Author Rosalind Heywood's Psychic Experiences and Research

Divine Dispensations of Spiritualism Article #9

Rosalind Heywood (1895-1980) wrote two books about Extrasensory Perception ('ESP' or 'psi') published in London as The Sixth Sense: An Inquiry Into Extra-Sensory Perception (1959) and The Infinite Hive: A Personal Record of Extrasensory Experiences (1964) [American titles Beyond The Reach of Sense and ESP: A Personal Memoir].  Rosalind also wrote a pamphlet entitled Telepathy and Allied Phenomena published by the Society for Psychical Research in 1948 with a section about quantitative experiments by S. G. Soal.  Rosalind had joined the Society in 1938.  She also is the author of two chapters of Man's Concern with Death (1968) by Arnold Toynbee and others.

According to the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (2001), Rosalind Heywood "was an active member . . . including a tenure on the council.  She experimented with Whateley Carington on ESP, and was also a subject for physicians studying the effects of mescaline.  She contributed a number of articles to the journal of the SPR, including many memoirs of deceased members . . ."  A 1968 Journal article is "An Apparently Telepathic Impression of Illness."

In a chapter of The Sixth Sense citing historical instances of "psi phenomena" (the twenty-third letter of the Greek alphabet used as a blanket name for psychic phenomena in 1964), Rosalind mentioned Greek and Egyptian oracles and specifically the Delphic Oracle.  She appraised: "The Christian Church laid a ban on all matters connected with psychical research.  They were of the devil and to be avoided at all costs . . . But since ESP appears to be a normal faculty in man, it naturally naturally continued to crop up spontaneously here and there in spite of the Church's disapproval . . . Serious interest in it never died out, although driven underground by the Church."

 

The movement of Spiritualism is traced to the year 1848 in America when "the relatives of two girls, the Fox sisters, claimed that they could communicate with the spirits of deceased human beings by means of raps . . . their successors multiplied . . ."

 

The popularity of the movement soon also became widespread in England with Rosalind noting "on all sides persons appeared who not only undertook to transmit messages from the 'other side' by means of raps, but fell into trances during which they purported to converse personally with the deceased."  Automatic writing, planchette and table-turning were among the methods that resulted with "apparent messages from some source which was not that of their conscious minds."  Rosalind commented:

The phenomena of trance and other automatisms seem to be inherent in human nature, for they were recorded in the literature of Greece and Rome and travellers have reported them from India, China and elsewhere and also from primitive societies.

She identified that a key figure in the development of psychical research was Henry Sidgwick, who became an iconoclastic figure at Cambridge's Trinity College, where he eventually became Knightsbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy.  Rosalind quoted his letter to a friend: "I dread doing anything to support the plausible suspicion that men in general, even those who profess lofty aspirations, are secretly swayed by material interests."  Sidgwick became cofounder and the first president of  the Society for Psychical Research.

The Society for Psychical Research website at https://www.spr.ac.uk/ provides some historical notes, identifying Sidgwick's chief associates in the early stages: "Frederic Myers, a classical scholar with wide-ranging interests, and the brilliant Edmund Gurney, who was to develop a pioneering interest in hypnotism and psychological automatisms.  Other prominent figures were the physicists William Barrett and Lord Rayleigh; Arthur Balfour, philosopher and Britain’s prime minister in the years 1902-1905; his brother Gerald Balfour, classical scholar and philosopher; and Eleanor Sidgwick, the Balfours' sister (and wife of Henry Sidgwick), a mathematician and later principal of Newnham College, Cambridge."

Rosalind wrote that Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney formed an intellectual nucleus for the formation of the S.P.R. and another colleague was Sir William Crookes.  Phantasms of the Living (1886) by Gurney, Myers and Frank Podmore is among the books that chronicle the research of these men.

There were many cases recorded in Phantasms of the Living in which people believed themselves actually to have heard or seen friends or relatives who were not physically present at times when they were afterwards discovered to have been in danger or distress or, even more frequently, near the moment of death.  These came to be known as crisis cases.  Myers and Gurney analysed large numbers of them and came jointly to the conclusion that there was at least a connection between such experiences and the events occurring to the person seen or heard; that is, they seemed to be testimony to some kind of ESP.  The actual nature of such apparitions was another problem and much more complicated.

