This morning didn’t start well.

I nuked a frypan.

I left it on the stove and went off to handle some emails. Next I hear Jennifer calling out from upstairs: Is something burning?

Burning alright.

The frypan was burning so much that it had welded itself to the hotplate. It wasn’t burning, it was melting. I couldn’t physically pull it off the stove. I had to turn off the hotplate, wait till it cooled down, then jemmy it free.

Jennifer put it into the garbage bin – she said it had turned toxic, and couldn’t be used anymore.

Next, she asked me to make her some toast while she went out into the garden to plant snap dragons.

So I put on some toast.

When the toaster popped I wasn’t happy with the result – the toast wasn’t crispy enough. It needed a bit more heat. So I  put it on again – figuring I’d pop it part way through the cycle and it would be perfect.

Then I went off to handle a few more emails…

And of course I forgot about the toast and this is what I ended up with –

It hasn’t been a good morning for me. I’ve been anxious about this trip coming up. Usually I head off on a filming trip with great excitement. This time I’m anxious.

I have some real heavy hitters to interview this time – including Carolyn Myss, Dr. Judith Orloff, Dr. Norm Shealy, Dr. John Geiger, and James Van Praagh.

Later if I have time I’ll give you more detail on these people – but suffice to say they are “headline acts” when it comes to intuition. And I want to make sure this next phase of the filming goes well, because it will constitute the core of the film.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been packing, but I haven’t been able to find my favourite summer jacket.

It’s a smokey blue jacket, which I bought in Rome last year for €90. I bought it for filming around The Vatican –

But I haven’t been able to find it – and for some crazy reason all my anxiety about this upcoming filming trip has morphed into an anxiety about this blue jacket.

I have other jackets that I could take.
I have a nice brown jacket.
But I wanted to take the blue one.

So this morning, after the nuked frypan and the nuked toast, Jennifer sat me down in our front sun room, and talked me through what was happening.

She told me my emotional body was running amok – and she was right.

Actually no, she was wrong. It wasn’t running amok – it was running like a burning man consumed by flames racing from room to room, screaming, looking for a fire extinguisher.

Anyway, she was right. I told her about my anxiety, and she said that my emotional body was like a monster with a giant hammer pounding into dust all the good work I’ve been doing to strengthen my spiritual body.

My emotional body was pulverising me, she said. And I had to do something about it because soon my emotional body would have full control.

She said I had tools at my disposal – tools I knew how to use: yoga; meditation; even stopping for half an hour to sit in the sun and contemplate.

She said I could also allow myself to be drawn to a book, open it up at any page, and read – trusting that what I would read would be of help.

In other words, allow my Personal Guidance System to do its job.

I said yes, I could do all that. And in fact I did 40 minutes of yoga this morning, I did 30 minutes of meditation last night, I’ve been reading Dr. Norman Shealy’s book on Intuitive Medicine, which is extraordinary – but…

I STILL CAN’T FIND MY BLUE JACKET!!!!

Jennifer sighed, knowing that I was indeed the burning man, still consumed by flames, running from room to room, screaming, looking for a blue jacket.

(The blue jacket being my fire extinguisher.)

Where have you looked? she asked.

I’d looked everywhere. For days and days. I’d looked in my wardrobe. In the spare wardrobe. In the spare spare wardrobe. In the wardrobe in the spare room. In the wardrobe under the stairs where we keep the hiking jackets.

A jacket isn’t like car keys. You lose your car keys, they could be anywhere. Down a crack in a lounge chair, under a book, in the ignition. With a jacket, particularly a conspicuous blue jacket, there are only a few places in a house it could be. And I’d searched them all.

Of this I was certain – the blue jacket was not in the house.

All I could think was that I’d taken the jacket to our daughter’s place in Sydney and left it there to be dry cleaned. But when I called her, she couldn’t recall having seen it.

Jennifer had no recollection of having seen the blue jacket recently –
But she said: Let me take a look.

She went upstairs.
Within twenty seconds, she called out: I’ve found it! 

She’d found the jacket on a bed in a spare bedroom. It had been partly covered by some other clothing. She’d found it almost immediately, because she’d been calm.

She came down and told me that my emotional body had prevented me finding it, because I was anxious. Anxiety, which is simply a form of fear, robs us of our clear connection to our true selves.

When we have a clear connection to our true selves, there’s no such thing as loss.

Oh and by the way, I’ve decided to take the brown jacket instead… 

A post today covering various thungs…

(I’m practising my New Zealand accent)

First Thung ~
Marie Rigaud – our beloved companion on two of our tours now and soon to be three – is wanting to go to Bhutan. But she’s wondering if anyone wants to go with her.

She is coming on our Mother Ganga Spiritual tour in September – and she plans to go to Bhutan before we start in Delhi on Sept 14th.

Jennifer and I are going to Bhutan after the tour finishes – at the beginning of October – to film with His Royal Highness the Prince of Bhutan for the PGS documentary.

If you’re interested in accompanying Marie to Bhutan, please get in touch with her via the comment section on this blog.

2nd Thung ~
I’ve now confirmed a few more very exciting interviews for the PGS Intuition film – the latest being Dr. John Geiger. Dr. Geiger is the Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, as well as Senior Fellow at Massey College at Toronto University.

But his big claim to fame, and the reason I’m interviewing him for the film, is he wrote a book called THE THIRD MAN FACTOR, which details a phenomenon which many adventurers and explorers have experienced at times of extreme exhaustion, and near death.

