Before I leave this section another thought has come to mind in connection with those fairy tales. I don’t understand Einstein’s theories but I have been told that he suggested that if you faster than the speed of light, time slows down, so you don’t age as fast as those you left behind on earth.

Now there is an important point I want to make, and perhaps I should have made it at the beginning of this talk instead of at the end.

When I was researching my Egyptian novels I came across the concepts of ‘Everlasting’ and ‘eternity’ set over against each other. When I was young I had always associated them together, believing that they were the same thing. For instance in a Grimm brothers story I read about a diamond mountain in Pomerania which was two miles high. Every 1000 years a little bird came and sharpened its beak on it. When the diamond mountain is worn away, the story said, this would indicate that the first second of eternity had been passed.

In Irish myth I read that the Otherworld was remarkably like our own – but better.

At the doorway to the east,
Three trees of brilliant crystal,
Whence a gentle flock of birds calls
To the children of the royal fort.

A tree at the doorway to the court,
Fair its harmony;
A tree of silver before the setting sun,
Its brightness like that of gold.

Three score trees there
Whose crowns are meetings that do not meet.
Each tree bears ripe fruit,
For three hundred men.
There is in the sid a well
With three fifties of brightly coloured mantles,
A pin of radiant gold
In the corner of each mantle.

[Early Irish Myths and Sagas. Gantz. Penguin Books]

Even in the Bible I read a description of the otherworld using images from this and implying in both cases that That is just an extension of This.

Book of Revelations, Chapter 4:

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, “Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter.”

And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine-stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, I sight like unto an emerald.

And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting clothed in white raiment: and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

And out the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.

And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

In this century T.S.Eliot’s poem Little Gidding comes to mind.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered fate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

When my husband died I avoided asking him for help because I feared it would impede his progress in the Otherworld – might take him away from doing something else more important. And then I got a message ‘loud and clear’ reminding me that in the Otherworld there is neither time nor space. He does not have to come from somewhere else to attend to me – because he is ‘here’.

Because we call it the Otherworld we think it is like this one – only insubstantial. It is totally, unimaginably different. For the first time I understood how God could be aware of every sparrow that fell. ‘He’ wasn’t somewhere else looking on as we would from a height surveying a landscape. The sparrow is ‘in’ Eternity with Him.

And we, if we were not seduced by others into confusing ‘Everlasting’ and ‘Eternity’, would know that we, as eternal spiritual beings, are ‘in’ Eternity even now, while we are simultaneously but only temporarily ‘in’ time because we have material bodies as well as our spiritual being.

If we had champagne this evening I would ask you to raise you glasses in a toast to the magnificence of the present moment, through which all the strands of multi-dimensional time are threaded!

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 8
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 9

Fairy stories are sometimes the ‘dumbing down’ of mighty ancient myths. The shining, highly evolved beings of other realms are reduced to improbable little flittering creatures that hide among the bluebells. But nevertheless their stories can still give us the insights we need, and the sentence that starts them all off ‘Once upon a time’ is relevant to this talk. It implies that there is more than one Time, and what we are about to hear is happening in a different Time to the one we know.

A herd boy falls in love with a beautiful maiden he sees standing at the doorway into a hollow hill. He follows her and enters ‘faeryland’ – a realm of great beauty, where nothing is as it is in the world he has known. He has a blissful visit with her of a few days and returns to the ordinary world only to find he has been away for 50 years and everything has changed. His parents are dead, his old companions changed.

This has to be an allegory of the moment we enter the Quest, the path of seriously exploring the Unknown Spiritual realms. It is out of Linear Time. It could take fifty years or a moment. While we are exploring we are on a ‘high’ of spiritual endeavour. When we look around us again – our old companions have changed. This happens all around us. How many marriages do you know that have gone sour because one partner has explored further than the other?

Read these old fairy stories with new eyes. ‘Redeem the unread vision in the Higher Dream’, says T.S. Eliot in his poem Ash Wednesday.

Irish Folk Tales ed. By Henry Glassie Penguin Books 1987 p.256
Usheen’s Return to Ireland (Galway) by Lady Gregory 1926:

Usheen was the last of the Fianna and the greatest of them. It’s he was brought away to Tir-Nan-Oge, that place where you’d stop for a thousand years and be as young as the first day you went.

Out hunting they were, and there was a deer came before them very often, and they would follow it with the hounds, and it would always make for the sea, and there was a rock a little way out in the water, and it would leap on to that, and they wouldn’t follow it.