An S.P.R. website article by Zofia Weaver that I read years ago mentioned that the book contains more than 700 carefully analyzed cases.  Other S.P.R. members in later years include Oliver Lodge, Richard Hodgson and Charles Richet.  Richet's metaphysical research and appraisals were published in 1922 as Traité de Metapsychique (translated into English the following year as Thirty Years of Psychical Research: Being A Treatise on Metapsychics).  At the beginning of the book, Richet observed that metapsychic phenomena "seem due to unknown but intelligent forces, including among these unknown intelligences the astonishing intellectual phenomena of our subconsciousness."

Rosalind noted that Richard Hodgson with William James and J. H. Hyslop were instrumental to the founding of the American Society for Psychical Research.  One of the mediums profiled in The Sixth Sense is Mrs. Piper, "who was under expert observation from 1886 until 1911."

Piper's gift of mediumship was discovered at a time when she was discouraged by the failure of medical treatment to clear up the effects of an accident.  She at last decided to consult a 'psychic healer.'  At her second visit to him she herself went into a trance.  Rosalind wrote that soon Mrs. Piper "developed the power to do this at will" but this choice of words may foster an incorrect impression.  More precisely, the reader should consider that the 'power' and 'will' being demonstrated was harmonious with Mrs. Piper's mental state and thus other personalities were able to communicate through her physical body.  Rosalind observed that Piper’s "head would fall on to a cushion, her surface personality fade out, and a new personality would speak or write matter of which it was clear she had no knowledge when she awoke."  After several of these "new personalities" or "Controls," the entity observed to preside became known as "Phinuit."

He claimed to have been a French doctor called Phinuit—this was a variant of the name of the healer’s own Control—and to transmit messages from a number of communicators.  Whatever the truth of this, when he was ostensibly in control of the entranced Mrs. Piper she would often display remarkable ESP.

Some of the incidents mentioned by Rosalind Heywood are to be found in The Life and Work of Mrs. Piper, a 1929 biography by Alta L. Piper, the medium’s daughter.  In 1892 Mrs. Piper developed a new Control who "purported to be a young friend of Hodgson's," George Pellew (Alta L. Piper used the pseudonyms Pelham and Pelman in her book) who had died very suddenly in New York.  Alta L. Piper noted:

It was "George Pelham" who developed the automatic writing which, while not an entirely new phenomenon in Mrs. Piper's work, had heretofore been of the briefest and most scrappy kind.

In the "Phinuit" days the voice had been the chief means of communication, and the sense of reality produced upon the sitter by the deep gruff voice of this control was one of the outstanding features of that period.

During the years covering the period from 1892 to 1898 "G.P." saw and talked with one hundred and thirty persons of which number thirty had been previously known to him during his life time, and not only did he recognise and correctly call by name each one of these thirty sitters, but he used with each, as well, both the tone and the manner which he had been accustomed to use when living.

Alta L. Piper found that her mother's phenomena—"or perhaps better the development of them"—could be assigned three stages or periods.

. . . the first stage which began with the inception of her power in 1884 and continued for a period of eight years under the control of the quaint and whimsical personality known as "Dr. Phinuit"; the second, beginning with the advent, in 1892, of George Pelman—or G.P. as this control was generally known—as the principal communicator; and the third, or last stage which began in 1897 with the appearance of the group of controls known as the "Imperator Group" . . .

. . . "G. P.", in turn, is the antithesis of the gentle, patient, and reverent "Rector" who acts as the "amanuensis" for the "Imperator Group" and so becomes the principal communicator of the third period.

Under the control of this group of personalities, the communications assumed a dignity and loftiness of expression, as well as a quasi-religious character, which they had heretofore entirely lacked.

An observation was included in Alta L. Piper's book that apparently derived from experiences observed in relation to her mother's mediumship.

If the investigator possesses a personality, which for some reason or other is antagonistic to the medium, he is but wasting her strength and his own time in continuing his experiments; for, indeed, such a position is analagous to that of an electrician who by connecting two cathodes, or negatives, expects to produce a current of electricity.

Rosalind acknowledged in The Sixth Sense a quotation also included in The Life and Work of Mrs. Piper.

In the end G.P.'s characterisation of George Pelham, added to an incommunicable sense of presence, broke down Hodgson's extreme skepticism.  "I cannot profess," he wrote, "to have any doubt but that the chief communicators to whom I have referred . . . are veritably the personalities that they claim to be, that they have survived the change we call death, and that they have directly communicated with us whom we call living through Mrs. Piper's entranced organism."

