It’s a Buddhist thing; when you realise that you are not your body. The proof is that if you were unlucky enough to loose a leg, you remain the same conscious individual; complete. Many people are permanently identified with the meat and bones which they were given to complete a life time. This illusion contributes to a general fear death in the population. But from a spiritual perspective, death is completely safe! For the more spiritually aware, death is merely our energetic body leaving the physical body.

Some of the best evidence for the reality of our non-physical higher Self or Soul, comes from those who have died and come back. These ‘near death experiences’ describe the early stages of the transition we call ‘death’. If we accept this, then it becomes easier to allow the possibility that our soul will enter another body for another life on Earth.

For the Soul, the cast off body feels like a well loved overcoat that is left on a train. But in fact the Soul is more at ease without a body; feeling bliss. Those who describe their near death experience felt reluctant to return, but they were guided to complete what they need to do here.

At a even more subtle level, this world can be experienced as a rough representation of a more sublime parallel dimension, because it is digital hologram. As far fetched as this may sound, contemporary physicists are presenting evidence supporting this theory and Michael Talbot explores it in his book ‘The Holographic Universe’. This dimension is what in the Bible is called Heaven and you would therefore expect there also to be it’s opposite. According to David Icke, there is indeed a malign parallel dimension which has broken the law of non-interference by influencing a Cabal of human institutions with the aim of world domination. In order to know what this Hell would be like it is similar to the film ‘Hunger Games’ and parts of this movie have already started in Gaza and Southern Sudan.

The process of our body growing old also prompts serious reflection on what we really are. Most elders ‘feel’ they are a much younger age than their body. From this we might deduct that the natural process of physical ageing does not affect our Soul. Indeed, if we are open to the idea of life , then we might after death we might give credence to the idea that we leave our bodies every night when we sleep. It is the body that needs to regenerate at night, not the Soul. These experiences outside our bodies we can recall as dreams. The Soul has the wonderful ability to go anywhere, as demonstrated by Saints and Prophets throughout history.

To move from this sublime thought to the modern western world, there is a debate about gender which cast some light on the subject of souls and bodies. Some souls feel to the opposite gender to their body, which might be a memory of a previous life where we might have have a body of the opposite gender. A crude solution is ‘gender reassignment’; physical surgery and chemical manipulation. But just because this is possible it does no mean it is wise, in my view. Psychological and spiritual understanding is more important than appearances and gender roles in society. As is said, ‘know yourself’. In Jungian psychology all men contain a female persona and the reverse in women. Our relationship with our opposite gender characteristics within ourselves will produce inner peace for the Soul, rather than the personal and social conflicts which identification with the body creates.

The body is after all, never a problem in itself. The more honest we can be about our bodies, then the sooner we can be less concerned with self image. In Naturism, men and women walk around naked and enjoy the principles of equality, fraternity and liberty. Problems created by the ‘deadly sin’ of lust are not involved as nudity is not sexual in many contexts. Those who cannot control their lust are likely to be trapped in their bodies and are in a Hell – the other state of consciousness to the Garden of Eden. The terrorist group ISIS as an example of souls in Hell, destroyed ancient statues of the human body in the name of religion, whilst importing devout Muslim ‘brides’ and abusing them mercilessly as sex slaves.

The feelings of ‘shame’ in nakedness that Adam and Eve felt are not natural but are produced by controlling social and religious rules and dogma. These treat every person to be no better than the least. Therefore, everyone is treated as being unable to control their lusts. Islam embraced the rule of tolerance and understanding towards sex and gender equality long before modern liberal societies understood the benefits of this ideal.

The Holy Quran insists on ‘modesty’ in dress. There are no specific ‘dress rules’ so different cultures have decided what is ‘modest’. If modesty is understood to mean ‘covering up’, this has to mean covering the whole body. But where to stop ‘covering up’ is a missing detail in this guidance. Why do men not wear face veils for instance? From a moral perspective, the whole issue of modesty is irrelevant if men and women were to control their lust as is their higher spiritual duty. Surely dress codes serve society best when they express the Divine beauty within and without? The human body was, after all, designed by Allah.

The beauty of the Greek gods wonderfully expresses the human body without shame and self consciousness. These gods are powerful symbols of the complete human condition. The ancient Greek myths and legends describe at a psychological level, how to master one’s Self within a single lifetime.

In a different interpretation, the word ‘modest’ may also or instead, be forbidding displays of high self opinion and excess wealth. Such an interpretation would hit hard in many wealthy Arab countries!