So one day they were going to hunt, they put Usheen out on the rock first, the way he could catch a hold of the deer and be there before it. So they found it and followed it, and when it jumped on to the rock Usheen got a hold of it. But it went down in to the sea and brought him with it to some enchanted place underground that was called Tir-Nan-Oge, and there he stopped a very long time, but he thought it was only a few days he was in it.

It is in that direction, to the west he was brought, and it was to the Clare coast he came back. And in that place you wouldn’t feel the time passing and he saw the beauty of heaven and kept his youth there a thousand years.

It is a fine place, and everything that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there with a message he will want to stop in it, and twenty years of it will seem to him like one half-hour. But as to where Tir-Nan-Oge is, it is in every place, all about us.

Well, when he thought he had been a twelvemonth there, he began to wish to see the strong men again, his brothers; and he asked whoever was in authority in that place to give him a horse and to let him go.

And they told him his brothers were all dead, but he wouldn’t believe it.

So they gave him a horse, but they bade him not to get off it or to touch the ground while he was away; and they put him back in his own country.

And when he went back to his old place, there was nothing left of the houses but broken walls, and they covered with moss; and all his friends and brothers were dead, with the length of time that had passed.

And where his own home used to be he saw the stone trough standing that used to be full of water, and where they used to be putting their hands in and washing themselves.

And when he saw it he had such a wish and such a feeling for it that he forgot what he was told and got off the horse.

And in a minute it was as if all the years came on him, and he was lying there on the ground, a very old man and all his strength gone.

I sometimes wonder if the tales we hear about the abductions by aliens in spacecraft are not of the same order as these ancient tales of fairy abduction. They could both be symbolic tales thrown up by a powerful subconscious yearning for spiritual enlightenment – or they could be quite literally tales of abduction by extra-terrestrials – both in fairytale times, and in the present day. Who knows how long we have been visited by beings from other worlds?

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 8

One of the peculiarities of being human is our belief in a Golden Age when everything was running smoothly and everyone was happy and fulfilled. From the Hopi Indians who posit various worlds which started off in perfection but were gradually corrupted and destroyed, to Plato who spoke of perfect archetypes, only the shadows of which make up our world; from the high Civilisation of Atlantis to the Biblical Eden – the examples are endless.

Most simply a Time when things were good. But not now. Never now.

Our mistake is to put the Golden Age behind us. It is essentially out of time. The High Culture of Atlantis and the natural perfection of Eden is a template that exists in the matrix of our being, outside Linear Time, part of the multi-dimensional time we truly exist in. Such images of the Golden Age lead us on. We believe that because they once existed they could exist again.

To me the greatest of themes expressed in Mythic Time is the significant Inner Journey – the quest for the Soul itself. One step could take seventy years or a split second. The Quest can be started when one is five years old or eighty. It has nothing to do with Linear Time, yet is expressed in terms we are familiar with from Linear Time.

It takes various forms and often the goal is reached in pursuit of something else. The traveller thinks he is looking for one thing but finds something totally other which proves to be more important in the long run.

In the ancient Irish tale of the Journey of Maeldun – the hero sets off to seek revenge for the killing of his father. After years of extraordinary testing adventures in rough seas and on strange islands, he meets the man who killed his father only to find that he has forgiven him.

The mighty Sumerian King Gilgamish, 3000 years BC, set off to try to obtain immortality for himself, having been shocked at the death of his best friend, and having heard that in the ancient days one man, Ziusudra, had been granted immortality by the gods. To him it seemed that everything he had had no more savour than dust if life would be so suddenly taken away.

On his journey to find Ziusudra he endured many hardships that would have turned a lesser man back. A woman at a tavern at the end of the world tried to persuade him to abandon his dangerous and difficult quest and ‘eat, drink and be merry’ with the time he had left. But he persisted and at last came to the great ocean that separated the land of the Living from the land of the Dead. He was given instructions how to cross it without touching it and he came at last to find Ziusudra. They spoke long and deeply and Ziusudra gave Gilgamish a hint as to where the Flower of Immortality was hidden. After more difficult trials he plucked it and set off for home. But at one point he rested and fell asleep and a snake came out of a hole and ate it. He was devastated when he woke up to find the snake had shed its skin and been renewed, while he was still mortal and subject to death.

Wearily and disconsolately he journeyed home, but when he stood on the hills looking down on his city he was moved to joy. ‘What a goodly place’, he thought, and ran down to greet his friends and family.

Many stories from around the world tell of man’s search for immortality only to discover at the end that it is ultimately boring, and mortal life is preferable. I particularly like the Japanese one where a man takes to the sea to escape unwelcome guests and is driven by a storm to land on an island of Immortals. He found everyone so bored they spent their time trying to commit suicide and failing.

