Why Believe?

Why should anybody believe all this psychic stuff? Don't ask me—I don't have any wisdom. Belief is mostly a matter of opinion based on experiences that many people find doubtful or deluded. Considering some of the whacky ideas that have found ready acceptance in the New Age movement it's a wonder anybody believes any of it at all.

I'm no evangelist. "The Mystic Maze" was added to Tomorrowland basically because it is such an intriguing subject and one which I have had the good fortune to observe.

Following are a few of the things that led to this part of my personal journey. They will allow you to understand where I came from, and why.

When Lynne had the first of a long series of "transient ischaemic attacks" in 1991 we were holidaying in Perth, thousands of kilometres from home. She held herself together for the plane trip across Australia but collapsed as soon as we reached Sydney. Two hours later she was in hospital.
Three weeks of tests followed and at their conclusion nobody knew what was wrong with her. (It was months before our GP realised that she had suffered a TIA—a kind of transient stroke.)
During that time I thought she might die. I was distraught and fell back on two defence mechanisms. The first was to calculate square roots using only mental arithmetic (I wasn't very good at it but I defy anybody to worry about anything when they're trying to hold all those numbers in memory), the second was to list all the instances of ESP and related happenings I had experienced at first hand.

It was that list that eventually led me to my present position. Do we survive death? Do our loved ones survive death? Wanting it to happen doesn't make it so and I was looking for evidence that the mind (or spirit—is there a difference?) might exist outside the body. If so then physical death doesn't necessarily end everything.

I will list (in no particular order) some of the things I considered. There are no obvious links between them but they were all parts of the jigsaw puzzle.

Three stories have already been told under the Hypnosis tag (see the menu at left). The first was about a friend who saw what was happening at a distant race meeting, the second was Lynne's past life regression (inconclusive, but I added it to the list), and the third was my attempt to contact Lynne telephathically while away with the Army Reserve.

Once I entered a friend's home and one of her guests said, "You're going to come into a lot of money." Well, it was a different way to start a conversation with a stranger.
"That's nice," I said.
"It's going to come from a member of your family."
"Now you've blown it," I said. "My family have no more money than I do."
But she was right!
Six weeks later my son walked in and handed me $4000 from the sale of a block of land in which we had a shared interest.
The woman was a Wendish gypsy and her perception was extraordinary.

Following an accident on the way home from work I once spent the night in hospital. Lynne was used to me staying out all night because I was required to work straight through if my relief shift failed to arrive.
She had been sleeping but woke at the time of the accident, alert that something was wrong. She sat up all night waiting for me to come home. (We didn't have a telephone at that time so she couldn't conveniently ring the office to see if I was working.)

We were driving down a quiet mountain road one night when she said, "Slow down. There's an echidna around the corner." The echidna, a spiny ant-eater, is a very shy animal and almost never seen, but Lynne was spot on. We rounded a sharp right-hand bend and there in the middle of the road was an echidna.

So those are some of the experiences that started me thinking about spiritual things. Since then there has been much more evidence from many sources—accurate Tarot readings (see Travelling Show), spirits (occasionally), ESP, and so on.

My son, Wayne, was killed in a cliff fall in 1996 and for the first couple of months after he died a number of odd things happened that persuaded us that he had survived. They are personal and subjective and I won't go into them here.
What I can tell you is that when I resumed travelling with the Psychic Circus one of our regular stall holders came to see me. She had never claimed to be psychic, she was there only in a sales capacity, but she said, "I have a message from your son. It makes no sense to me but I wrote it down." Then she gave me a piece of paper and left.
Written on it was a message so loving and so sincere that it could only have come from the woman herself. Wayne wasn't like that. He'd have been cheeky with me as he was when alive, but he would never have expressed the thoughts that were written on that page.
But then we came to the one sentence the lady couldn't understand and I'll copy it verbatim from her note, which is sitting by my computer.
It said "The piece of art that is hanging on the wall, as worthless as it is, is priceless to me knowing that you did it for me."
Reading those words ten years later can still bring tears to my eyes.
Wayne had an unhappy marriage and when he died his wife sold, gave away or just threw out many of his possessions. Lynne and I visited one day to find some of his favourite pictures in a skip waiting to be taken to the garbage tip. I asked if I could have one, took it home, and hung it on the wall. It is still there.
But that happened just two days before and almost two hundred kilometres from the venue where I was handed that message. The timing was dramatic.
Anecdotal evidence? Of course, but in the circumstances it is totally convincing.

There is a Sufi fable which teaches us that when the world was young God handed a crystal to one of his angels and said, "This crystal contains the Truth. Take it to Earth and give it to the people.
As he flew along the angel was attacked by a demon. They fought and the crystal fell, shattering on impact.
Many people found pieces of the crystal and declared, "I have found the truth."
As far as the fable goes that was true enough, but of course they hadn't found the whole truth.
Science, philosophy, metaphysics, religion and poetry have all discovered that part of the crystal that satisfies their need, but nobody has found the whole crystal.
Nobody ever will.