Spirit Dialogues
Explorations of Spirit |
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Front page: Foreword - Site Map Introduction (this page) Glossary First dialogue --> |
IntroductionThe biggest part of what follows consists of my attempts to channel my Higher Self, known to me at present as Bivalia. This name was told me by Lady Hilarion from Queensland while she gave me a healing at Kangaroo Ground in January, 1994. Although I don't have any particular inner conviction that Bivalia is indeed my Higher-Self name, and feel no particular attachment to the name, I am quite happy to use it as an identifying name for my Higher Self (sometimes known as my "I Am" presence) until something better comes to me by some means. The passages in question are in the form of a dialogue between my ordinary self (the parts labelled "Michael") and my Higher Self ("Bivalia"). I wanted to explore various matters in my own life in this dialogue, as a form of self-therapy, and thus I deemed it more useful to have conversations between myself and my Higher Self than to have uninterrupted passages channelled from my Higher Self. As you will see, Bivalia was perfectly agreeable to this arrangement. Although I have written similar things in the past, the pages that detail my discussions with Bivalia, which follow a continuous page numbering from 1 up as far as the channellings continue into the future, are the first dialogues I've written with the fully conscious intention of channelling my Higher Self. However, there are, in the pages preceding this, and numbered in their own sequences, other passages which are related. They appear in the order in which they were written, immediately following this introduction, and are dated appropriately. At the very beginning, immediately following this introduction, come miscellaneous materials, such as short channellings I gave at a channelling workshop, and guided meditations I have written. First of all appear several dialogues with a "Counsellor" (marked "C" in the dialogues), whom I sometimes addressed as Richard. Perhaps I was not quite so deliberately addressing my Higher Self here, but merely imagining an ideal counsellor I could have sessions with, a bit like a psychiatrist, only much better. However, the thought of my Higher Self was definitely hovering somewhere in my mind, and the dialogues even contain references to this as a possibility, during the course of speculations about who the Counsellor might really be, if he was more than a figment of my imagination. And Richard certainly spoke with a voice very similar to Bivalia, and so I think these passages can all but be regarded as early attempts at channelling my Higher Self. I have included them in this collection of my writings for that reason. When I started these dialogues in 1990, I intended them to be a long series rather like the following ones seem to have become, but for reasons that don't appear to be very clear, they petered out after little more than a dozen pages, in three sessions. Another related passage follows, and it is a deliberate attempt to channel Bivalia, or almost deliberate. It was approached as an imaginative exercise, suggested to me by a friend, and was not taken too seriously. However, a lot of ideas came out of this exercise, and so it appears it might at least possibly be a real channelling of Bivalia, and once again he speaks with a similar voice to how he speaks in the dialogues. That passage, however, is not a dialogue, but is continuous text from Bivalia, and purports to be a letter from the future after his/my ascension, telling his friends back in the present how he found ascension and the way of life it led to. Although these writings were written with varying degrees of intention to channel my Higher Self, I do not guarantee that any of them are in fact genuine channellings. I am not even sure myself if they are, as I do not have any conscious awareness of any influence on my writing other than my own mind (a mixture of the rational and intuitive parts thereof), and certainly do not feel any mystical presence of my Higher Self. A number of people involved in spiritual activity (of the so-called "New-Age" type) who have read some of these writings have expressed their opinion that the writings are indeed genuine channellings, and good ones too, but that may or may not mean anything at all. If you read any of these writings, you might encounter ideas that seem self-important or conceited. Please remember that they were written for personal reasons, and do not purport to teach knowledge of general application. I relied upon intuition as much as I was capable of, and did not censor as I went along (or later, either) with my rational mind. If I talk about my own affairs a lot, that is because this was the intention of it; at no time was I intending to deal with more general or universal matters, and if these come in at times, it is simply a bonus. Honesty is the keystone here, and if something favourable needs to be said about myself, or if it appears possible that in some respect I am in a highly favourable spiritual position, I just go ahead and say it, and so does Bivalia; in fact, it is he rather than I who goes in for saying such things, as I do feel more comfortable personally (with my ordinary self) maintaining a certain degree of modesty. You will also see passages where I have criticized myself in various ways, or frankly described emotions I've had which seem quite unadmirable, so it's not all sweetness and light. It might seem that Bivalia doesn't criticize me, but that is presumably because (being my Higher Self) he has a more charitable attitude than I myself do to that which he disagrees with, or to people he feels little sympathy with. His way does not seem to be to criticize me (or anyone) in a dogmatic judgemental way, but to discuss an issue and to see why I feel a certain way, and to propose other possible ways of dealing with a situation. At many such times I can tell that he doesn't really agree with the view I've taken on the matter under discussion. Often the conversation refers prominently to certain ideas which are not widely believed in by people at large, but which are believed in by most members of spiritual groups I have been involved with since October, 1993 (when I first attended a channelling by the visiting American channel Crea). These ideas include the Masters (highly evolved beings who have finished their series of incarnations on Earth), and ascension (the process of raising one's consciousness beyond the physical level, to higher levels sometimes referred to as dimensions). I am not completely sure if I believe in these ideas, but since I have been involved with people who do, and have given these ideas much thought, the writings are done in that spiritual context. These ideas may seem idiosyncratic, even eccentric, to those who have not been immersed in them, and may be meaningless to many people, especially those of a conventional Christian faith. However, I believe it is good to be as open-minded to spiritual ideas that one encounters, and that's what I'm doing here; and it is probably good to continue to follow that which your intuition or feelings lead you to, and, for whatever reasons, my intuition seems to have not only led me to these ideas, but to have stayed with them for some time. If any people of conventional Christian faith happen to read this, I am sure they will have difficulty accepting much of what is discussed. However, if I were to be criticized for what is discussed here, I must say honestly that I have just as much difficulty accepting many of