Whether these stories are invented for the same reason that it is common to think of riches not bringing happiness, to comfort ourselves for something we cannot have, or they are trying to tell us something more profound. What the hero is seeking is more of Linear Time, when what he should be seeking is something quite different – Eternity. At the end of this talk I want to touch on what I see as the difference between ‘Everlasting’ and ‘Eternity’, but there is something else I must deal with first under the category of ‘Mythic Time’.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 7

As far as I understand it the Aborigine Dream Time is at once a mythic representation of the origins of their culture, set in the ancient past, and a state of heightened being they can slip in to the present in which their actions take on a deeply spiritual meaning. In other words it is another kind of Time, very different from Linear. The Rainbow Snake created the landscape in the ancient days as he gouged out valleys and water holes, but he is still present as a mysterious force that shapes lives. Similarly the human exists at once in the Dream Time and in the present. At once in Eternity, and in Time.

Wally Camana in his book on Aboriginal Art says: ‘The Dreaming and the Dreamtime do not refer to the state of dreams and unreality, but rather to a state of reality beyond the mundane.’ James G. Cowen in The Elements of Aboriginal Tradition says: ‘The Dreaming embodies both an historical perspective and an account of First Causes. For it is in the activities of the ancestral beings in their various acts of world creation “outside time” that the Aborigine identifies with when it comes to determining how he should live’ (p. 23).

‘The Dreaming is, first and foremost, a metaphysical condition denoting the working of divine principles dressed up in the garb of totemic heroes. The myth is the expressive vehicle. Men identify with their Sky Heroes by way of ritual. The great ceremonies central to every tribe act as a channel by which Dreaming events are recalled, contemplated and acted upon in the life of the people’ (p. 24).

This is not the only time when reading about the Dreamtime of the Aborigines that I am reminded of the meaningfulness of our own beliefs, rituals and ceremonies. To the Aborigine the spirit of each child exists in the Dreaming before it actualizes in the world. In this instance I am reminded of Wordsworth’s poem:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

[From Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.]

The Dreaming is universal, though it has different names in different cultures – and it never means ‘dreaming’ in the ordinary sense of the word, but in the extraordinary sense. It ‘remakes’ our experience with significant symbolism into something more meaningful than we originally thought.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 6

Another very important group of categories I would like to mention this evening is what I will call The Mythic or The Spiritual.

The Mythic

I have written several books about the esoteric meaning of myths, legends and fairy tails, and so when I label this category MYTHIC I do not mean it to be filed in your minds under ‘fiction’ or ‘fantasy’ or ‘just imagination’! To me the imagination is one of the most important faculties of the human mind. I hate the phrase ‘just imagination’. Imagination is the bridge between the Known and the Unknown. It flashes with images, metaphors and symbols that illuminate the deepest and darkest secrets of Being.

[‘Mysticism lives by symbols, the only mental representation by which the Absolute can enter our relative experience’ (E. Récéjac, Essays on the Bases of Mystic Knowledge, trans. By Sara Carr Upton, London: Kegan Paul, p. 3). Symbols ‘have the same effect as direct perceptions; as soon as they have been “seen” within, their psychic action takes hold of the feeling and fills the consciousness with a crowd of images and emotions which are attracted by the force of Analogy’ (ibid.).]

‘In the symbol proper…there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite, the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there’ (Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resantus, p.152).

From Myths of the Sacred Tree by Moyra Caldecott, p.11:

Everything we do, everything we think, everything we are is influenced subliminally by the background mythical traditions of our culture and, beyond that, by the universal mythical traditions of the human race.

From Crystal Legends by Moyra Caldecott, p. 14:

Myths and legends are produced by the imagination when it is functioning at its most serious and profound level. The body is a finely tuned, immensely complex and efficient instrument capable of experiencing much more than we commonly give it credit for – and one of its functions is at once to house the ‘growing point’ for the soul, and to protect it from the damage it might suffer if it were exposed to too much transcendent experience too soon. The imagination tests out the ground beyond ourselves and allows us to explore the way ahead in imaginal symbolic form before we have to encounter it in reality. The imagination gives us myths and legends – those marvellous, subtle, complex vehicles of esoteric teaching – to prepare us for our future. In seeking their meaning we are meant to find the meaning of ourselves.

Life is, as you well know, inexplicable. All the religions in the world, all the myths and legends in the world, all the scientific theories and mathematical formulae, laid end to end, cannot give us a glimpse, a fleeting flash, of something that makes us feel we understand so that we can live out our lives with direction and purpose instead of floundering blindly in the dust and wasting our potential.

