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.

We’ve decided to mount the Celtic Camino in either September or October of next year.

Jennifer and I have made an intuitive call on this.

So the Mother Ganga Indian tour will be the last tour we’ll do until the Celtic later next year.

I received an email overnight from Leslie Gilmour, who runs a Camino website and forum called Camino Adventures. Here is his website:

Camino Adventures homepage

He contacted me to let me know he’d written a wonderful review of my Camino memoir book, THE WAY, MY WAY. Here is the review:

Leslie Gilmour’s review:

He says:

…this is the best Camino de Santiago travelogue that I have read to date. It is funny, at points heart wrenching, insightful, and like the best of these books brutally honest. On top of all that it is a damn good read, one of the few that I found hard to put down in the evening.

It was incredibly kind of him.

When reading the review it spurred me to consider, now two years later, what’s been the “take-out” from that walk. That pilgrimage. That experience.

The take out has been profound – physically, emotionally, spiritually.

I am now a vastly different person to the one that set off, literally trembling with fear at times, to walk the Camino in April / May of 2013.

PHYSICALLY:
Physically, the Camino took its toll. I remember thinking at one point during the walk that I didn’t care if I had to have titanium knees or legs when I finished, I was going to complete the Camino no matter what the long term collateral damage.

I came back sore but not sorry, thinking my body would repair itself. An MRI showed that I had no cartilage left in my right knee joint, and that “a knee replacement is not a question of if, but when,” according to the specialist that examined my MRI.

Separately I’d lost sensitivity in the toes and ball of my left foot. After several excruciatingly painful tests, a Neurologist told me that I’d pinched or bruised a nerve near my spine, and that the feeling in my left foot would eventually return.

Two years later the feeling has returned – but not completely. I still lack sensitivity in some areas.

Perhaps the most striking physical effect of the Camino though has been that my eyesight has returned. Prior to the Camino I’d worn glasses for about 15 years – long distance and reading glasses.

I now don’t wear glasses at all.

I stopped using my glasses during the Camino, for practical reasons, because it was hard taking photos while wearing glasses. And part way into the walk I realised that I didn’t need my glasses anymore – my eyesight had improved.

Soon I will have to renew my drivers license, and it will be interesting to see if I pass the eye test!

EMOTIONALLY:
I’m calmer. I don’t let much bother me anymore.

On the Camino, if ever I was anxious about something, I’d ask myself: What’s the worst that can happen? and invariably, if I answered truthfully I’d realise that answer wasn’t so bad. I could handle it.

Anxious about getting a bed that night?
What’s the worst that can happen?
I sleep under a tree, or in an ATM booth.
That’s not so bad.

Anxious about my knee?
What’s the worst that can happen?
I need surgery when I get back.
That’s not so bad.

Anxious that a blister is forming?
What’s the worst that can happen?
It forms, it’s huge, and it’s incredibly painful.
That’s not so bad. It won’t stop me walking.

And so forth.

When I got back home, I applied that “What’s the worst that can happen?” mantra to other aspects of my life.

I have high cholesterol.
What’s the worst that can happen?
I have a heart attack and die.
That’s not so bad.

And I mean it – dying is not so bad.
It just opens up new possibilities, that’s all – new adventures.
Which leads me to the spiritual take-out:

SPIRITUALLY:
The spiritual advancements have been significant.

I won’t go into this in detail, because it’s deeply personal – but I now believe things I didn’t use to believe.

Here’s what I put up on this blog last November, in Dallas – a list of what I believe:

• I believe in divine guidance.
• I believe in an all encompassing, all pervasive force of pure unimaginable love that some would call God.
• I believe in destiny
• I believe in free will
• I believe in reincarnation
• I believe that children choose their parents
• I believe that we’re each born into this earthly realm to achieve certain things and learn certain lessons.
• I believe in the subtle body
• I believe we each have a soul
• I believe that our soul is everlasting
• I believe that our soul is always constantly seeking a higher plane.
• I don’t believe in death
• I don’t believe in religion
• I don’t believe in evil
• But I do believe in ignorance, which spawns fear and hate
• I believe in divine messengers
• I believe we are each given signs, constantly, to help direct us along our path.
• I believe in a Higher Self, or Selves
• I believe in miracles
• I believe that ultimately, the only thing that truly matters is love.

If you want to see the full post, here it is:

What I believe –

In the two years since that Camino I’ve written two books – THE WAY, MY WAY – and a book on how to best take photos on the Camino – PHOTO CAMINO.

My wife and I have also led two pilgrimage walking tours – a tour along the Portuguese Camino, and a tour along the Via di Francesco, in Italy.