Both books also provide a description and analysis of the 'automatic writing' scripts that came to be recognized as offering 'cross correspondences' and these were intensively studied by S.P.R. investigators.  This epoch followed the death of Henry Sidgwick in 1900 and Frederic Myers in 1901; Edmund Gurney had been dead for ten years.  As recounted by Rosalind, among the friends of Myers at Cambridge were classical scholar Dr. A. W. Verrall and his wife, who herself was a lecturer in classics at Newnham College.  After the death of Myers, Mrs. Verrall decided to try and enable him to demonstrate his survival of death through automatic writing.  After three months of abortive efforts, Mrs. Verrall began writing mysteriously worded Latin and Greek automatic scripts signed 'Myers.'

Allusions to subjects referred to by Mrs. Verrall began to be made in America by Mrs. Piper, and these too claimed to come from Myers.  In another year or so Mrs. Verrall's daughter, Miss Helen Verrall, also began to write automatically, and it was found that before she had seen her mother's scripts she was alluding to the same subjects as her mother and Mrs. Piper.  After this their scripts were all sent to Miss Alice Johnson, who had by now become secretary of the S.P.R.

The next person to come into the picture was Mrs. Fleming, who was a sister of Rudyard Kipling and lived in India.  (She used a pseudonym, Mrs. Holland, as her husband And family strongly disproved of psychic activities.)  In 1903 she read Myers' book Human Personality, and this renewed her interest in her own gift of automatic writing.  She too began to obtain scripts signed 'Myers,' and in one of these she was instructed to send it to Mrs. Verrall at 5 Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge.

It was not until 1905 that Miss Johnson realized what was happening, by which time the scripts themselves appeared to be making the extraordinary claim that Myers, Gurney and Sidgwick had devised them to demonstrate their continued existence and prove their identity.

Rosalind noted that some of the communications were spoken but it was convenient to refer to them all as 'scripts.'  She further mentioned that there were three thousand original documents available for study.

This series of scripts came to be known as the cross correspondences and they abounded in literary allusions and quotations in both classical and modern languages, many of them so abstruse that it needed a scholar of the quality of their alleged authors even to recognise them.  The work of assessment was laborious and complicated.  The first appearance of any allusion or quotation had to be noted and its reappearance or any complementary statement watched for thereafter.  To do that was particularly important, for the essence of the plan as it grew more complicated appeared to be for the allusions and quotations not to repeat but to complement each other.

Mrs. Holland said that she was always fully conscious when writing but that the pencil moved too quickly for her to grasp any meaning.  To amuse herself she had written automatically for ten years before she read Human Personality.  In it she came upon some experiences similar to her own, which she had been unable to understand, and this encouraged her to write about these to Alice Johnson, the Secretary of the S.P.R.  Miss Johnson asked for details which Mrs. Holland sent.  Her scripts, she said, had always come at great speed; she once wrote fourteen poems in an hour.

Alta L. Piper observed at the conclusion of a brief examination of cross correspondences in her book that if "this communicator is considered to have displayed actual knowledge on this point, it follows that such consideration must tend to strengthen the theory of the existence of an extraneous intelligence responsible for, and capable of, directing the production of diverse and fragmentary 'bits,' which, when fitted into place like pictures of a picture puzzle, form in their entirety the complete pattern of the whole."

In the Appendix of The Sixth Sense, Rosalind shared her observations about psi researchers.  Concerning the work of physical scientists G.N.M. Tyrrell (author of Apparitions, 1953) and Whately Carington (author of Telepathy, 1945), she wrote:

. . . the point of interest is that Tyrrell's research work, like Carington's, drove him to postulate some kind of immediate linkage between human beings at a subconscious level.  This hypothesis tallies with the conceptions of Hindu philosophy and also with those developed by Jung, partly as a result of his discovery that similar symbols people the human subconscious the world over and have done so throughout the ages.

Whately Carington went further than Tyrrell and postulated 'group minds' within the common subconscious.

Biologist Sir Alister Hardy also was associated with the hypothesis of a group mind, particularly "a group mind acting as a selective agent." 

In the view of Professor Hardy, the fact that individual organisms are in psychical connection with one another across space is one of the most revolutionary biological discoveries ever made.

