my newspaper and the dance floor would suddenly be crowded with all sorts of people dancing, jiving and twisting. Thirty seconds ago not only was the dance floor empty but so was the pub, now it was full, and they all seemed to revolve strangely around me. I can’t explain it but I was the centre of attention, it was always the same, then I started asking myself if I was losing my mind. That’s why I’ve come back here, I didn’t know what it meant and it was wearing my head out trying to work it all out.

I was shocked, it seemed my formerly solid and happy old buddy was losing his mind, or at least that he was suffering from some kind of monomania.

    “It gets worse.” Ollie said quietly, I inwardly sighed, I had no doubt that it did.

   “Have you ever sat at a table in an ordinary  restaurant or in an even more ordinary  café or pub and sat at a table next to a couple of these odd people, sometimes a man and a woman, or two women or two men, they order a drink, peanuts hell maybe even soup cheese and a side of beef too, the whole feast, among friends, and the whole lot without saying a blasted word? Who are these people, these frozen mutes who just sit and stare, who go out together not to talk to each other? What does it mean? Who or what are these people, are they real? I think I have found the answer. I think that these ‘people’ are in fact what I call filling. In fact they’re not really real and they’re just there to provide filling to an otherwise empty scene. Like in a movie there are the extras who wander aimlessly and mute or who otherwise repeat the same couple of syllables over and over again to give the impression of conversation, well the extras exist in real life, the filling.. 

 

They have no autonomy of course and they don’t think, they just sit and blink all the while. I now believe that half of the whole world is stuffing, and I see them everywhere. and they’re after me. I’m scared, either that they’re really after me or that I’m going mad or that I don’t know anything anymore.”

   “But why would anyone be after you? It doesn’t make any sense.”

   “You’re telling me.”

   “Are you sure about this, it really doesn’t seem very likely?”

   “I know, believe me I know, I really don’t want to believe it, but that’s when I started getting really crazy, it was like I was denying the evidence of my own eyes, my brain was telling me something and I was trying to ignore it at all costs. I couldn’t even trust my mind anymore, I even stopped leaving my room, I stopped eating because I kept seeing those strange people. I was destroying myself and I was weak. So I just decided to go with it and chill out, I felt much better, stronger, and maybe in a kind of way it does make sense, I mean there are lots of strange things in the universe and, well maybe I’m getting some kind of spiritual insight from all this.”

We had breakfast together and I called in sick and I didn’t have to try too hard. Ollie certainly seemed to be crazy, at least what he said was totally crazy but he was still the same old Ollie, I decided not to make any kind of judgement about what he was saying, just go along with it and see what happened. It was true that he was a bright bloke and had seen a lot of things, maybe in some way he was right, I did hold out the possibility that all or some of the crazy things he said could be right, however it was only a small possibility for me. It was all so unfamiliar to me, he was too much a philosopher, always had been, for me to follow him out there wherever he was lost and wandering now.

After breakfast we decided to go out for a couple of drinks and a few games of pool.

As we walked down the street on the way to the pub Ollie noticed a black car driving slowly just behind us, it followed us all the way to the pub, and parked while we went inside.

   “I told you!” Ollie said.
    “Just a coincidence.” I said.

   “I wish I could still believe it was that simple. You say coincidence and it doesn’t trouble you in the least but the word coincidence scares me and fills me with horror.”
   “Why? Coincidences are usually nice things like bumping into a mate  you haven’t seen for ages just when you were thinking about how nice it would be to seem him again.”

   “Yeah but do you understand them, how they work and why?”

   “Well, not really, they just happen don’t they. It’s a good feeling though, makes you feel kind of spiritual I would say.”

   “But what if they were bad coincidences? Not bumping into a friend but into somebody who can’t stand you, and not just sometimes but every time you go out, every time you go out something totally improbably bad happens to you. Like your best friend gets killed in a car accident just when you were out the night before having the best time you’ve ever had with them or a bank error has caused you not to have your account credited with your wages and at that very moment your sister begs you to lend her some money because she’s in serious financial trouble.”

“Yeah but I’m not sure that heavy shit happens that often.”

   “It’s happening to me now Jake, and it happens every day.”

   “Shit!”

   “Something’s out to get me and it’s not of this world, some other power is messing with  me and I’ve no idea why.”

   “God I don’t know what to say. Is there anything I can do?”

   “Yeah there is actually.”

   “What? Anything I can do?”

   “Get pissed with me, lets get rolling drunk.”

   “Is that all?”

   “Hey it’ll mean a lot to me, while I was away I couldn’t even trust my drinking buddies.”

We walked through the car-park of the Boot, the duke-box was playing a song I didn’t recognise but which seemed to be significant to Ollie as he gave me a look which seemed to say ‘here we go again’.

The pub was empty when we went inside and Ollie seemed to be looking around furtively, he gave me a resigned look to say that it wouldn’t last and that soon the bar would be full.

However we sat there and two pints and a couple of games of pool later, the pub was still as bare as it had been when we went inside. A little later I remembered something he said and while I was lining up the black I asked him.

   “How come you couldn’t trust your mates in Japan?”

He gazed at the black ball I was preparing to pocket, and he shrugged.    

   “Oh I don’t know it’s the coincidence thing again it scared the shit out of me. I would be mulling over my pint and perhaps thinking about how Spurs were getting on back home when my friend would suddenly start talking about football and how his favourite team was Spurs, I thought he was reading my mind at first and I nearly went mad but then I realised that it was just a coincidence, a creepy scary and viciously orchestrated coincidence.”

I struck the black side on and sent it firmly the corner pocket with a satisfying clunk.

   “Nice shot!” Ollie  said.

 

I started racked up the balls for another game, and tried to cheer him up.

   “Maybe it wasn’t so viciously orchestrated, I mean maybe it was a good thing that your friend shared the interest with you and that you had something to talk about.”

