We’re heading home today, after an amazing few weeks on the road, filming for my intuition documentary.

Back in Sydney Sunday morning.

Only home for a couple of weeks before we leave for India, to lead the Mother Ganga tour of the major spiritual sites of that amazing country.

Then we’re off to Bhutan, to film with the royal family.

Then – who knows?

Pieter de Vries, Cameraman Extraordinaire, (notice the respectful use of caps?) has been such an important part of this journey. He’s brought not only a technical expertise of the highest order, but also a compassionate and enquiring energy that has fitted in so well.

And Priyanka – she was with us for too short a time! But we’ll be seeing her in India, and she’ll be coming with us to Bhutan. She is a wonderful asset to our team.

I need more interviews to complete the narrative – but the interviews are just one portion of this film. They will provide the spine and ribcage and internal skeleton, but I still need to flesh it out with other material – dramatic recreations, overlay, library and stock footage, linking sequences, etc.

There’s a heck of a lot more to do before we begin post production. But man o man, this is going to be a cracker of a film.

I hope we’ll complete filming on schedule by the end of this year, which would have us on track for the film to be in release by Oct / Nov next year.

And once the film is done, then I’ll go on my long long walk….

I’ve not posted anything publicly about my mate Steve – because I wanted to respect his privacy. However he’s told me that he’s fine with me putting something up on this blog – and so here goes / with his permission.

Steve a couple of months back discovered he had prostate cancer.

As many of you know, he’s a champion body builder – and has taken testosterone regularly over a long period. People on regular testosterone have a pre-disposition to contract prostate cancer, and so Steve has had regular checkups to monitor his PSA levels – the indicator that a cancer might be forming.

Steve told his his PSA levels were always high, however a couple of months back he had a blood test which concerned the physicians, and so he had further tests which revealed that yes, a cancer was forming.

Steve determined, on his physicians advice, that they should remove the prostate altogether.

I talked to him shortly after he’d received this news, and then not long before he was to go into surgery to get the prostate removed. He was very relaxed about it all – said he had a great doctor, one of the best hospitals for this kind of procedure in the US, and he thought he’d be back in the gym within a week.

It didn’t work out as planned.

I won’t go into details, but there were complications right from the get-go.

Now, about a month after the operation, he can only get around with the aid of a walker. He’s been on high level painkillers all this time – and up until a short while ago no-one knew exactly what was causing his immense pain.

Steve cannot walk, cannot lift his legs, he struggles to move around his apartment.

I spoke to him yesterday and he’d just had the results back from a MRI which showed that perhaps the pain was coming from “inflammation” of the groin and lower torso. Steve thinks he might have picked up some kind of infection while he was in hospital.

Irrespective, the situation is that Steve, one of the fittest 73year olds you’re ever likely to meet, has been reduced to a near cripple.

He’s maintained terrific spirits – although at times he’s expressed to me his frustration at not knowing what was wrong – but he has innate fitness and he’s a healthy guy, so once the medicos figure out what’s exactly wrong and treat it accordingly, he’ll bounce back fast.

But it’s been a huge ordeal. And continues to be. The poor bugger. Jennifer and I drove down to Houston to meet with him while he was in ER – and I phone him regularly – but I wish there was more that I could for him.

I’m sure he would appreciate your well wishes –

Please feel free to leave messages here – or if you want to contact him personally outside this blog let me know and I’ll send you his email address.

Here is a shot of Steve on the Portuguese Camino when he was in good health.

The post on Caroline Myss was my 777th post on this blog.

Ha – and I was going to stop after I finished the Camino.
But you guys wanted me to keep going.

Now you can’t stop me!

Today was the last day of filming. And it was an interview with Caroline Myss.

Caroline Myss is to intuition what the “L” is to Chicago. For those interested in intuition, she is a goddess. For those interested in intuitive healing, she is a magician.

She’s written many books, perhaps the most well known are ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT, SACRED CONTRACTS, and ENTERING THE CASTLE. 

Here is Caroline Myss’ Amazon page – CAROLINE MYSS’ BOOKS

Caroline is a genuine mystic. She describes herself as a Roman Catholic mystic. She is a fast talking, no nonsense, no bullshit, purveyor of truth. She has no time for frauds, for pretence, for fakery or deceit of any kind.

I asked her about science and its attitude to intuition, and she let forth a blast on the spiritual movement, and its inability to step up to the plate and see things clearly.

Her interview was fascinating because she was able to talk in terms of myths and archetypes – both subjects she has written on widely, and knows intimately.

What came through strongly though was her passion, and her wisdom.