Rosalind related that American psychologist Professor Gardner Murphy had tried to explain ESP in terms of what is known as "field theory."  She observed, "The idea of field theory in physics began to take shape near the end of the nineteenth century, when pioneer work by Clerk-Maxwell made it possible to envisage electromagnetic activity as a distribution of energy in time and space.  An area of such energy became known as a field."  Murphy's view of the model of field research as applied to psychical research suggested that "any possible continuing psychical activity which might survive the death of the body would tend to merge more closely into the complex structural whole (field) of which it is an aspect."  Psychical activity related to an individual personality would thus become an aspect of different fields and take on new qualities and new structural relationships.

The perspective of psychologist Dr. R. H. Thouless and bio-chemist Dr. B. P. Wiesner motivated Rosalind to consider "what are the limits or the channels in the case of psi?"  One hypothesis by Thouless and Wiesner concerned psychic healing: "And it may be possible, they said, to relate normal growth and healing with the curious apparent psi phenomenon of materialisation in physical mediumship, for which they think there is some quite strong testimony."

The Infinite Hive: A Personal Record of Extrasensory Experiences was published five years after Rosalind's first book, which she described as "a short non-technical introduction" to the subject addressing the question "What evidence is there for ESP?"  She acknowledged that a "well known psychologist who was brave enough to be interested in ESP" suggested she write another book providing "the point of view of the percipient" by relating her own ESP experiences.  These incidents encompassed some of her own thoughts that she had found surprising over the years as well as unusual events that had occurred to other people in her presence.  Rosalind labeled her thought "impulses to constructive action" as 'Orders' "for want of a better word."

She recalled that when she was a volunteer nurse during the war of 1914, she witnessed an occurrence where a gravely ill soldier appeared aware of invisible presences. After a serious operation, the soldier was delirious.

He appeared quite unconscious of my presence, and I felt desperate because there seemed no way to reach and comfort him.  This desperation may perhaps have enabled a confident inner Order to emerge to consciousness.  The Order was "Think him quiet."  I was much surprised . . .

. . . to my even greater surprise, he at once fell into a quiet sleep.

Then, suddenly, the tossing and delirium ceased, he looked at me with quiet, rational eyes—he was obviously an educated man—and said calmly, "It's no use concentrating any longer, Nurse.  I shall not be going to sleep again."  Then the rational man vanished and the agonizing delirium began once more . . .

But suddenly his face lit up.  "It's Annie!" he cried, gazing in joyous recognition at someone I could not see, "And John! . . . Oh, the Light! . . . The light! . . ."  Soon afterwards he died.

The remembrances of her work as a nurse included spontaneously promising to obtain a rose for a soldier with blackwater fever when she was serving in Macedonia and then finding herself able to fulfill the unlikely task.  On another occasion, she nagged a malnourished man to save his life.

Among 'ESP-type' experiences, she included "the flash of knowledge" that an acquaintance would become her husband.  She added with a footnote: "Many years later I had a similar apparently precognitive flash which pin-pointed exactly the girl our son was going to marry.  I had never heard of her, but they met and married about a year later."

My experiences divide roughly into two kinds: a passive awareness, usually fleeting and on the fringe of the mind, of apparent presences or of situations not perceptible via the senses; and an inner prompting to action or comment on behalf of other people, which seems either beyond my normal capacity, or absurd in the light of facts known to me at the time, but turns out to be relevant in the light of other facts learnt later on.

Rosalind shared an odd experience that was among the occasions "when I have been aware of duality in myself."

One hot night my husband was peacefully sleeping while I wriggled, restless and wide awake, at his side in the great carved bed.  At last the excessive peace became unbearable.  "I can’t stand it," I thought, "I shall wake him up to make love to me."

Before I could carry out this egoistic idea I did something very odd—I split in two.  One Me in its pink nightie continued to toss self-centredly against the embroidered pillows, but another, clad in a long, very white, hooded garment, was now standing, calm, immobile and impersonally outward-looking, at the foot of the bed.  This White Me seemed just as actual as Pink Me and I was equally conscious in both places at the same time.  I vividly remember myself as White Me looking down and observing the carved end of the bed in front of me and also thinking what a silly fool Pink Me looked, tossing in that petulant way against the pillows.  "You're behaving disgracefully," said White Me to Pink Me with cold contempt.  "Don't be so selfish, you know he's dog tired."

Pink Me was a totally self-regarding little animal, entirely composed of 'appetites,' and she cared not at all whether her unfortunate husband was tired or not.  "I shall do what I like," she retorted furiously, "and you can't stop me, you pious white prig!"  She was particularly furious because she knew very well that White Me was the stronger and could stop her.