From Myths of the Sacred Tree by Moyra Caldecott, p.3:

When we talk about the spirit, our ordinary language is inadequate, because we don’t know exactly what the spirit is.

When we see leaves moving on a tree we assume the possible existence of a breeze, and even so do we assume the existence of spirit because of certain otherwise inexplicable experiences in our lives. The language we use when we attempt to talk about spirit is of necessity highly symbolic.

Ibid., p.12:

A myth clothes those deep and mysterious insights into the meaning of life that we all have but sometimes refuse to recognise. Mythic truth is the language of the inner journey, and it cannot be judged by the same criteria we use in a court of law or in a laboratory. It has to sound true against our hearts. It has to fall into place like a ball rolling into the hole that was designed for it.

From Crystal Legends by Moyra Caldecott, p.11:

Myths are among the greatest treasures of the world.

Through the ages certain stories have evolved that are so universal in their appeal and so exactly fit human experience at the deepest level that they help us to cope with what would otherwise be the chaotic and terrifying impact of the outside world.

When scientific and rational knowledge broke away from intuitive and instinctive knowledge these stories – these myths and legends – were dismissed as nonsense and relegated to children. In the households of very rational people, even children were denied their aid. Lately, having discovered that the route these scientists and rationalists insisted we take has led us into an horrifying impasse, and following such great thinkers as Jung and Joseph Campbell, we are trying to reinstate the ancient myths, the healing stories, to their rightful place complementing and illuminating the other types of knowledge available to us.

Story is a natural need, and if we deny ourselves its benefits we may well suffer all kinds of maladies.

In this section I would place the significant Inner Journey, the Dream Time of the Aborigines, and the Vision Quests of the Native Americans, the Grail Quest, and myths of abduction into other worlds.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 5

Although this evening I am talking about different types of time – of course I know that there are no clear categories in real life. What I call Linear Time runs into Physical Time, and Physical Time runs into Psychological Time, not to mention Dream and Memory Time. That is why I use the term ‘multi-dimensional’, because although they are different and have their own characteristics and influences, they happen to us simultaneously; they are part of the ‘wholeness’ of our experience.

Under the heading of Psychic Time I would include experiences of psychometry, pre-cognition and automatic writing.

An example of psychometry from my own life occurred when I was given a photograph in a closed envelope and told to hold it and try to ‘see’ it and report what I saw. I described a small impish boy with a cap looking rather like a street urchin at the time of Dickens. My friend showed me the photograph. It was of an elderly lady in black satin sitting at a writing desk. Then, with a smile, he showed me a sketch of the boy I had seen. It seemed he was the spirit guide of the medium in the photograph. So I had ‘scored’ after all. On another occasion I held a stranger’s locket and got an overwhelming felling of suicide. It turned out to have been given to her by her lover at Masada in the Middle East, a place made famous by the suicide of hundreds of Jews during the siege by the Romans in 73AD.

Pre-cognition, premonition and prophecy have always bothered me because I don’t like to think we have no free will – that everything is ordained and pre-determined. When I try to accommodate it in my thinking I come up with the image of a football match, the rules of which, and the roles of each of the players, are pre-determined, but the outcome is still uncertain because it is dependant on the free will actions of the players within the given framework.

I have one case of prophecy to report from my own life. At the age of eighteen some friends and I were experimenting with a Ouija board to contact the dead. We became quite carried away by it, as it seemed to be giving us remarkably relevant and accurate answers to our questions. So relevant and accurate indeed that we became frightened and decided to stop. At our last session one of my friends was told that she would die at twenty-seven, and I would die at thirty-five. When she twenty-seven she did die! So when I reached thirty-five I was very uneasy, even to the point of not wanting to fly because I was convinced the plane would crash. My sensible, sceptical husband talked me out of it and I went on the flight. It did not crash. In fact, as you can see, I am still alive. Did my friend bring about her own death because she believed the prophecy? Certainly African witch-doctors and West Indian Voodoo practitioners can bring about death by fear. Something in my own life changed considerably when I was thirty-five. So, in a sense, the ‘old’ me did die then. Was the prediction was correct – but merely misinterpreted?

If prophets and prophecies exist we have to be careful, remembering the witches in Macbeth who make two correct predictions and thus arouse expectation in Macbeth that their third will also be correct. He brings about the third by his own efforts.

‘Automatic writing’ I think also come into the category of Psychic Time. As it is usually understood, a person can be ‘overshadowed’ by a spirit from the Otherworld to write or draw or compose music. There have been some well documented cases of famous artists, writers or composers ‘coming back from the dead’ to finish unfinished business this way. An experience of this type of my own occurred one morning when I woke from a deep sleep. The person in my dream continued speaking while I was waking, and, without realising what I was doing I wrote down what he was saying. When I read it through at the end, it made profound sense. Unfortunately when I was awake I could not remember who the person was, though in my dream I knew exactly who he was.