We both didn’t realise but today – the day of the interview – was the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. She did a 9 minute monologue about how the very nature of our existence changed when that atom was split. She brought it all back to the Vedic belief that “As is the atom, so is the Universe.”

It was an amazing piece of oratory.

I don’t know how I can use it in my film on intuition, but I’d like to find a way to make it available because it was a wonderfully passionate and erudite verbal treatise on how our very existence changed irrevocably when that atom was split.

I’d gone into the interview very prepared with a list of maybe 25 questions. About five minutes into the interview I threw them all away because I knew the interview wasn’t going to follow a conventional course. And so I followed her leads.

The interview lasted about 90 minutes, and I didn’t refer to my questions once.

Caroline was the last interviewee on this current trip. Tomorrow we return to Australia. It’s been an extraordinary journey, this one. We’ve met some remarkable people. And they each have contributed to the film in their own unique way.

I have some fabulous footage to review when I get back home.

The last couple of days have been very busy.

We’re now in Chicago, after a solid 10hrs drive from Toronto, split up by an overnight stop at the Holiday Inn Express in a small Michigan town called Charlotte.

The Holiday Inn Express Charlotte MI was notable for the fact that it had dial-up speed internet, just when I needed to send some large files to Dubai for an investor to sight.

The trip into the US was also notable because we got stopped at the Canadian / USA border.

My own stupid fault.

There was a huge line of cars at the border crossing, waiting to get processed by immigration. I noticed one line was moving much faster than all the others, and so I deftly manoeuvred the car into that line.

And yes, the line was moving much more swiftly than all the others.

Whoopee, I thought. We’ll be through in no time.

And then Pieter said: What’s NEXUS mean Bill? 

Over our lane was a big neon sign saying NEXUS ONLY. I thought that meant a type of vehicle, you know, like a LEXUS, but spelt wrong. It IS America after all and they’re not that good with spelling. I figured I could talk my way around that one with the Immigration Officials if it came to that. Something along the lines of: Oh, I’m driving a Toyota. That’s made by the same company that makes Lexus. Am I right to go? 

Well, then I realised that the car in front had stopped at some kind of camera, and the driver had shown a card to a camera, and then had been waved through.

This was why the line was moving so fast.

It came my turn to stop at the camera. I read a sign that said: PLEASE SHOW YOUR NEXUS CARD. 

I showed my credit card.

And then I had to stop at a window where a very strict Immigration Official asked me some questions. It went like this:

US Immigration: And what are you doing in the United States?

Me: I’m making a film on intuition. 

US Immigration: Really? And how’s that going?

Me: I have a good feeling about it. 

He didn’t get the joke. Or maybe he did, and didn’t find it funny, because we then had to drive to a Guantanamo like compound and then go through half an hour of rigorous questioning. While that was happening, they searched the car. They even searched the suitcases, and found in Jennifer’s suitcase Pieter’s heavy tripod head and baseplate.

(Pieter had asked her to carry them on a flight to balance out the weights.)

We finally got released, with a very severe warning not to try and jump the line ever again by going in the NEXUS lane. We walked out to find another official holding up the tripod head and baseplate. From a distance it looked like the parts of an Improvised Explosive Device – that is, a bomb.

We explained what it was – the official looked at us skeptically, but then allowed us to go.

The reason we’d gone to Toronto (we got in at 11pm, and left at 1pm the next day) was to do an interview with John Geiger, Senior Fellow at Massey College, Toronto University, and CEO (formerly Governor) of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society.

He’s also author of THE THIRD MAN FACTOR and THE ANGEL EFFECT – both books examining what scientists refer to as “sensed presences.” A lot of those who have sensed these presences prefer to call them Angels.

In both books John has meticulously detailed first hand accounts of people who have reported “divine intervention” with a sensed presence.

John took a secular approach in the interview, which for my film was great because I have enough people referring to angels and taking a spiritual or religious approach.

John cited scientific research which gave plausible explanations for these phenomena, however he conceded in the interview that science really can’t explain everything.

For instance, he said that most of these so-called angelic encounters are accompanied with an overpowering empathy or feeling of what’s been described as love.

Science has no explanation for that.

It was an important interview, and will balance the ledger a little in my film – which is much needed for those who will watch the film and hanker for an empirical answer to these spiritual questions.

Today was a big travel day.

We left the hotel in Portland before 5am, and caught a flight at 7 to Chicago. There we waited for 3 hrs for a flight to Buffalo, where we picked up a van and drove two hrs to Toronto. We got in after 11pm.

Why not fly straight from Portland to Toronto you might ask?

Money.
It was cheaper this way.
We can’t afford direct flights on this budget!

During the flight I finished John Geiger’s book – THE ANGEL EFFECT.
It’s an incredibly powerful book.