A moment or two later—I felt no transition—White Me was once more imprisoned with Pink Me in one body, and there they have dwelt as oil and water ever since.  It is only quite lately that I have become aware, though I seldom remember it, that I can deliberately identify myself with White Me and watch without feeling them—that is the point—the desires and repulsions that must inevitably toss all Pink Mes around.

Reading The Infinite Hive, I was reminded of my conviction that all people have psychic abilities; however, it seems evident that individuals such as Rosalind Heywood, highly aware and accepting of the mental process involved with these abilities, who can demonstrate how they have been helpful in day-to-day life.  In one incident recounted, her 'Orders' were described as having sent her to go back to her husband.  She later learned that their solicitor didn't show up for an appointment.  Rosalind mentioned, "I seem more inclined to pick up such minor mishaps to my husband than major crises.  (Fortunately, they happen oftener.)  I failed, for instance, to get two serious accidents or a narrow shave when he was Military Attaché in Turkey, and a brigand killed the guide in his car with a bullet meant for him."

She recalled her husband's response when a limousine collided with their small sports car and forced it on to the pavement up against a lamp post.

"It's all right," he said placidly, "I dreamt this last night.  I know what's wrong.  I only have to change the wheel."  He got out, looked, said, "It's as I thought," and changed it. 

A Ouija Board experience resulting with apparent precognition was recalled by Rosalind to show "how many questions can be raised by one simple sentence."

A doctor asked me to show him my ouija board working, and we tried it with his finger and mine on the pointer.  After it had spelt out some trite remarks I felt a sudden impulse to test what it would write if I could not see the letters.  Would that concern the doctor only, or me as well?  To make my test I sat down on the floor with my head bent below table level, but my arms stretched up so that two fingers could still rest on the pointer.  After a minute or two the doctor said that it had written that George had asked for Frank to be warned to drive with exaggerated care for the next two days.  This, he said, meant nothing to him as he had no close links with a George.

Rosalind reflected, "George is a common enough name, but it happened to have been that of my husband's much-loved brother, who had been killed not long before."  She couldn't recollect if she had referred to her husband's name, Frank, when speaking casually with the doctor, whom she had met only once.  She cautioned her husband to drive carefully for two days.

The following evening he came in looking really astonished.  "Do you know," he said, "if I had not driven with exaggerated care as you asked me to, I should have had no less than three major accidents today."

She noted that experiences of telepathy could involve people who had no previous link between them.

One day, for instance, I saw my younger son look up the name of a street in the map of London because, so he told me later, he had "known" that when he went out someone was going to ask him where it was and he did not know.  This happened as he had foreseen within an hour.  Chance?  Perhaps.  Yet he has never looked up a street for that reason and not been asked for it.  But if it was not chance, what was the link between two total strangers?

Rosalind confessed to "the experience of meeting people who had recently died": "I shall give the two apparently extra-mundane contacts which made the deepest and most lasting impression on me, and in which I felt vividly aware of being urgently approached by a friend . . . in neither case at the time did I doubt that the person I had known in life was present."

The setting of the first occurrence was Washington in the 1930s after her husband had joined the Foreign Service.  At parties the couple had met an American woman named Julia.  Two days after learning that Julia's plane had crashed in the Andes with no survivors, Rosalind began writing a letter offering her condolences to Julia's mother.

. . . inside my head I heard Julia speak. She spoke in no uncertain terms.  "Don't send that silly letter," she said.  "Go to my mother now, straight away, and tell her to stop all that ridiculous mourning at once.  I'm very happy and I can't stand it."

The more I hesitated the more insistent 'Julia' became . . .

Although barging in and asking Julia's mother to stop an excessive display of mourning seemed rude to Rosalind, she fulfilled the unexpected psychic request.

. . . her face lit up.  "I knew it," she cried, "I knew she'd hate it, and I didn't want it.  I shall get up and stop it at once!"

The second occurrence was after the funeral of naval inventor Vivian Usborne, who she had known since her sojourn in Macedonia.  Around ten days later, she went to what had been his home to get a painting he had made and left to her.

As I hurried into his room to fetch the picture I was shocked by a sickening blast of what I have come to call the smell of death.

As with 'Julia,' I felt 'Vivian' communicate inside my mind, and I shut my mind, and I shut my eyes and stood very still to attend better.  He conveyed in some fashion so intimate that the best word seems to be communion, pretentious though that sounds, that he had been entirely mistaken in expecting extinction at death.  On the contrary, he now had scope, freedom and opportunity beyond his wildest dreams.  The emphasis was not merely on being alive but on this magnificent expansion of opportunity.  Then I too seemed to be caught up into the quality of his situation — but not into its form.  I experienced no forms and no images.