Atman was given the secret of the universe as a gift. He was pleased, but he didn’t know what to do with it. At first he tested it in all kinds of ways to find out what it was, but failing to get a satisfactory answer he hung it on a tree as decoration. And then he forgot it.

So it stayed for a long time… an unconsidered trifle… until one day someone came by who recognised it and asked if he might have it.

Atman gladly parted with it in exchange for an artefact and went off satisfied that he had struck a good bargain, rejoicing in his newly acquired treasure.

The one who now had the secret of the universe saw that it was a seed and planted it in his garden, rejoicing in its shade in the heat of the day and was filled with great reverence and love.

All things were clear to him.

All things were good.

Meanwhile Atman began to grow dissatisfied and miserable. The artefact no longer pleased him. He was bored with it. He had done whatever there was to be done with it on the first day and thereafter he could find out nothing new about it.

The man who had the Secret of the Universe however was never bored, its variations were infinite, his interest in it ever deepening.

At last Atman, having realised his mistake came to the man and asked for it back. But now the price was so high Atman could not pay it.

He went away and worked for endless aeons to earn the price of the thing he had sold so carelessly and so cheaply before. “When I get it back,” he though, “I will ever let it go, for indeed, it is the only thing worth having.”

At that moment the man standing under the Tree of Life reached out to him and gave him freely of its fruit.

[Moyra Caldecott, Child of the Dark Star]

Leading on from this I would raise the vexed question of ‘ghosts’.

There are so many reports of ghosts (and I myself once experienced one) that I am inclined to believe in them. But what they are I don’t know. Are they impressions of past lives left in a place rather like a video recording that was made and not quite wiped away – some technical hitch in the Akashic Records and the passing of Linear Time? Or are there indeed souls who were detached from their bodies at death and are still clinging to their old lives on earth instead of moving on through the many and complex realms of the Afterlife?

I am sure we have all had gloomy, fearful impressions in a place, only to find out later that it was the site of a dreadful battle, or a horrific murder.

If Linear Time is the only sort of Time we experience, how can we thus ‘tune in’ to events that have already past as though they are still present? We don’t know how it can be, but we have noticed that a strong emotional charge seems to be a necessary part of it (as with telepathy) and a certain kind of sensitivity is necessary to ‘pick them up’.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 4

Most of my books have sprung from similar experiences that could have been ‘far memory’. The Tower and the Emerald was written incorporating an experience I had at a stone circle in Derbyshire, where all the stones are lying down on the earth as though pushed down by a giant hand. There I felt that there was a body buried at the centre who had been cursed so that his soul could not leave that place, ever. He seemed to be pleading with me to release him – but I resisted because I thought he might have been pinned there for a good reason, that is, that he was under the influence of an extremely evil force. I walked away. But that night, and for four nights following, I had a recurring dream in which I was one of the priests that had cursed him and buried him. I saw that we broke both his legs so that he could not run away while we performed the ritual.

I realised I would never be free of the dream unless I freed him. Besides – it seemed to me that on one had the right to deprive a soul of its freedom to repent and be redeemed. I went back to the circle and prayed that he would be released to the care of the Angel Gabriel and the Christ (as sort of celestial probation officers). The disturbing dreams ceased.

Months later, a friend, to whom I had told the story, told me that she had visited a local museum and discovered that there had been a burial at the centre of the circle – and that the body had both legs broken.

My most successful book, a trilogy of novels set in the Bronze Age of Britain, now in one volume called Guardians of the Tall Stones, still in print after 24 years, started off from an experience I had in a stone circle at Dyce, near Aberdeen, in Scotland. I had angina at the time and after several heart attacks was living for each moment very intensely and gratefully. I was only in the circle for a few moments, but felt I had experienced a life time there. I began to write – fast – determined to get it all down before I died.

My main character was Kyra, a young girl who found she had psychic abilities and was therefore chosen to train as a priest in the Temple of the Sun, far to the south, at Avebury.

In 1976 as I lay in St Thomas’s hospital in London after a severe heart attack, not believing that I would be alive in the morning, I watched a star through the huge plate glass windows slowly crossing the sky.

I wrote the following as though it was happening to Kyra at Avebury, but to me it was at once my own experience that night in hospital and the experience I was ‘remembering’ from that ancient time. Linear Time had ceased to exist.

On a clear, moonless and cloudless night, she entered the great Stone Circle of the Temple and lay upon her back on the grass, her feet towards the East where the Sun would rise.