It’s a phenomenon whereby an ethereal being appears and helps guide them to safety. It’s a term which the Antarctic explorer Shackleton termed, after he experienced this himself. A “third man” to his team guided them to safety when they were lost in the icy wastelands.

Here is a synopsis of his book –

The Third Man Factor is an extraordinary account of how people at the very edge of death often sense an unseen presence beside them who encourages them to make one final effort to survive. This incorporeal being offers a feeling of hope, protection, and guidance, and leaves the person convinced he or she is not alone. There is a name for this phenomenon: it’s called the Third Man Factor.

If only a handful of people had ever encountered the Third Man, it might be dismissed as an unusual delusion shared by a few overstressed minds. But over the years, the experience has occurred again and again, to 9/11 survivors, mountaineers, divers, polar explorers, prisoners of war, sailors, shipwreck survivors, aviators, and astronauts. All have escaped traumatic events only to tell strikingly similar stories of having sensed the close presence of a helper or guardian. The force has been explained as everything from hallucination to divine intervention. Recent neurological research suggests something else.

Bestselling and award-winning author John Geiger has completed six years of physiological, psychological, and historical research on the Third Man. He blends his analysis with compelling human stories such as that of Ron DiFrancesco, the last survivor to escape the World Trade Center on 9/11; Ernest Shackleton, the legendary explorer whose account of the Third Man inspired T. S. Eliot to write of it in The Waste Land; Jerry Linenger, a NASA astronaut who experienced the Third Man while aboard the Mir space station—and many more.

Amazon link:

Dr. Geiger has also written a book called THE ANGEL EFFECT, that similarly documents true accounts of experiences with what can only be described as angels.

Dr. Geiger has agreed to an interview for my film – and I’m delighted.

3rd Thung ~
A wonderful lady named Monica Schwartz emailed me overnight to say that she’d done a review of my book – THE WAY, MY WAY – for her website.

Her website is very elegant, and covers all the good things of life – food, travel. music, films and books. It’s called LIFE OUT OF BOUNDS. 

Here is the review, and her website:

The Way, My Way by Bill Bennett | Book Review

It’s well worth taking a look through – because apart from anything else, those of you who are interested in a Hawaii PGS hook-up will find that Monica knows Hawaii really well.

That’s all for now. I have to go and have dinner.
I thunk it’s fush and chups.

As part of my research into the film I’m making: PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System – I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the science of intuition.

This has led me to a fascinating book written by Dr. Robert Lanza called:  BIOCENTRISM – HOW LIFE AND CONSCIOUSNESS ARE THE KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING THE TRUE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE –

If you haven’t heard of Dr. Lanza, well, he’s one truly extraordinary person.

He is regarded as one of the world’s leading research scientists. He specialises in Stem Cell biological research, and last year was selected by Time Magazine as being one of the 100 Most Important Minds in the world.

Here is his bio:

Biography

His book, Biocentrism, has shaken up traditional scientific thinking not only on the nature and genesis of the universe, but also about consciousness itself.

Here is what Nobel Prize winning scientist E Donnall Thomas said of the book:

Like ‘A brief history of time’ it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. Almost every society of mankind has explained the mystery of our surroundings and being by invoking a god or group of gods. Scientists work to acquire objective answers from the infinity of space or the inner machinery of the atom. Lanza proposes a biocentrist theory which ascribes the answer to the observer rather than the observed. The work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology into the central role in unifying the whole. The book will appeal to an audience of many different disciplines because it is a new way of looking at the old problem of our existence. Most importantly, it makes you think.”

Essentially, what Dr. Lanza proposes is groundbreaking: that the Universe came into existence to create life – and that consciousness existed before the creation of the Universe. That the Universe would not exist without consciousness.

Wrap your head around THAT one!

Dr. Lanza is a scientist. He eschews the concept of God – and yet he addresses this within his book. How can he not?

Here are Dr. Lanza’s seven principles of Biocentrism –

1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An “external” reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
4. Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The “universe” is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.

Here is a fascinating interview with Deepak Chopra:

Robert Lanza Interview By Deepak Chopra

I found the book to be very accessible, beautifully written, and Lanza was able to describe complex physical and scientific processes and concepts in a way that was immediately understandable.

I thoroughly recommend the book.

Here is the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_10?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=biocentrism&sprefix=biocentris%2Caps%2C880

I used to wear glasses –

For fifteen years I wore glasses for long distance, and for reading.

I even had prescription lenses made for my sunglasses.

I couldn’t see without my glasses.

Then I walked the Camino – and I noticed that gradually, I didn’t need my glasses anymore.

While I was walking I was always taking them off whenever I took a photo, and putting them back on after the shot – and after a while it just became bothersome, so I left my glasses off altogether.

And I kept them off.

When I finished the Camino and got back home I was all prepared to start wearing my glasses again, but I found I didn’t really need them.

Today I went to renew my driver’s license.

I needed to take an eyesight test. I decided to give the test a shot without my glasses. And I was surprised to find that I passed!

So I now officially don’t need glasses anymore!

Here’s what I used to look like with glasses…

Just got an email from the office of His Royal Highness the Prince of Bhutan.

We have been granted an audience with the Prince in early October. So we will fly into Bhutan straight after the Indian Mother Ganga tour finishes, at the end of September.

This is great news!

I’m thrilled to bits, because the Royal Family will be preparing for two months of ceremonies and celebrations in October and November, commemorating the 60th birth date of His Majesty the King of Bhutan.

I wish to speak to His Royal Highness about intuition – and whether intuition helps make Bhutan the happiest country on the planet.

Our filming in this magical place will make another significant contribution to the film.