   “Well I don’t know about that, it just freaks me out. Then there’s the weird crowds that seem to be watching me all the time, I don’t know if that’s some kind of coincidence too.”

   “Well they haven’t followed you in here, maybe this place is too dingy for ‘em.”

He smiled, “Nice idea, I think maybe I’ll stay here then.”

   “About these crowds that are watching you, have you tried to talk to them.”

   “I might seem strange but no I haven’t.”

   “How come?”

   “Well I don’t know, I just don’t think it would serve anything, besides they sicken me I’ve nothing to say to them.”

   “So when did all this start?”

   “Oh I don’t know, it was kind of a gradual thing. I thought I was becoming more spiritual, like Jung talked about synchronicity and apophenia.”

   “What’s apophenia when it’s at home?”

   “It’s pattern recognition, or at least it’s a kind of mania that leads you to see meaning  behind the most otherwise insignificant things. I think in small doses it can be nice, like the coincidence thing but in larger doses it can drive you mad. I’m a case in point. Still I’m not the only one, Stravinsky it is said suffered from delusions of apophenia.

Jung’s own example was of a beetle flying into his room while a patient was describing a dream about a scarab. The scarab is an Egyptian symbol of rebirth, he noted. Therefore, the propitious moment of the flying beetle indicated that the transcendental meaning of both the scarab in the dream and the insect in the room was that the patient needed to be liberated from her excessive rationalism.”

A couple of people came into the bar, I eyed them suspiciously, seemingly Ollie was contagious and I almost considered them as his weird stuffing people but then again they were just blokes like me and him. A couple of moments later a group of four of five people came into the bar.

   “Is this your fan-club here?”

   “Could be, they arrive in small groups gradually until there’s at least a dozen of them, they don’t actually talk to each other but somehow they know each other or at least they’re involved in something together.”

I went over and talked to this guy and told him that my friend thinks he went to school with him and wants to talk to him. They got chatting and Ollie kind of realised that he was just a normal bloke, the problem was that he hadn’t spoken to anyone for such a long time, not a proper old chin-wag like, that he started to get kind of manic.  Ollie talked to me and seemed to be cured of his delusions.

   “I don’t know what to say, maybe things have been getting to me lately, well for these last five years or so. I guess I’ve had no stability, hell I haven’t had a girlfriend for the last year, maybe the loneliness got to me.”

   “It probably makes more sense than this business about people following you and what was the other thing?”
   “The stuffing people?”

   “Yeah!”

   “I’ve just been somewhere totally different for the past year or so, Jesus I feel like I’m just waking up out of a bad-dream. I feel such a fool.”

   “Hey well it’s all over now.”

   “I think coming back to see you is the best decision I’ve ever made in my life, thanks mate.”

He hugged me with warmth and he seemed very full of grateful emotion. I was really happy, still puzzled how my friend could have lost the plot for so long but relieved now that he was better and I was pleased to have been able to help him in such a simple way, just by being there. To celebrate we decided to keep up our day’s festivities into the night when we ended up our favourite haunt of years gone by, a very small but very funky little nightclub called Swift’s.

We had a few drinks and danced to all the cheesy hits of our youth.

The last time I saw him he was dancing opposite me to some cheesy old Brit pop song that seemed to take about 10 years off us and reminded us of good old times. There was a surge on the dance floor and I saw a couple of girls dancing next to him and he started talking to one of them, or at least shouting at them, you know how it is in night clubs, impossible to have a conversation, she was a pretty pixie faced little thing, just his type. Whatever  he was bawling into her ears seemed to be making her smile and I figured that he probably wouldn’t be going home alone tonight.

He seemed to be floating away from me across the dance-floor, and there was another surge and more people came onto the dance floor increasing the number of people between me and Ollie. The Specials came on, Night Club, he’d started dancing again with the girl, they were pogoing up and down, I kept seeing his head pop up above the others.

He seemed really to be enjoying himself, almost like old times, then I didn’t see his head pop up anymore, he must have stopped dancing. I found myself pushed out to the edge of the dance-floor and I took a seat. That’s the last time I ever saw him.

 All I know is he’s gone again, maybe he’ll come back one day maybe he won’t. I don’t know where he is, no-one does, his mother doesn’t know what happened to him because she called me to get news. It’s strange. Anything could have happened to him.  I feel strange, maybe one day there’ll be a knock on my door when I least expect it. When I’ve almost forgotten about him and I’m having my cornflakes, he’ll show up with more incredible stories.  The only problem now is that in my heart of hearts somehow I really don’t expect it, not at all.

That’s really all I know.

Illuminati mind control 101

Illusion delusion illumination and confusion.

I admit frankly to going through a mystical sequence  and am happy to say that I’ve still got a full set of marbles and all screws are still fully tightened. However it took a lot of luck to get me through it. But when I look at the word ‘luck’ I find it way too small and casual a word to really describe how I feel about having escaped from the darkened underworld into the light of true awareness. The word ‘grace’ seems a little better, but that too has negative associations of being part of God’s chosen elite or something.
I will freely admit that for one brief moment I entertained the possibility that maybe I was ‘dead’. 

In my disordered state I imagined that perhaps a lot of what had subsequently happened was not real but the result of a kind of purgatory. Many puzzling and seemingly miraculous things had happened to me during the years, strange and unaccountable coincidences which at the time seemed rather cool but looking back at them in my new state I wondered if perhaps they had been too good to be true, and that is they too were somehow part of some unreal fantasy that I have been involved in without quite knowing it.