These ideals remind us that we should not be distracted by this physical world because it does not last; only our Souls exist perpetually. Vanity, whatever one’s social rank, is always transient, as in the last lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’;

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings!

Look on my works ye mighty and despair,

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay,

of that colossal wreck, round and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Compared with the fruitless pre-occupations of the Guidance Patrol in modern Iran, inner cleansing and self improvement is the most noble spiritual objective, involving no judgment by or about others.

One of the principle Hermetic laws is that every aspect of creation is male or female. The Alchemists depicted the duality of the Sun and Moon as expressing this. The Sun is the radiant expanding male principle, known as Yang in Eastern philosophy. The presence of the sun gives rise to the reflecting moon, or Yin, which expresses the complimentary feminine characteristic of absorbing, contracting and most importantly, reflecting.

This ability of reflection is what distinguishes humans as unique. Although all of nature is ‘aware’ in various ways and differing degrees, only humans are able to properly ‘reflect’ internally. We can remove ourselves from what we observe. We can be independent observers whilst participating. This ability inspired the scientific method. Through this extraordinary ability we reflect the same characteristic as God or Mind who is after all the ‘Great Observer’.

Without the physical world God cannot know itself. Every galaxy, every human and every atom contains this ‘awareness’ and can create and destroy in the same manner as God or Mind which is knowing itself through human experience in the physical dimension. In this view, matter becomes a difficulty but necessary means to experience of the Divine.

From this stand point we might appreciate that what we call ‘my body’ is no more than aeons of star dust, condensed into biology and energised by Mind. This Divine unity enables an experience which we call ‘life’ although at no point can we ever truly put our finger on it and never will.

‘The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

(almost a palindrome…the art of speaking backwards)

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people’, said Alice. ‘Oh you can’t help that,’ said the cat, ‘we are all mad here.’

…. extract from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

In the film ‘The Life of Brian’, when Brian was lying in a manger in Bethlehem, a group of exotic strangers with tall hats, entered the stable and started to offer him gifts. ‘Go away!’ repeatedly screams his mother. ‘But we come offering gifts,’ the magicians reply. ‘Gifts! Well why didn’t you say before!’

From birth, we are faced with a bewildering world. People are talking a language we do not understand. Later they arrange a religion for us to enter which we also do not understand. Then the poke us off to school to learn stuff we do not understand. Then we are sent off to work, until we are too old to understand. Then the great mystery wakes us up and we return from whence we came. The oddest thing is that we do not question any of this.

There is something that at a certain point in life, we would do well to understand; to look inside the Magi’s hat, so to speak. For most adults are similar to a placid audience about to watch a ‘magic show’. The magician has set up his props and practiced relentlessly until the show is seamless and the deceptions invisible to the untrained eye. The compliant audience follow the narrative and the hand gestures as if they know they have to in order for the deception to work. Sure enough, the final twist is more extraordinary than anyone’s wildest imagination. It’s a form of collective madness, but it’s fun. Like a joke, it gives us a jolt.

Recently, my dear mother died and I had to return to England for her funeral. The day after, I was sitting at London Airport for serveral hours in a somewhat depressed mood. ‘Departures Waiting’ is a compulsive merrygoround of brightly lit shops, overpriced restaurants and swathes of seating. Recently uncomfortable near horizontal chairs have been added in case you are too giddy or drunk to sit up properly. I watched my fellow passengers quizzically, for their high spirits indicated they believed they were ‘off’ on their long wished for, spring holiday in the sun. They imagined themselves sipping drinks on a beach or clubbing until the night wears thin, and had already begun to live the dream. When we arrived on the south coast of Spain, the weather was not as desired. For the next week it was windy, cold and constantly wet. It was weather that fitted my state of mind perfectly and made me think of those now, unhappy holiday makers huddled in their one star hotels playing endless rounds of cards.

‘The world is as it is’ is a simple truth but hard to realise. We tend to imagine the world is something else and mold our imaginations to fit our dream.

Once I stepped into a crowded underground train in London. There were no available seats except for one, on which a man had placed a goldfish in a polythene bag. I asked him to pick up his bag so that I could sit down. He refused saying that if he did that, the goldfish would die. I was not convinced by his conviction as he had clearly moved the fish already to get on the train, so I challenged him. His reply was the same. I decided to run with the surreal unreal. ‘Does the fish have a ticket?’ He didn’t take the bait on that hook but we continued to argue on his original fishocide position. Those around me were no doubt following this Socratean debate. A man behind me, got up and gave me his seat probably just to make me shut up. Was this kind man averse to nonsense or did he sacrifice his comfort in order to resume the ‘status qou’?