John details instances, both contemporary and historical, where people have literally been touched by an angel.

Most of these people did not hold religious beliefs, but the majority of them tell of their experience with a sense of awe – and a belief that it really was their Guardian Angel that stepped up to help them.

It’s a terrific book – beautifully researched and written – and if you’rre interested in this stuff you really should read it. Read it even if you aren’t interested, because it might make you consider the world a little differently.

John was formerly a highly respected journalist, and now he’s an academic at Toronto University, and Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

He writes from an objective secular viewpoint, and includes many interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, and researchers who provide plausible rational explanations for these phenomena.

However, as John says in his book, science can’t answer all the questions that arise from these first hand accounts.

The overwhelming conclusion that you have once you’ve read the book is that there is more unknown than is known. And those that believe in angels – those that have had first hand experiences with these incorporeal spiritual beings – have as much right to say they exist as scientists have to say that they don’t, and it’s all a function of the brain under stress.

I’m interviewing John tomorrow for my film on intuition, and he promises to make a fascinating contribution.

On the drive from Buffalo up to Toronto we stopped in at Niagara Falls – right on our route. None of us had been to Niagara Falls before, and so we had to drop in for a quickie selfie.

Just as I never expected Uluru to impact me as powerfully as it did, nor did I expect Niagara Falls to make an impression. I’d always thought it as being a bit tacky and down-at-heel – like the back blocks of Las Vegas.

But i found the energy that came up from the tumult of water – the prana in the air – was almost so thick you could grab it and swallow it whole.

I stood back and soaked in this prana – and wondered at how extraordinary it must have been before the arrival of white settlement – what this must have meant spiritually to the Native Americans. What myths and legends they must have created.

Now it’s hard to find beauty there.

Carparks have replaced woods, and ugly buildings – mainly casinos – crowd the skyline, and concrete walkways jut out over the falls. But none of this unfortunate aesthetic can take away from the prana that exists independent of all that.

We could only spare a short visit, and so I quickly tried to find some interesting shots which weren’t the usual touristique shots you take when you go to one of the great Wonders of the World.

Here are my attempts:

I had a persistent cough since Assisi. 

That’s since April. 

I went to the doctor twice. He checked my chest and wrote me scripts. 

Despite double rounds of two separate antibiotics though, the cough remained. 

I should add here that I don’t usually take medicines of any kind. I have a belief that the mind heals the body. It took me about a month after returning from Assisi to finally bring myself to go to the doctor and ask for antibiotics. 

That’s how bad my cough was. 

Sometimes it was so bad I couldn’t speak. It kept me, and my wife, awake at night. It was exhausting me. 

And I don’t get sick. 

I never get sick. 

I thought leaving Mudgee in winter and coming to the U.S. in summer would fix it. 

It didn’t. 

Then one night while I was in Mount Shasta my cough was so bad it kept me up till 1am. When I woke in the morning I saw that I’d coughed up blood. A worrying amount of blood. 

That morning I had to interview psychic teacher and healer Michael Tamura. 

When I arrived at his door that morning he took one look at me and he knew something was wrong. 

I told him I’d been up a good deal of the night coughing, and that I hadn’t been able to shake the cough despite various antibiotics. 

He asked me if he wanted me to heal him. 

I said yes. 

He directed me to sit on their lounge chair, and he sat opposite, about ten feet away. Then he did what he called a reading. He closed his eyes, and used one hand to feel the energies in my body. 

And then he opened his eyes and asked me three questions of a personal nature. 

They had to do with a person in my distant past. 

He was checking what he knew. What he’d picked up with his energetic exploration. He was right with his three queries. Startlingly so. 

How could he have possibly known about a person in my past that he said was causing my cough? Again I won’t go into specifics, but he told me things about this person that no one could possibly know, other than myself and that other person. 

He did more exploratory work, told me more startling things about myself and my life that were unerringly accurate, and then he did his healing work. 

It involved clearing energetic blockages that were causing the cough. Blockages caused by unfinished business between myself and this other person. 

He did this by twirling his fingers in a way that looked like he was conducting a spiritual orchestra. 

His eyes were closed, his eyelids fluttered uncontrollably, and his mouth was agape. 

He was somewhere else. 

I haven’t coughed since. 

That’s not entirely true – I have coughed now and again – but more of a clearing, rather than the entrenched persistent cough that I had before. 

What he did, whatever he did, worked – where antibiotics and western medicine failed. 

It’s amazing. 

Edited with BlogPad Pro

I’ve changed the banner image back to the Camino shot that I had before.

I got some feedback which suggested it was a better shot.

The feedback came from Cinematographer Extraordinaire Pieter de Vries, who knows bugger all about photography.