One time I had arranged to go to the Phoenix festival in 1996 with my girlfriend but my ticket had somehow disappeared, I since learned that a rather unpleasant flatmate had stolen it, but to be honest, even his act of thievery helped me find the way to something extraordinary. Searching desperately around the flat the ticket was nowhere to be found but my girlfriend was all ready to leave and so it could be put off no longer and off we drove down to the festival. We arrived, somewhat perplexed about my ticketless state and there seemed to be none available to buy at the site. We camped up because fortunately the camp site and access to the festival ground itself was in a separate area and my ticket was required only to enter the music arena. So we hung around, while time ticked on, the festival had started it appeared that I would miss Frank Sidebottom. Another band I really liked ‘Gene’ were due to play and it appeared they too would be missed. My girlfriend and her friends started getting restless and said that they would have to go into the festival, they had been very sympathetic to my plight but they had to start enjoying their weekend. I got up from our camping spot and decided to go on a disconsolate little wander around the campsite, not quite knowing why or where I was going, I imagined that by the time I got back my friends would be in the festival and at least they would be having a good time. So I wandered around and saw something shiny on the ground, I had that feeling when you maybe find a £5 note, you can’t quite understand what it’s doing there and you can’t quite believe it, but all the same you pick it up and put it in your pocket. I kicked at this shiny thing on the ground and stooped to turn it over. It was two full tickets to the Phoenix festival. This was strange! At this moment in time I became convinced of a deeper hidden significance to life and that this was no mere coincidence. I returned to the tent with the tickets to the delight of my friends. I promptly sold one of the tickets to a tout and made enough money to ensure we would have a great weekend. One of my friends observed sagely ‘it looks like this is your festival!’ Not only that but I arrived in perfect timing to see Gene and not only that but it turned out that Frank Sidebottom has rescheduled his appearance to the following day.

It really was ‘my festival’. It was almost as if, going for that aimless stroll around the tents I had asked a question or searched for a sign and one had arrived just in time.

There are two subsequent times when I had asked for a sign and they too had duly arrived. One was sat in a cinema in France with my then French girlfriend and we were watching a film. I was feeling a little insecure about the future and my own life, I didn’t have a job nor could see much hope of any kind of meaningful profession for myself; I used to suffer from occasional bouts of melancholy and would need something to set me off in the right direction again. So I stared at the screen and was surprised to see my own name and surname appear on the screen in front of me as part of the film plot. It was a kind of message that you are in the right place at the right time. Always an encouraging thought.

A similar thing happened when I was about to start university again to complete a post graduate course. I was standing exactly on the corner of a certain crossroads in London I again felt this trepidation for the future and this irrational worry that maybe I had not made the best of my life so far and that I had missed some opportunity here or there. The kind of existential worries we all have I suppose. Though I used to take them to extremes and get quiet upset by such irrational thoughts, and so I asked God for a sign. I walked a few meters and looked up and saw my own name, Christian AND surname, written as the name of the estate agents. It was weird, but proved beyond reasonable doubt that the science of coincidence surpasses by far our limited understanding.

I took this as a friendly sign from some pan dimensional power. Hopefully God or someone close to him. But I hardly think I got carried away in this instance. I mean, if you had asked for a sign and at that very moment you look up to find a variation of your own name just in front of you, you might be forgiven for feeling a little bit excited and rather happy. And so this is how I seek to live my life, with an awareness that God or something positive, is watching over me and trying to connect to me on some level. I would be reluctant to totally connect with this unknown force while on earth because it would make life rather a strange experience, I think perhaps this is what happens during the ‘gnosis’ experience, that basically your consciousness breaks through to the other side (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) but , since my rather frightening and uncomfortable ‘gnosis’ adrenochrome experience, I feel that this is not a state we should reach for while alive and living in physical material bodies. 

I feel that although earth is a fairly interesting place with plenty of potential and lots going on, it is not a very spiritually aware place and the first place a fully spiritually enlightened person would end up would be, if they were lucky, a psychiatric home, if unlucky, torn apart by the mob. Though perhaps times are finally changing. With people like David Icke who, although famously publicly ridiculed on live TV in front of millions, he was torn apart by the mob but he survived the experience to now become a potent force for a new generation of truth seekers who are actually willing to hear strange and unlikely sounding stories, and look at the evidence, rather than let a robotised TV brain dictate their reality. One thing is for sure. We want better and, maybe, if we are willing to open our minds to new possibilities, we might get it.

What I learned in this state was that I was far from being the only one to exist in some kind of ongoing delusional state. It takes one to know one as they say and with my changed brain chemistry I became aware that the world is quite a different place to what I had hitherto believed.

The thousand daily symbols and signs we walk past everyday and think nothing of, now shone and burned with a dark and sinister significance. For example, I noticed the logo on ‘3’ mobile phone and something dawned on me. Why did my phone have a 666 sigil on it? How long had I lived in a world in which the Biblical mark of the Beast was right under our noses and I hadn’t noticed it before? My new awareness wasn’t restricted to noticing symbols around me, but something else had happened and I noticed that in this new perceptual world I wasn’t alone. Some very strange things started happening and suddenly I found myself living in a Jason Bourne style wonderland. I went out of the house for a jog through London, as I passed through the financial city I went down an alley way nearby the main offices of Merrill Lynch, I stopped to catch my breath and suddenly three suited business men turned to face me as I walked down the alley, looking straight at me they said in unison ‘Join us!’. No joking. I knew they were masons because prior to this my tutor had put pressure on me to join the masons. I had been told I ‘wasn’t square enough’. I knew what this meant because since my adventures in Japan I had learned to recognise Masonic key words and insinuations. In retrospect I managed to make sense of all this, just as I had made sense of the strange indoctrination course in the remote French village, but at the time, having people I’d never met before in the street directly addressing me to ‘join them’ was rather surprising and I wondered what strange parallel universe I had strayed into.

During the daylight hours my new ‘illuminated’ consciousness seemed to have few drawbacks, I felt slightly trippy and as I said reality had suddenly become a lot more uncertain and unpredictable. Total strangers would appear in the street and suddenly ask me questions, it was weird. People would also look at me and wink knowingly. If I didn’t know better I would say I had entered some kind of communal consciousness, and in the London streets on the outskirts of the financial city, there were a lot of fellow Masonic inmates with whom I was now sharing my new reality. It was very weird. A shopkeeper would see me passing and make a private sign of acknowledgement to me. I’d never seen the man in my life but apparently we had something in common.