The late hypnotist and therapist Dolores Canon, spent much of her life travelling the world giving lectures and writing books on her work. She found that through hypnosis she could communicate with otherworldly entities, such as the great Nostradamus, connecting across time. One narrative given is that planet earth is presently undergoing a fundamental transition. Some souls will be able to see through the veils of secrecy of lies and tricks and frauds and take a completely new path in life; a path into what Dolores called ‘the New Earth’.

Now odd as this may sound without knowing Doloreses exemplary scientific methods, it may be obvious to readers that much in the modern western world is full of secrecy and lies and tricks and fraud. Politics is a good a example. Political parties in so called ‘democracies’ get randomly donated money to employ teams of persuaders, influencers, nudgers and even hypnotists to design their campaigns and write their speeches. The ‘Brexit’ campaign was designed and conducted in this manner, which is why those more level headed could not understand what the advantages of Brexit were and continue to be. It was all a fish; the infamous red herring.

The present build up to the elections in the United States of America should evoke a response in the average citizen voter;

‘I don’t want to vote for mad people.’

‘Oh, you can’t help that’, replies society, ‘we are all mad here.’

The world voluntarily followed (‘nothing to do with us’) China into a so called ‘pandemic’ based on a slightly harmful virus. We were told by governments across the globe that the situation was ‘unprecedented’ and the virus was deadly, despite the relatively small number of deaths compared to the normal daily death rate. The narrative of reversed common sense continued by insisting masks stopped transmission, cash spread the disease and door handles did not. Vitamin D was good for the immune system and stay indoors…etc. etc. Various novel and untested ‘vaccines’ were the solution to, what was in reality, an imaginary problem. Perhaps the phantom memory of the Black Death and so called Spanish Flu was invoked from the smoke of the cauldron of lies. If you could go back in time, you would see that those were real pandemics, killing half the population of some countries.

During the pandemic in communist China, citizens had to get a green ‘tested clear’ screen on their phones by taking a constant merry-go-round of tests every forty eight hours. The charade was absurd and only a small number of people saw through the illusion at the time at the risk of losing their jobs, fines and prison.

If you have a reflective and analytical mind, you might have been unconvinced by this carnival of absurd narratives and masked figures parading down the centre of your city like the Rio de Janeiro Carnaval on steroids!

If you are still following, let’s return to white rabbits and top hats. Clearly the only person who ever understands the magic tricks presented to the public, is the magician. We the audience, have no idea how to produce a white rabbit from an apparently empty top hat. Magicians are normal people, except that they know how to take ‘power’ from others. The audience sits open mouthed because they have given away their observational and thinking faculties (their power) to a devious stranger.

We all have the means to take back our power from whoever and whatever is trying to decieve us…even if it takes decades. If we are not in the dream, then we cannot be manipulated by it. This is the answer to those who ask ‘what is the meaning of life?’ Life in a lunatic asylum has no meaning. Only those with a truly objective view from high above the clouds might see the slights of hand and madness.

This following paragraph is distressing but real. In the Crocus City Hall in Moscow recently, gunmen shot dead at least 137 members of the audience and injured many more. These were people who had entered the hall for an entertaining evening, as they have done many times before. They would never have expected the horror that confronted them. The headline on ABC News is, ‘Moscow theatre shooting fans flames of a disinformation war.’ Not only did the audience anticipate nothing of the horror of that night but afterwards, governments produced ‘disinformation’ supporting their different versions of the facts.

A macabre example of ‘waking up’ to end this essay but a necessary prod in the ribs because we are all guilty of sleep walking through most of our lives.

In a mad back to front world, it is logical to refer to a ‘fairy story’ for a breath of common sense. Sleeping Beauty is a story familiar to most of us and yet it has a deeper provenance and meaning. In ancient Egypt, the god Osiris is killed by his evil son Seth and placed into a coffin and then a tree. This represents Osisris experiencing a life in a material body on earth. He sleeps whilst in the tree as does Sleeping Beauty for they are both unaware that they are dreaming and mistake dreams for life. In the case of Osiris it is his wife Isis, who discovers him and puts his broken body back together. Similarly, Sleeping Beauty is restored with a kiss from an enlightened being; her prince.

The tales are dark, as is any tale of murder, and yet we lovingly narrate them to our children and let their unconscious minds piece together the ageless wisdom and truth in the story.

The process of learning or ‘waking up’ is a mystery to most, but in present times, the cry to us all is just that, and wake up before you die, not afterwards.

The theatrical tricks and wobbling scenery that we witness daily, should be forcing us to ask the question;

Am I mad or is it everyone else?