Still, I do like to keep Pieter happy – because he is a New Age newt after all.

We’re in Portland Oregon right now, and at 5am tomorrow we head off to the airport to catch a flight to Chicago, then we transfer to a flight to Buffalo, then we drive to Toronto.

On Tuesday I do an interview with John Geiger, author of THE THIRD MAN FACTOR and THE ANGEL EFFECT.

Both books detail recorded incidences where people, often under extreme hardship or duress, are visited by what John calls a “sensed presence” that helps guide them to safety, or gives them advice to help them in their moment of distress.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the Third Man Factor –

The Third Man factor or Third Man syndrome refers to the reported situations where an unseen presence such as a “spirit” provides comfort or support during traumatic experiences. Sir Ernest Shackleton in his book South, described his belief that an incorporeal being joined him and two others during the final leg of their journey. Shackleton wrote, “during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward and sharing similar experiences.

In recent years well-known adventurers like climber Reinhold Messner and polar explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft have reported the experience. One study of cases involving adventurers reported that the largest group involved climbers, with solo sailors and shipwreck survivors being the second most common group, followed by polar explorers. Some journalists have related this to the concept of a guardian angel or imaginary friend. Scientific explanations consider this a coping mechanism or an example of bicameralism. The concept was popularized by a book by John G. Geiger The Third Man Factor, that documents scores of examples.

John Geiger is an academic at Toronto University. He’s also Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and a former editor at the Toronto Globe & Mail. In other words, he’s no mug. He’s a man who researches thoroughly, and writes with objectivity.

He is not a religious man – he writes from a secular viewpoint – and yet many people whom he’s interviewed who also are not religious describe this “sensed presence” in terms of it being a Guardian Angel.

It should be a fascinating interview.

We then drive from Toronto all the way to Chicago, and there we interview Caroline Myss, who is well known as an authority on intuition. Caroline will be our last interview on this trip. We return to Australia next weekend.

Last night we had dinner with Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler, and today I interviewed her.

Dr. Ammon-Wexler lives in a beautiful little town called Ashland, in Oregon. Her field of expertise is the brain, and particularly how the brain functions in heightened states of awareness.

She calls herself Dr. Jill – and she’s the most delightful woman.

She spent years studying Tibetan Buddhism, and she really does look like a smiling Buddha. There is a serenity and knowing-ness/knowing-nothingness about her that is quite palpable.

I like to have a meal a day or two before with a person I will interview. It allows us both to get a sense about each other – it makes for a more intimate relaxed interview later – and a more informed one too, because I’m able to ascertain early on what areas I should cover.

No matter how much research you do from afar, there’s nothing better than sitting down with someone beforehand and chewing the fat in informal circumstances.

At dinner last night Dr. Jill told us about some quite startling new research about the pineal gland that really ties in with the concept of a guidance system.

Dr. Jill has written a book on the Third Eye / Pineal Gland connection, and it’s effect on intuition. Here is a link to her book – It’s fascinating reading….

PINEAL GLAND & THIRD EYE – PROVEN WAYS TO DEVELOP YOUR HIGHER SELF

Today during the interview she talked not only about the Pineal Gland as being an underused muscle when it comes to achieving intuitive insights, but she also talked about the “Gut Brain.” She said the gut has more neurones than the brain – and it plays a crucial role in intuition.

By the way, everyone I’ve interviewed – including Swamis and theologians and Sufis and scientists – have all agreed that calling intuition a “guidance system” is a fair call.

Dr. Jill today went further and gave me even more apt analogies to a car’s GPS, and I won’t reveal them here – I’ll let you wait for the film – but what she said made so much sense! And it tied in beautifully with what Michael Tamura said in his interview yesterday, and prior interviews with Dr. Norm Shealy and Dr. Judith Orloff and James Van Praagh.

You know you’re on the right track when there’s essential accord with those from different disciplines.

Dr. Jill today largely veered away from Higher Self connections, angels etc – instead she talked more about brain waves, and there being a special band or frequency of brain activity where she believed intuition and clairvoyance and other so called psychic abilities lay. The trick she said, is being able to dip into that bandwidth and bring what you’ve seen, what you’ve learned, up into the higher more conscious bandwidths.

It can be done, with training, but isn’t that fascinating? And doesn’t it make a lot of sense?

Our Director of Photography, Pieter de Vries, (who ain’t very spiritual, let me tell you), found this stuff really interesting. If there’s such a thing as spiritual evolution, Pieter is crawling out of the primordial ooze.

He’s like a spiritual salamander.
A New Age newt.

Mind you, I think by the end of this shoot Pieter will be donning orange robes and adopting the lotus position and chanting Om…