She was alone and the whole night was hers.

This night she must not let her attention wander for an instant.

The Star the High Priest had chosen for her was rising at the moment she lay down and she must watch its progress across the sky, unwaveringly the whole night long. No matter how tired her eyes became she must not let it out of her sight for an instant.

The effect of the high earthen ridge around the Circumference was to cut out all sight of the landscape and the villages around. She was isolated in a Circle of Power in complete darkness, alone with the Stars.

As the night progressed she totally forgot herself lying on the grass. All that existed was the one star she followed, brilliantly in focus, while an incredible pattern of subtly changing points of gold moved round in the background of her vision.

The star she watched not only moved with slow but inexorable majesty across the dark forever hole of the night sky, but grew in brightness and in power until she felt it like a sharp needle point actually penetrating the centre of her forehead.

It seemed to her the earth bank and the Tall Stones surrounding her not only kept the rest of the world out, but concentrated the power of the stars and whatever realms of Reality that lay beyond her normal consciousness, until they grew in strength and became the only Reality of which she was aware.

It seemed to her the needle of the Star she watched pinned her through the centre of her forehead to the earth and she could not move her body. In her stillness she could feel the earth moving. She was no longer loose upon its surface but was joined to it by this thin, sharp beam of force that passed from the Star to her, through her into the earth, and through the earth until it came out the other side to continue its journey…

Her mind ached with the strain of thoughts that were coming to her.

Her forehead ached with the pain of the sharp beam passing through it.

She felt very strange as she turned with the earth, feeling the earth move and the Star stand still.

But the thought she was trying to grasp kept returning until at last her mind could encompass it.

It was the realisation that the beam of force from the star that was passing through her and through the earth, and through the universe beyond, was returning to the Star of its origin from the other side!

As though the Whole Universe was a sphere, yet of such a kind that there was no material solidity to it whatever, and therefore no bounds of inside and outside.

She was like a bead on a necklace, threaded through the line of force that was curving with the Universe.

As she grasped this there seemed to be a kind of brilliant explosion in her mind, or was it in the sky?

But suddenly, from every star in the sky, there seemed to be the same fine beam of light, and each one was threaded through the pain in her forehead, through the earth, and through the Universe beyond and back again to its original Source.

The sky now instead of being black with separate points of light, was criss-crossed with fine arcs of light, each starting in a star, or …

Did they start in her hear?

She could no longer tell if she was the centre from which all the beams were coming, or whether she was the passive recipient of the beams from the stars.

Was she the beginning of all things?

She?

Who was she?

She could not remember her name.

She thought and thought in a sudden kind of panic…

“What is my name?”

But she had no name.

The more she tried to remember the more the beams passing through her head hurt her.

At last exhausted and in agony, she accepted that she had no name.

And with that acceptance the pain ceased, and she lay in wonder, watching the cycles of light weaving their magnificent pattern all around her and through her.

The beauty of it! The blissful peace and happiness she felt that anything could be so perfect occupied her for the rest of the night.

And when the sun slowly rose and the vision faded, she remembered her name.

And with the remembrance she moved and felt pain in every limb.

Slowly she dragged herself to her feet and looked round her with weary and bewildered eyes.

The dawn light revealed the Circle as she had known it before, the grassy bank, the giant Stones. Above her the first flights of birds called cheerfully to their fellows.

[Moyra Caldecott, Guardians of the Tall Stones, p.303]

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 3

My next category I call Psychological Time.

We have all noticed how time seems to speed up when we are happy and occupied, how it drags when we are bored or unoccupied, how long the nights are when we cannot sleep and how quickly they pass when we can.

Under this heading I would include the strange things time does in our dream world. Scientists tell us dreams occur in the few seconds when we are not fully asleep, or about to wake. And yet we have long and complex adventures in our dreams that seem to take hours, days and sometimes even years.

Our subconscious seems to have a time of its own. Things lurk there for years flowing like underground rivers in a complex cavern system. Some are temporarily blocked, only later to have their channels opened – while streams from other sources flow through and join at different places on the ordinary time-line – all affecting us at any given point in our sleep and in our waking moments, but without reference to Linear Time.

Similarly what I call the Higher Consciousness – that highly evolved part of all of us that is capable of swimming in the ocean of consciousness that links us to all that exists – has no relevance to Linear Time.

To continue the analogy of water in connection with consciousness I would say that our normal everyday consciousness is like water in a bucket on a conveyer belt of Linear Time – limited and constrained –aware neither of the dark streams that run through the subconscious, nor of the great shining expanse of the ocean that leads us, if we dare to swim in it or sail it, towards our God.