This September we are taking a tour group on a spiritual tour of India.

I would not have contemplated doing any of this prior to walking the Camino in 2013. The thought of doing so would have been absurd.

But this is just the start.

The thing I’ve realised is this: Walking the Camino did not trigger change in me. Walking the Camino simply prepared me for the changes that were inevitable.

Weird and Whacky spoiler alert –

For those of you not interested in my delving into the Weird and the Whacky, click over onto something else… something really boring, like Women’s Cricket.

Ouch.

That was my wife slapping me over the head.

Okay – A Dweller on Two Planets.
Intriguing title, no?

The book was “written” by a seventeen year old boy in 1883. Frederick S Oliver lived on a farm in northern California, and admits that he had very little learning or education when he came to write the book.

The book is extraordinary.

It’s written in a highly intellectual and complex style, and yet it’s very accessible. But the thing is, it’s simply not possible to believe that a seventeen year old kid without any education could have written such a tome.

In fact, he claimed he didn’t. He claimed he was merely the stenographer for an entity called Phylos the Thibetan, who channeled the work through Frederick.

The book was finally published in 1905, six years after Frederick’s death. The book was published by his mother, who along with his father, a medical doctor, witnessed and vouched for the circumstances of their son’s channeling.

Frederick says that Phylos would give him sections of text out of context, and even sentences and paragraphs in the wrong order, and would later instruct Frederick how to edit them so that they would make sense.

The book tells in graphic detail about Atlantis. And I mean incredible detail. More detail than is possible for a seventeen year old boy, barely literate, to imagine or write about himself.

The book also describes advances in technology and science which were yet to happen – including the discovery of X-Rays, telephony, high speed rail transport – and other deeper metaphysical subjects, such as karma and reincarnation.

Here is a summary:

Concerning itself with Atlantis, it portrays a first person account of Atlantean culture which had reached a high level of technological and scientific advancement. His personal history and that of a group of souls with whom Phylos closely interacted is portrayed in the context of the social, economic, political and religious structures which shaped Poseid society.

Daily life for Poseidi citizens included such things as antigravity air and submarine craft, television, wireless telephony, arial water generators, air conditioners and high-speed rail. The book deals with deep esoteric subjects including karma and re-incarnation and describes Phylos’ final incarnation in 19th century America where his Atlantean karma played itself out.

In that incarnation (as Walter Pierson, gold miner and occult student of the Theo-Christic Adepts) he travelled to Venus/Hysperia in a subtle body while his physical form remained at the temple inside Mt Shasta.

The book subsequently caused a furore on publication, and became a standard bearer for a lot of New Age thought which is still current. Its influences since have been manyfold, including the starting of the I AM discourses of Guy Ballard, and the Lemurian movement.

Frederick wrote most of the book in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, which if you remember Jennifer and I visited – when was it – last year? Mt. Shasta has become a very important place for those interested in spiritual and esoteric learning and discovery.

Read this book – A Dweller on Two Planets – and read it with an open mind. Read it knowing the circumstances of its writing. It will challenge your thinking about what you’ve been taught to believe is true. It costs less than a buck on Kindle:

There’s another book that I’m reading at the moment, which was also channeled – this time by Jesus Christ, through a highly trained academic. It’s A Course in Miracles, and it was written by Helen Schucman, an avowed disbeliever in God or Jesus.

She wrote the book from dreams, visions, and what she called an “inner voice.” She had another academic help her in the writing and compilation of what has become, some say, a New Age Bible.

The book is dense and complex and at times not easy reading at all. It challenges you and your beliefs on all sorts of levels.

But once again, knowing how it was “written,” you have to give serious consideration that perhaps there are things “behind the veil,” as the channeller for Kryon, Lee Carroll, calls it.

What do I believe?
I believe this stuff.
Sure.
Just like I believe in electricity.
And gravity.
And the sub-atomic nature of matter.
I don’t know how they work, but I still believe in them.

I subscribe to what Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your Philosophy.

I thought I’d post this definition of a pilgrimage, which I read this morning in a newsletter from the Parmarth Niketan Mission, in Rishikesh, India. 

To me, it beautifully encapsulates what it means to embark on a pilgrimage –

A yatra or sacred pilgrimage is a divine experience. 

It is an internal journey as well as an outer journey; a true pilgrimage takes us not only to a Source of the Divine in the external world, but also to the Divine Source within ourselves. 

In this way, every minute and every moment of a pilgrimage is puja (worship), not only that which we perform in the temple upon arrival. 

The pilgrimage experience touches us so deeply that it transforms us and turns us into vessels and vehicles of transformation for the world. 

Edited with BlogPad Pro