Like the film Fight Club, where the nameless Edward Norton character sees total strangers in distant cities acknowledging him and cannot understand it, this is exactly what it’s like to enter the freemason domain. When your consciousness undergoes the change in perception there must be some undetectable character trait or mannerism, or even a way you walk, that makes you recognisable by your brothers. Personally speaking, as a private person who values his individuality, I wasn’t quite sure I fancied the idea of suddenly being a part of this secret community within a community, particularly as one of the things I liked about London was its ability for one to remain anonymous and vanish into part of the crowd. 

I am someone who can think of nothing worse than having neighbours one is obliged to talk to everyday and people who notice your comings and goings. However it seems that certain members of this group, people you’ve never met before in your life, know as much about your private business as you yourself do, as I found in Tokyo when my employer would hold imaginary phone conversations in the next room mentioning things about me and my life while pretending it had nothing to do with me. Subsequently while working at a Catholic school some months later another mason was talking aloud to no one in particular, but was using coded language and advising me to join the masons, he said: ‘we know all about you so you’d better join or else’ without actually addressing me specifically. Again I had never met the man before, but it seemed my reputation proceeds me wherever these creepy crawly masons are lurking about. In another school a mason addressed me and cryptically asked me: ‘are you a rebel of are you part of the Empire?’. Of course I answered ‘I’m a rebel’ and he said ‘well I’m part of the Empire.’ I didn't know if this was an attempt at intimidation of some kind, but it was genuinely difficult to be intimidated by this rather disgusting and fruity looking fat man who could well have been the local school paedophile. There was something disturbing about the fruity smile that played on his face whenever he was near the kids.

So anyway my life had generally been rather strange for at least 10 years, with strange and unaccountable occurrences and some often inexplicable things happening to me. And so in seeking to explain what was happening to me these two films: Vanilla Sky and Jacob’s Ladder seemed to offer something like an explanation. Vanilla Sky is near identical to Jacob’s Ladder but instead of merely offering the solution to the riddle that weird things are happening to you, things which go against what most people consider ‘reality’ therefore you are no longer living in reality, in fact you are dead but don’t know it yet, it suggests a radical solution. I will not attempt to disguise the fact that as a result of the Masonic attention and the mystical enlightenment I had undergone, I would say I had entered a borderline psychotic state. As I have previously endeavoured to show, the mystical Illumination and result of Masonic initiation is the psychotic schizoid state due to the excess production of adrenalin by the body which becomes adrenochrome as it breaks down in the body.

Vanilla Sky features a character played by Tom Cruise who is successful and generally envied by his friends until one day, his girlfriend decides to drive her car with Aames inside, off a bridge in a fit of jealous rage, leaving him terribly disfigured. His life becomes a nightmare without his good looks and he slips into despair, until one day he wakes up to find the girl he loves take him in hand and say she wants to help him. However the reality around him starts to break-down, he hears voices, music playing in his head, people act strangely and even people transform into other people while he is with them. Ok. Like Jacob’s Ladder, some of his symptoms such as hearing and seeing things which are not there, and reading too much into his environment and making erroneous connections are all symptoms of a psychotic episode or schizophrenia. In particular Jake Singer from Jacob’s Ladder is enrolled in a programme of veteran care, is it not more reasonable to assume that his odd hallucinations are the result of post traumatic stress disorder rather than the result of him being dead and trapped in purgatory?

There is a curious branch of ancient Greek philosophy called Solipsism whose main contention is that the there is no objective way to prove the existence of anything else in the world apart from yourself. That one can only be sure of oneself and that the whole reality around could be some kind of unreal fantasy. This train of thought has been attacked and discredited over the years of course because it is very close to a dangerously psychotic line of reasoning, but the fact remains that if you tell yourself that all of the stimuli available to the bodily sense may also be faked and could equally be a fantasy, then the imperviousness of this delusion would be complete. Someone in the grip of such a line of thought, who believed everyone else was fake and didn’t really exist, would be total.


So the solution offered to someone who may be having slightly unusual experiences and indeed may be developing schizophrenia, as outlined in the film Vanilla Sky, would be to run around shouting out ‘Tech Support’ at the top of your voice, before convincing yourself that none of your friends are real and throwing yourself of a tall building. Anyone who has researched schizophrenia to some small degree will know that death by jumping from high buildings is the most common cause of suicide amongst schizophrenics.

John Joyce and Simon Fleminger in their research paper entitled Suicide Attempts by Jumping found that from the period of September 1990 to November 1994 there were 962 admissions to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel via the London Air Ambulance. Of these 77 were identified as being involved in some form of self-harm of these a large proportion: 61, self harmed though jumping from a height, 51 already had case notes and a history of various psychological disturbances. In their study a clear link is drawn between psychological disturbances and suicide attempts by jumping.

Indeed, research carried out by the university hospital of psychiatry in Bern Switzerland, indicates that:
“Persons who jumped from heights in general were more likely to suffer from schizophrenia than those who used other methods.”

In the film Vanilla Sky we see how David Aames becomes convinced that neither Doctor McCabe nor his friend Brian Shelby are real. There is no doubt that this is a relatively common schizoid delusion which leads him to throw himself from the top of a very tall building in order to end the virtual reality programme he his involved in. Such a line of delusion, that someone is involved in a ‘virtual reality’ simulation of one kind or another has always been a common symptom of schizophrenia. Some schizophrenics think they are ‘dead’ or in a hell of some kind, usually this thought comes to them as a result of guilt about something they did or something that was done to them in the past and which they find impossible to put behind them. They often believe they are being punished in some way. I spoke to schizophrenia sufferers on the streets of Brighton and found this attitude that they feel they have been ‘bad people’ and that they somehow deserve to be on the streets as part of their purgatory. It is very very hard to break such a way of thinking, particularly as the human brain tends to select the evidence in the world around them to suit and support the conclusions they have already reached. 