Rosalind recalled having 'said' to him, "This is wonderful, but you've given me no evidence.  What can I say to the S.P.R.?"

Vivian's response to my question was emphatic and immediate.  "I cannot give you evidence.  You have no concepts for these conditions.  I can only give you poetic images."

At that, far, far above me, I saw—with the inner eye—an immense pair of white wings flying in a limitless blue sky.  Though at first an image of such Victorian obviousness seems absurd, it was in fact an entirely apt expression of the scope, opportunity and freedom into which for a few moments I felt caught up.  But it was only for a few moments.  I quickly became aware that I could not hold the absorbed state which contact with 'Vivian' demanded, and very soon had to say reluctantly, "Good-bye, I must drop now."

Then I dropped — down to the empty room and the smell of death.

I hope it is clear that at the time this experience seemed completely normal and the invisible 'Vivian' as real as a friend one meets in the street.

Upon reading the final personal experience offered by the author in The Infinite Hive, I was reminded of some of my own moments of spiritual understanding when I've found myself required to put personal considerations aside and respond to the needs of others.  Rosalind recalled a day in the autumn of 1962 when her husband gave her a 5 note to buy herself something new to wear.  She expressed having mixed feelings about the request and went home cognizant that she didn't want to purchase anything.  She noticed an upset man and asked if she could be of help.

He had recently been discharged from hospital after polio, and the only room he could afford to rent was on the top floor of a hostel where they provided no food.  It took him over an hour to crawl up and down the stairs.  After a long and weary search he had that morning found a ground floor room which he could afford, but because the landlady had been let down by the previous tenant she was afraid to risk not having the rent in advance.  And he had not got it.

"There you are," said Orders smugly, as if they had timed the whole affair to the second.  So I obediently fished out my 5 note and at least had the satisfaction of seeing that little bit of paper switch despair into a vision of the heavens opening.

Rosalind was given mescalin in 1952 by "a doctor who was studying model psychoses in a search for a cure for schizophrenia."  She stated, "Mr. Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception, had not come out, hallucinogens were not yet fashionable, and I had no idea what to expect."  She described this experience yet her conclusion is the important lesson: "Many people have experienced symbols of universal interrelatedness under a hallucinogen, and mystics, artists, saints and sensitives do the same on their own."

 

One chapter of The Infinite Hive is devoted to an aspect of psychic phenomena that the author referred to as 'the Singing.'  

 

It is best described as a kind of continuous vibrant inner quasi-sound, in which the nearest outer analogy is the noise induced by pressing a seashell against the car, or perhaps the hum of a distant dynamo . . . 

Indeed, at times I think of it as the hum of life, for it is always louder when life of any kind feels more intense.

Rosalind recalled first becoming aware of 'the Singing' when she and her husband began residing in an old converted barn in a Sussex village.  ". . . there for the first time I became aware of the Singing on a note I labelled Christian, because it seemed to emanate from the church just over the wall."

I listened for the Christian note in several quiet empty churches and found that in some it would pass over into a more intense experience, as if—I repeat as if—an inner force were streaming from the altar.

To a person with my agnostic outlook such an experience was disconcerting, but to deny it repeatedly would have been dishonest.

What Rosalind called "a yet greater shock to my self-conceit" was experienced soon thereafter.

Our friend Mary had asked me to go and cheer up a poor old invalid lady in Brighton, and I did so, very bored, but self-righteously resigned to listen with the best grace I could to her babble about auras and karma and the rest.  Once more snobbery went before a fall.  What I got was a blast of the Christian note so strong that it knocked out mny power to talk, as the glare of a searchlight knocks out the power to see.

One way for readers today to become aware of the reality of so-called 'psychic' experiences relating to one's interaction with 'intelligent forces'—or what this blogger calls "my personal 'guide/s in Oneness'/'Guardian Angel' as representing the 'God Force' ('Michael' or 'M') manifesting continuously around me in diverse and unlimited ways"—is through reading my frank and straightforward journal blog entries chronicling the psychic phenomena that I've been experiencing on a daily basis during the present ongoing sad and distressing phase of earthly life: My Life with Michael journal.  I began allocating time to journal blog entries in January 2021.