Under the heading of Psychological Time I would also include memory. In memory Linear Time is contracted so that an event that took hours or years can be re-experienced by the mind in a few seconds and can crucially affect our decisions that shape our future.

I have already pointed out how many memories are threading through each of our minds in this room at this very moment – affecting how we understand everything we hear. If they could suddenly be made visible – the air would be filled with more activity than a block-buster film that had spent millions of dollars on special effects!

Add into this the possibility that we may have lived before – that reincarnation may be a reality – and that we might have threads of memory from those other lives also weaving through us.

I don’t know for sure if reincarnation exists – but I would like to mention here a few instances when it has seemed to me I have tapped into past times – either by my own memory of a past life – or by accessing the Akashic Records – the records that are purported to exist in another realm of reality which record all that has ever happened. From the Recording Angel in the Biblical Book of Revelations, to the Egyptian god Djehuti (Thoth), most cultures have a belief in celestial records being kept.

I was trying to write a novel about Saint Etheldreda, an Anglo Saxon saint of the 7^th century from East Anglia, a woman who became Queen of Northumbria at a most interesting period in British history. I had done a lot of research. So much so that I had become completely bogged down in the details of unfamiliar Anglo Saxon names, battles and events. I found it impossible to find the thread I needed to make a compelling novel about her life. I gave up the idea of writing the book.

My husband at that time was illustrating a walking guide to the ancient track ways of East Anglia and so we were travelling around the area. It was winter and we had not booked anywhere to stay. We went to the hotels we had stayed at in the summer, but they were closed for the winter. We went from village to village and finally settled for a hotel we did not know in a village we had not been to before. We did not even notice its name – but just signed in and went straight to bed.

At 2 am I woke with a jerk. I sat bolt upright, feeling the presence of someone else in the room. And then it was almost as though I was watching a film about Etheldreda’s life. It was incredibly vivid. I knew exactly how I would write the book. It was almost as though I had been there when it all happened.

In the morning we discovered that the hotel was built on the site of a shrine to Etheldreda and her sister. It had been a place of pilgrimage for centuries.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2

I want you now to envisage the sky at night. Imagine yourselves standing in some country place, far away from the distracting lights of the city.

What you are looking at may look like blackness dotted with points of light, but is actually an unimaginably vast space filled with enormous balls of fire, like our sun, roaring and crackling with nuclear power, hurtling with tremendous speed and force through the universe, using and emitting incalculable energy… And between these billions and billions of dynamic power points are great clouds of dust and plasma from stars that have exploded and from which new stars are emerging.

All this is going on but we do not see it. We see only points of light in immeasurable darkness. We know now, because scientists have worked it out, that light travels at a certain speed, and the light of the stars we see left those stars at different times. This one left 20 million light years ago, that one 100 million light years ago. Yet we see them simultaneously and they seem part of our same vision – our immediate experience. We are experiencing vastly different times – simultaneously.

Now I want to focus on this room.

When we look at our fellow human beings we see very little of what or who they really are. We see only points of light in darkness as we did when we looked outwards into space. Each one of us is a complex of bones and veins and organs on the physical level doing an extraordinary job of keeping us alive, while our minds encompass the greater universe without, and our souls and spirits reach into realms of reality we can only guess at. In this room, memories are flashing and sparking from every brain, from every time. At this present moment memories from our childhood, from our ancestors, from books we have read, from films we have seen, from relationships we have had – all, all are influencing the interpretation we put on the words we hear – the way we react to the present moment. We are experiencing vastly different times – simultaneously.

In our minds multi-dimensional time is a commonplace. But the clock is ticking, and for the sake of convenience we rule our lives by it. That is what Linear Time is – a convenience won over centuries of scientific endeavour. Until very recently every part of the world was out of synchronicity with every other. Edinburgh was twelve minutes different from London until they had to fix a standard time for all the country for the convenience of the railways. Greenwich was chosen. But even now, as we know, the Christian Millennium is dawning in the Far East before it does here, and the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic Millennia bear no relation to the Christian ones.

As a by-section of Linear Time and associated loosely with it, is the category of time I will call Physical Time. This is the time of the biological clock.

We are surrounded by clocks that tell us about Linear Time, but other things mark the passing of this type of time too. Aging, the crumbling of buildings, decay…

Physical time

Under the heading of physical time I would list the growth of tree rings that archaeologists use for dating ancient sites and events, a woman’s regular monthly menstruation, the nine months of gestation, the onset of puberty, the gradual (or, it seems to me – not so gradual) aging process. At this point in my thinking Andrew Marvell’s lines to his coy mistress some to mind:

‘But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.’