For example, somebody who thinks all men are pigs or a person who had been hurt by women, will actively search for examples which fit their prejudices in order to make them feel correct in their beliefs. Other evidence which does not suit their ideas will either not be noticed or be discarded as anomalous. Not only this but you must surely have noticed that if you are feeling insecure or a little sensitive, then suddenly the world seems more threatening and dangerous. Or conversely, if you’re in love then the world suddenly appears a much more sympathetic place and wherever you look you see only happy couples and happy contented people. If you’re happy you attract good things, if you’re feeling depressed or down you will attract things which will only deepen your condition. Some people call this ‘the law of attraction’, and it is true to some extent that we do create our own reality. On one level this is nearly a mystical phenomenon which defies explanation by our current scientific methods, on another level it is totally obvious that say a happy friendly person has more chance of making friends and living in a happier reality than say a depressed and reserved person has of making new friends and meeting people.

So my question is what is the purpose of making films like this? Let’s forget the science fiction storyline for a minute because virtual reality of the type simply doesn’t exist, but mental illnesses where crazed maniacs suffocate their girlfriends (as in the Tom Cruise film Vanilla Sky) because they don’t recognise them anymore, DO exist.

Or people running through public places shouting ‘I wanna wake-up!’ or ‘It’s a nightmare!’ or other seemingly incoherent rantings, also exist. Is this film a hidden way of managing potentially dangerous schizophrenics by encouraging them to kill themselves and hence no longer be a danger to society. Who knows? It seems unlikely perhaps so there may be a second possibility for the sudden trend in these odd sort of metaphysical films.

The effect on myself of these films was to prime me for the Luciferian awareness of the masons. In particular a scene from Vanilla Sky is one of the key scenes and is the first time the viewer and indeed David Aames himself, become aware that things are really not as they seem at all. At this point the viewer still doesn’t know about the virtual reality world he is trapped in since signing up with the Life Extension corporation (whose curious jingle ‘I have the universe inside me’ evokes many of the metaphysical beliefs of many of the world’s cults and Gnostic mystery religions). What we see in this scene takes place on two levels simultaneously, the character Edmund Ventura (played by Noah Taylor) is ‘tech support’ for the lucid dream which Aames is involved in. Ventura introduces himself in the quasi mystical manner of the new-age self-help guru. 

It is as if we the viewer are being addressed directly by Ventura, and the viewer awaits this moment as the great unveiling that will finally explain what has been happening all along, not just to Aames but perhaps, to certain of us who have had encounters with strange metaphysical events and Masonic theatrics:

‘You must overcome your fears, regain control, take a hold of your life again.. What if I were to tell you that you can take control of all of this, everything? Even me. David look at all these people, seems as though they’re just all chatting away, doesn’t it? Nothing to do with you? And yet, Maybe they’re only here because you wanted them to be here you are their God! not only that but you can make them obey you, or even destroy you.’

It seems clear that Venture is trying to implant a delusion in Aames mind. Again I would ask you not to accept the plotline of a futuristic technology which can create an artificial reality because this is simply a fantasy, but instead, ask yourself, in the similar manner of Jacob’s Ladder and the soldier traumatised by war and having strange hallucinations, look at what elements of this situation could be real and stage managed for various purposes. While I lived in Tokyo and was being recruited to join the freemasons and also become a spy as detailed in a chapter 3, I would also find that I was more or less constantly shadowed. I would often go into an empty bar or restaurant, and within about 10 minutes I would have people sitting all around me, or if in a bar, the place would suddenly fill with people who seemed to be watching me. It happened so consistently and repeatedly that it wasn’t mere coincidence but it was an example of Masonic targeting and shadowing of selected individuals. 

If you can accept my claim that I was being recruited by the secret services then it stands to reason that the first thing they would do would be to be aware of my movements and secondly, to give me the feeling that I no longer had any privacy in order that I eventually learn to police myself and act with the discretion required of a spy. This is what they do and forms just a part of their overall training of secret operatives. They have to convince the spy that everything they do is watched and that they can have no secrets from the organisation they are working for.

Could not the above scene be recreated with Masonic operatives filling the restaurant and could not the character of Ventura be a Masonic recruitment agent. Particularly if Aames’ movements were fairly regular and he tended to visit the same bars, it would be quite a simple thing for a group to gradually descend on the restaurant and give the impression of being discrete and unconnected individuals but in fact they had all been called to this restaurant in order to initiate this character Aames into a new form of consciousness. Namely the consciousness that ‘you are a God’. This is how they do things and have always done it since the earliest mystery cults. 

They implant delusions and because of the power of the human brain, what a person sincerely believes with all their heart and soul becomes totally real for them. I have no doubt that the Kings of Europe and before them the Roman Emperors, but particularly the ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, underwent a similar experience which changed their outlook of the nature of reality and made them become convinced that they were Gods. Many schizophrenics believe they have God like power, and the distortions of reality which the misfiring neurons in their mind produce, convince them this is true. But what of the ancient Egyptians and Kings who actually possessed the genuine temporal power over hundreds of thousands of humans, would not it be almost difficult to believe that they weren’t special in some way?

But how far does this go today? What about Presidents and Prime-Ministers, even film stars and pop singers. Do they secretly harbour delusions of grandeur which explain their exalted status?

Do some of these stars of our world share the same problem as Tom Cruise’s character who admits ‘I don’t know what’s real!’? Are our leaders living in a world of their own ‘made-to-order’ delusions? Does this explain why a person like George W Bush can claim to speak to God and work for him? Just how nutty are these people?