the elements of Christian faith: not just the doctrines themselves, but the whole Christian way of thinking, which seems to me to be quite an identifiable one. At times I think this is the more fundamental barrier between the faiths, even more than the teachings themselves. And it cannot be said that, while I have opened myself to the ascension teachings, I have been closed to Christianity. At various times I have encountered various forms of Christianity, in the form of books, discussion with Christians, even a degree of involvement with Christian churches or groups of various sorts. I have tried my best to be open-minded to their ideas, but time and time again I have found myself unable to accept some of the most fundamental ideas of Christianity. I cannot go on banging my head against a brick wall; a time comes when you have to say "That's enough; I've given it a fair trial". I have largely turned away from considering Christianity as a possible spiritual path for myself, and have turned more to various New-Age ideas, which seem more congenial, even though I also difficulty with many of those ideas. Such issues are discussed quite often with Bivalia in the following pages. (Certainly I will still remain open to any further ideas of the orthodox Christian sort I may encounter, but in recent years, it seems I've heard all the main arguments from that area of faith, and already considered them.) I think part of the difficulty I have with anything spiritual (Christian, New-Age, whatever) is that I tend to be a rational, left-brain sort of person who feels more at home with logic and deduction and proof in the scientific sense. I suspect I am really an agnostic, that I am undecided about the existence of God, the spiritual world, or anything metaphysical. However, more and more in recent years, I have come to realize that the scientific view of life offers no real hope for anything we might call spiritual: survival after death (perhaps most obviously), and those unidentified longings, that sense of magic that can come unbidden out of the blue for reasons you know not why, which almost give you the conviction (but not quite) that there must be something better than this world, better than life as science depicts it. This sensation, or emotion is one of the most important recurring themes of the following writings, and indeed seems to be at the very centre of everything that is spiritual to me, to be the essence of spirituality, and it is indeed an important theme running through my whole life, going way back to long before I ever applied a name to it, or thought about what the emotion might be. In the following writings, I variously refer to it as a sense of wonder, or a sense of magic, or a great unidentifiable longing, although I don't consider any of these descriptions an even nearly adequate description of it or name for it. For those who are familiar with the theological writings of C. S. Lewis, it appears to be very similar to that emotion he calls Joy (with a capital "J"), although I would not consider that a suitable name for it, and do not use it. If you have ever experienced this strange uplifting emotion yourself, I am sure you will recognize it from what is said about it in the discussions with Bivalia, if you haven't already recognized it from the remarks I've just made; if you haven't ever experienced this feeling in even the smallest degree, then I am afraid that probably nothing I can say will give you a picture of it. As it happens, I have no idea of what proportion of people generally have experienced it; I do not know whether it is exceedingly rare, or nearly ubiquitous, or somewhere in between. I would be interested to know, although it never seems to be talked or written about; I have never once read of it explicitly outside the writings of C. S. Lewis, to whom it appears to have been as important as it is to me, although he interprets it in orthodox Christian terms, whereas I don't. This sense of wonder is probably the main thing that spurs me on in seeking a spiritual life. I suspect that to a practical person it might seem a mirage, a will-o'-the-wisp, something as unreal as life after death probably seems to many practical people. And certainly the scientific view of life to which I am prone gives me no encouragement whatsoever. I grant that, according to the scientific view, I might be deluding myself following spiritual ideas. However, if the world is really as without lasting hope as science seems (to me) to depict it, then it is all so sterile and without more than superficial interest (to me), that I have nothing to lose in following my delusions. Just possibly they may be truth after all, not delusions. Science cannot disprove them directly; it can only appeal to the principle of Occam's Razor, a principle of reasoning that says you shouldn't make hypotheses which build in any more assumptions than necessary which are not based on known fact. Science can't say the spiritual world doesn't exist; it can only say that the known facts of the physical world give little reason (if any) to postulate it. However, the metaphysical approach says that if you open yourself to the spiritual, and just (at least temporarily) lay aside the scientific sorts of objections to it, you can experience it, and know it is real. You may have walked to a certain location yesterday alone, and may not be able to prove to anyone you went there; but you know you did because it is direct experience, and no-one could talk you out of it. Perhaps the spiritual life is like that (much further along the path than I am so far); you reach a point where you just know it is true, because you have experienced it. Things have happened to you in your inner life that a spiritual philosophy can make sense of, but which the rational approach can't do anything more with than to say it must be your imagination, or a hallucination. It is in this frame of thought that I am trying to be open-minded to the spiritual. What I've just said gives a little explanation of the background of thought and opinion from which I approached the channelling of my Higher Self; all these issues are thoroughly thrashed out with him as they come up. The channellings are preceded by a prayer I wrote before the first channelling to try to get into the right frame of mind, and is of a similar form to the sort of prayer I often say each time I start a session. It is based very approximately on the sort of prayer a friend of mine called Ra uses each time she starts channelling one of the Masters. On a more practical note - at times you will see that the conversation refers to the act of typing the text itself, and sometimes explicitly refers to which page number has been reached, or how many pages were done in a session, and the like. Please note that, since the sessions were first typed, all the pages have been repaginated to fit a different (larger) size of paper, and so the page numbers referred to will not coincide with those now in force. It is of no importance; such things come up heedlessly because Bivalia and I get quite chatty and informal with each other, and make throwaway remarks about all sorts of trivia. NOTE: Click here if you need an explanation for the strange appearance of the e-mail address which will appear when you click on the e-mail link, or if you don't know what you need to do to make the e-mail address work properly. |
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Front page: Foreword - Site Map Introduction (this page) Glossary First dialogue --> This page created on Friday, 19 January, 2001; last modified on Saturday, 20 January, 2001. |