These things, although measured against Linear Time, are actually more individually orchestrated. Puberty may start at different ages, and the prodigy of twelve who graduates from Cambridge undermines the neat regularity of our measurements of brain capacity at certain ages. One woman of seventy may ride a bicycle, while another of seventy can barely walk.

We mark our lives out into the compartments by birthdays and anniversaries which keep us aware of the passing of this type of time in relation to Linear Time. I sometimes wonder whether if we did away with birthdays we would be happier because we would not be so aware of time’s inexorable passage. We become obsessed by fear of the passing years because we count them.

Women approaching forty years of Linear Time who have been perfectly content with careers suddenly get panic stricken that they won’t be able to have a child if they don’t immediately find a mate and procreate. No doubt scientists are figuring out a way to extend the child-bearing age for women – no taking into account the very good reasons why the natural process worked so well in the past. Too late women of fifty or sixty find their levels of energy are not up to the demands of bring up a child.

I am told that every seven years all the cells in our bodies are destroyed and replaced. This means that as I stand here now, not a single physical cell in my body is the same as any I had when I left my mother’s womb. Yet why am I convinced that I am the same person? There must be more to us than the cells in our body.

More soon…

Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1

A talk given by Moyra Caldecott to the Wessex Research Group, Bath, UK on 9 September 1999.

When Grethe asked me to give this talk she suggested I should speak about the coming millennium. My reaction to this was one of dismay. Even way back then, in early spring, I was already tired of hearing about the millennium. I was not looking forward to a full fortnight of disruption to the normal tenor of life when you couldn’t get a plumber to fix burst pipes, or a gas engineer to mend your central heating unless you bribed him with a fortune. I was not looking forward to the world-wide disruption of the ‘millennium bug’ because we had foolishly put ‘all our eggs in one basket’. I was not looking forward to cities full of drunken people squeaking squeakers and punching balloons to celebrate – what? – the birth of Christ – when we didn’t even know the real date he was born and we had certainly drifted very, very far from the message he endured such suffering to deliver to us. How could we celebrate a world so full of corruption and genocide, so wantonly destroying its environment…?

And then an image came to mind of the film Titanic where we see the musicians playing up to the last moment before the ship is engulfed. At first I saw it as a bitter confirmation of our present situation, and then I saw it as an example of the courage of the human spirit in spite of everything – and I saw the millennium celebrations as a defiant gesture to the universe that in spite of the appalling millions who are bent on destroying our planet and breaking every rule, there are still some who honour another reality, another set of values.

But Grethe’s request set me thinking about Time, and this phrase ‘multi-dimensional time’ kept coming to mind. There are many different types of time that make up our experience. I intend this evening to throw into the ring some of my thoughts on the matter, and afterwards, instead of questions, I hope you will throw in some of yours.

Linear time

Linear time, one thing following another in an orderly fashion – past, present and future in neat and inexorable sequence, is what we are celebrating at the millennium. Astronomical Time. Time based on Shakespeare’s ‘majestical roof fretted with golden fire’ (Hamlet Act. II. Sc. 2). Since ancient days the movement of the sun and moon in relation to the earth has been the way we have measured the passing of time. Ancient monoliths were raised to mark the summer and winter solstices, and equinoxes. Sometimes incredible accuracy was achieved. For instance, at only one moment in the year, at the dawn of the winter solstice, a beam of light from the sun shines through a small gap at the entrance of a Neolithic structure at New Grange in Ireland, reaches down a narrow corridor within the tomb, and falls on the deceased to give him ‘new life’.

We take the quartz watch on our wrists for granted, forgetting the centuries of trial and error and the great leaps in scientific understanding that have given it to us, the centuries of water clocks, sand-timers and other more or less inaccurate and unsatisfactory ways of measuring Linear Time. We could celebrate our skill in measuring time at the Millennium. It has given our lives order and predictability. But is it always such a good thing? Here is a poem on the subject of having to part with a lover because of the dictates of a clock.

Measuring can become
Obsessional,
The water clock and hour glass
Were bad enough
But now, accurate
To a second in a thousand years
An atomic clock
Can check
The pulse of the earth.

Oh, lying with you
Should not be so confined!

Too clever we have
Undone ourselves again
And Science before it even
Blows us up
Has finished us
By making each second
Separate
And accountable.

So Linear Time marching inexorably from the past, through the present, to the future, measured by reference to the apparent regularity of the movements of the heavenly bodies, is what we usually think of as Time. It is what we use to mark birthdays and anniversaries. It is this type of time we notice most.

More soon…