‘Can you tell the difference between dreams and reality?’ Dr McCabe asks Aames, again this is a common symptom of schizophrenia. McCabe is, quite reasonably, treating Aames as if he were a schizophrenic. Which without the futuristic storyline of virtual reality, is exactly what he appears to be. So again, any schizophrenics watching this movie, particularly the moment when Ventura seems to directly address the audience, may find themselves following the further suggestions in the film, to the final moment of the film where the only way to resolve their problem and get rid of their symptoms is to face what Ventura calls the ‘true moment of choice’ and kill themselves and ‘wake up’ to the ultimate and more authentic reality.

What got me through the madness was a combination of things, primarily the awareness that something strange had happened to my mind and that if something in me has changed then there was no reason it couldn't be changed back. My dabbling with LSD as a student at university told me that somehow my body was producing dopamine and psychoactive compounds. At one point I thought I was being spiked by someone but I cast that idea away as being truly paranoid and I got smart and am here hanging around to expose the weird masons and their creepy mind-fuck techniques.  

Mind Control: A personal story.

The first steps on a very strange trail.

I have rather a privileged and fortunate position regarding my ability to comment on the cult known as freemasonry and the social control collective known as the Illuminati.  My family on my father’s side have the cursed royal blood originating from the Yorkshire based Fitzwilliam family at Wentworth. This was something that my nana always went on about, and how someone told her father that our family would always be ‘looked after’, needless to say like so many promises from those in the establishment and in a position to confer unlimited wealth, it never materialised. And so I forgot all about our aristocratic pretensions until some very strange things started happening to me.

Looking back on this period in my life feels like Alice returning to the Wonderland, albeit rather a frightened and uneasy one, I didn’t quite have the natural fearless authority of Alice as she negotiated the underworld.  I was working as an English teacher at a very small language school in the French Massif Central, when some six months after starting I was enrolled on a course called a BAFA (Brevet, formation animateur ) which basically allows you to supervise children and run holiday camps, basically it’s a kind of scout leader qualification and an uncanny number of French young people above the age of sixteen seem to have one. In my instance the course took place in a very remote rural village deep in the volcanic mountains of the Massif central. The course was to last 8 days and was what they call ‘intensive’ which is a rather ambiguous new euphemism for a particular peculiarly personally invasive kind of training. I have undertaken several of these so called ‘intensive’ courses over the years but the BAFA was my very first and it was quite a shock, it was in fact an initiation. The first step of a descending pathway that would have led me to hell and the life of a slave robotised by terror, had I not finally woken up to where I was being taken.

Initially I had no suspicions that there was something unusual about the course, I arrived with my bag packed with changes of clothes, towels, and the bathroom products I would need for the 8 day duration. I was shown to my dormitory which I shared with 3 others. Things started taking a turn for the unusual after the third day. The course was very demanding and the amount of information was intended to overload the mind. Each morning a new time table would be put up on the white board, the complexity of which was quite mind blowing and it was necessary to study the time table for about half an hour each morning in order to know what was happening that day and where. Indeed one session of study wasn’t enough and it was quite impossible to copy any details from the timetable as it was simply too complicated so one constantly felt throughout the course that one was perhaps not quite in the right place and one constantly wondered if one had missed some information or instruction from the timetable. In addition to the courses there were assignments to complete and simulation activities to prepare. In all it was very exhausting, the day began at six in the morning for no very good reason at it seemed that lectures and activities seemed to last all evening. There was no time alone that wasn’t spent working on something or studying something relevant to the course.

 

Looking back the first peculiarity of the course, when I first noticed something ‘special’ about the training was an activity where we, the thirty odd trainees were in a room and instructed to move about the room without bumping into any of the other people, we were told to adopt a special walk as we crossed and circled the room. The facilitator then made a sound, not of words but more a collection of vowels, like a mantra, which we were to repeat as we walked around the room. During this experience, about 5 minutes in, I started to feel unusual, slightly light headed but happy, almost ecstatic. I realised then that there was slightly more to this training that I had initially considered. It seemed that here was a kind of transcendental technique, or at the very least, a way to relax people.  I recently communicated with a person who was involved in the Illuminati through her grandmother and husband, who informed me that her grandmother had taken her to the lodge where there was a strange kind of music being played while they walked around and around the lodge while a variety of Hebrew characters were flashed to them. It seems to me that the intention was to create a mild trance in order that the symbols permeate the subconscious mind in order for use and recall at a later date.

After this experience I felt a closer bond with the people around me and relaxed my guard and considered to myself that I might actually enjoy the training. And so the first objective had been achieved by the trainers, namely that my guard had been dropped and I had begun to trust those around me (not always a good idea in these fraught times, there are predators everywhere) and I accepted the validity of the course and considered that it would do me some good. In retrospect the course did me an awful lot of good but certainly not in the way intended.

The programme stepped up and rather than a feeling that I was getting closer to my fellow trainees  (following the trance inducing activity of the previous evening) I awoke up to find the pressure had been doubled and there was even more work to be done. I also found that the people I shared a dorm with and people who it seemed I was getting closer too, were suddenly cold, almost robotic, in their speech and interaction with me. This confused me at the time and, as was intended, led me to question myself, analyse my behaviour, and ask myself it there was something I had done to upset them, or indeed if there was some fundamental failing in my personality that made people treat me in this way. And so I became further disempowered  by  concerning myself with the opinions of the other trainees.  Later on in this book I will seek to concretise an awareness in how these techniques work by deconstructing the film Shutter Island. 

Some days later it became clear that a full psychological test was being carried out and my reactions and demeanour analysed and noted, the programme and behaviour of the other ‘trainees’ being modulated in line with the needs of the test and my responses. That evening we all went out for a drink in one of the local cafe bars, the place was surprisingly crowded for a midweek evening in a remote French village but at the time I thought nothing of it, everyone seemed pretty determined to get drunk for some reason, I didn’t particularly fancy taking part in their heroic endeavours as I have previously explained, the odd aloofness of most of the trainees made me feel uncomfortable and I didn’t much fancy getting drunk in unfamiliar company. However a drink was offered to me and I asked for a verre of rouge, that is, a glass of red wine.  As soon as I asked for the drink there was an odd moment, everybody looked at me and there were noises of disapproval, I felt myself turning red and again examining myself and wondering what I had done wrong this time.

Needless to say the evening passed uncomfortably with people seeming to ignore my attempts at conversation and my being more or less ostracised. These methods are the tried and tested methods used in order to psychological disrupt someone in order eventually to break them completely. Break their sense of self, independence and pride. The new age refers to this as breaking the down ego, in order apparently that we achieve some kind of enlightenment. The techniques are as ancient as mankind itself, and harks back to shamanism and the secrets of the ancient Egyptians, through to the Greek mystery schools such as the Eleusinian mysteries where ancient allegories were re-enacted and sex and murder was actually part of the rites which were witnessed by the inductee and who was sworn to secrecy about what he had seen under pain of death. Then Roman subterranean cults such as Mithraism were the initiate would be installed in a special underground pit while a full grown bull was placed above the pit on a grille and was slaughtered releasing the blood into the underground pit. This is one of the few secrets of Mithraism to have slipped through the millennia aged secrets of the cult and no doubt modern equivalents of these rites are still carried out today, particularly by wiccan societies and especially by Satanist groups.  The effect of these rites were to terrorise and profoundly unsettle the mind of the initiate and set the way for a gradual change in their behaviour  and perception of reality itself. The modern day secrets of the freemasons were passed on from the Knight Templars and led to the rebirth of empire, signalled by the classical laurel leaves whose symbol harks back to the Roman empire and whose symbol has been successfully rewoven into the fabric (literally in the instance of the Henri Lloyd logo) of modern society.

To resume the story, later that evening  we returned back to the centre, somewhat worse for wear, when one of my roommates took me to one side and brought out a marijuana joint and asked me if I wanted some. A ploy of entrapment and compromising the target frequently employed by the secret societies. I smoked some of the proffered joint and we returned to the centre. To my surprise a last minute seminar had been arranged, only somehow I had not been informed so when I returned to the centre I found everyone in their seats and left me wondering why I had somehow been excluded from being informed about it. As I sat down, in that characteristic self conscious, self negating way that one does when one is acutely embarrassed at entering a seemingly important meeting late and unprepared, I saw all eyes turn to me and I felt a sudden light headedness, the strangest thing of all was that I heard a voice commenting on how I was feeling. The light headedness became as fuzziness of self and I had the impression that somehow, by some mysterious psychological process, I was merging with the group and losing my idea of self. I heard somebody say in French: ‘he’s feeling it now, he’s joining us’. I knew they were referring to me and at that moment a proverbial penny dropped and I realised that all was not as it seemed and I realised I had no idea at all what was going on or what I was involved with. At that point my sense of self reasserted itself and rejected the thought of becoming a part of this seeming group awareness. This seemed to be the evening of the great revealing  and the slight sense of embarrassment and unease I had been feeling turned more to terror as my time in the centre deteriorated into a voyage to the Twilight Zone.

Back in the dorm I was feeling hemmed in on all sides, ‘trapped in a square’ as the masons have it, a phrase which refers to someone who is totally under control of his brother masons and can turn to no one for help or assistance. The psychological results of this situation where the individual can no longer make choices of his own which will not somehow be detrimental to himself, where the free will and ability to act independently become completely dissolved, and that person loses his focus and his ability to undertake any task that he is not specifically told to do. He becomes a literal slave and his own psyche is his gaoler. Any attempts to break the programming and assert his own wishes result in a feeling of disorientation, weakness and panic, until he gives up the attempt and settles back into the role of slave.

The initial stages of this condition were starting to develop in me. I assumed however that perhaps by listening to some music on my Walkman I would be able to relax and feel a little less strung-out. What I heard as l put my headphones on and tuned in the radio shocked me and left me in a such a state of nervous tension that I could not sleep at all that night, but instead lay there fearful of what their next move would be. There was a looped techno style backing track, it sounded oddly sinister like some kind of music that one would imagine would be used in CIA brainwashing, while a voice over repeated again and again ‘Open the files on the FBI! Keep it a secret! Keep it a secret!’ as I tuned throughout the frequencies of my radio I found the same track on every station, it was hard to decide whether I was going mad or not at this stage but I knew what I was hearing at the time and knew that it was real enough. Final confirmation was given to me as I came out of my bed and saw the look on one of my dorm-mate’s faces who was also listening to his walkman, the look on his face was of pure guilt, as if he was knowingly involved in an unpleasant trick being played on myself and which he knew to be wrong.

 I have since heard from other sources that other people have been sent on similar training courses and were told to listen to their radios at a specific  time of day, they have reported similar strange radio programmes being broadcast, doubtlessly by a local transmitter especially for the purpose. In hindsight I suspect this is a fairly routine way for masons to recruit other members but at the time I suspected I was slowly becoming involved in the French secret services as the messages on the radio broadcast were decidedly critical of American hegemony. What came from this experience more than fear was my sense of anger and how I had been tricked into coming here, clearly I would not have come had I known that I was being involved in some strange initiatory conditioning program.

I was furiously angry yet I maintained composure and even a pleasant demeanour to the strange characters around me. The key to the experience of the course was that the people one assumed to be fellow trainees, the ones you bantered with, slept and ate with, were in fact the real trainers. They were there to break your old character and help mould a new one. Eventually I decided to leave, although I was in some fear that it might not be so simple to extricate myself after so much of their method had been exposed to me. However I made my intentions clear to the overseer who offered me some kind of deal, I was in no mood to compromise with these creeps and so I refused without even asking what the details of the deal would be.

I returned home feeling strung out, annoyed and slightly unstable. I felt like something was going on around me but I didn’t know what. At one point I visited the supermarket and found a couple of French women pointing at me down the biscuit aisle and saying ‘he’s lost his mind, just look at him’. Half of me attributed this to some kind of ‘follow up’ to the BAFA course, a sort of targeted victimisation, while the other half didn’t know what to make of it at all.

Within a few weeks I had put the delusion that I was being recruited for some organisation behind me, and I told myself that  the reason the course had become so unpleasant was because I had smoked that joint. Still it wasn’t my fault, it was entrapment, so with residual feelings of anger and a feeling that my civil rights had been violated by these jokers, I wrote to the Minister for Youth and Sports a detailed letter explaining my grievances. Some weeks later I received a reply and an interview with the local government representative. Prior to this meeting I had imagined that the stress and insidious nature of the course had made me go half mad and started imagining all sorts of delusions: secret agent delusions, elite organisation delusion and another line of thought that I couldn’t quite define, it seemed like I had undergone some kind of death and rebirth and that life would never be the same again, indeed it was hard to know what ‘life’ was at all and what the nature of the world I lived in was all about. This final thought process led me at times to believe that all the things I had taken for granted as real and authentic, such as people places and relationships, might not be what they appeared and that something odd was going on behind the scenes, someone or something unknowable and invisible was orchestrating meetings and coincidences in a rather unsettling manner.

At the time also I was watching a variety of metaphysical movies which seemed to deal with the strange experiences and people I had met, a film such as Jacob’s Ladder for example, which will be discussed along with the true purpose of many Hollywood  movies in a later chapter. These films served only to fuel my delusions even further and I soon started feeling as if I was somehow stuck between two worlds but not at home in either of them.  

Fortunately the meeting, although I was basically tricked out of any right to complain I might have had, helped me immeasurably to get back my natural grounding in reality. Even following the weeks after the course and prior to the interview I was in two minds as to what had really transpired. Part of me found it unbelievable that such a structure could exist and that so many people could be enrolled to take part, the cost must be incredible, I wondered if I had imagined some things and read too much into others. The letter I had angrily written accused the course designers of using Nazi techniques to break the will of the person, not that I knew particularly what Nazi techniques involved, but it seemed about the strongest most righteously indignant invective I could fire at them.

As a result one of the first things he wanted to address was why I had accused them of Nazi techniques, something I have since learned about people and perhaps a most valuable piece of advice for getting through this life experience with a full set of marbles tiddlywinks and without going to jail would be that the best way to lose an argument is to throw it away. By nature I am a person always willing to compromise, almost to the point of surrendering my own opinion and point of view, for the sake of peace and harmony. What happened in the meeting was that the good regional director of the ministry of Youth and Sports had cleverly (although it is a common enough psychological trick) directed the issue away from my complaint and instead wanted me to account for why I had called them Nazis, in my moderating and naive frame of mind I went along with his suggestion that my definition had been excessive and rather than holding my corner, the conciliation genie got hold of me and agreed with him. Straight away I noticed I had lost my case completely, there was a change in the air that spelt out clearly enough that the interview was over and I had thrown in my hand. However, due to God’s grace or some innate good quality in the regional director’s character he finished the interview with something that saved my sanity right there: He said “We don’t do this special type of course for just anybody!’. It was a tacit understanding that there was something going on, that they had modified the course for my own benefit and that they were indeed trying to recruit me for something. It would take about seven years of uncertainty and confusion before I finally discovered what it was.

Some months later I left the association  and the strange secret little rural pocket of France and went up to Paris to undertake another training course. This one was called one of the ‘better’ type of TEFL qualifications and was described as ‘challenging’ and ‘intensive’. Fortunately the BAFA experience had prepared me for what to expect and so I went through the course completely refusing to reveal too much about myself and steadfastly refusing to trust any one of the other so called ‘trainees’.

I decided that I would go through the course and try to see if I could tell who was who. Who were the trainers and who were the real trainees like me. There were approximately 20 other trainees on the course, and I easily spotted the ‘facilitators’ within the group, those who seemed to always hold the ‘right’  view about everything and who the other people supported every time, however the one thing that seemed to identify these facilitators is that there was a certain lack of something in their character. They seemed friendly and could converse easily, they didn’t have horns or the mark of the beast  or any other particular identifying mark but there was something that seemed missing about them. The fact that they were playing a part meant there was a certain lack of passion in them, they just seemed to be rolling along with a program.

Their eyes weren’t expressive of any positive emotion, they seldom laughed and indeed if you are receptive to people’s emotions you would notice a distinguishable sadness in their eyes along with a kind of cynicism. If you ever spot anyone who seems to suggest this to you be very weary that this person may not be what they seem. They seem emotionally closed down. The course lasted one month and ran from 9-5 everyday. There was the option to make it residential but I realised that I would be in a much weaker situation in this instance so I made the rather lengthy commute from my girlfriend’s quiet forest home to the centre of Paris every day. Probably was the only way I could have stuck out the endless hypocrisy and downright deceit and subterfuge of the course. It was galling to find that you were being moulded into being a good teacher using immoral means. Straightaway the course held no joy or interest for me, it was just an endless slog, made bearable only by the opportunity to walk around Paris at lunchtime and the return home to the forest and fine wine and good French food in the evening.

Anyway when the month was up I was informed I had passed the course and immediately I left to work abroad and while at the airport I came across the book that would for the first time would clear up the entire mystery of who these people were and how they could afford to run such a cost intensive course on only a relatively nominal 1000 pounds fee. The book was The Biggest Secret by David Icke and for the first time I became acquainted with the force that had been pursuing me, training me and generally trying to scramble my brains: The Freemasons. It all made sense! It fit perfectly. The relief I felt was enormous! Finally all the uncertainty and fear of going mad, all my delusions had been proven right. I wasn’t deluded, something  genuinely was going on.