The Book in the Sky, Part 2

The phrase "Not long now", clearly emphasized in the dream and later that day with an additional synchronicity, would imply that this accessibility is imminent. Once I had worked out a rough interpretation of these dreams, the imagery began to spill over into my daily reality.

A coworker with a background in mathematics scribbled a ridiculously complex mathematical formula on the window with a marker, just for entertainment, as our work has very little to do with math. The left side of the equation consisted of a large capital A and the right side was the indecipherable mass of symbols.

On June 1st 2008, 10 days before Jennifer made the connection about these dreams, a 300-foot crop circle appeared near Barbury Castle in England. Kal Cobalt reported on Reality Sandwich that "analysis of the 'ratchet' design has left many experts breathless with the complexity hidden within its angles...Mathematicians studying the new formation have made the startling discovery that pi to the tenth decimal point is encoded within the ratchet (3.14159265358)." The Telegraph reported it as "the most complex crop circle ever discovered in British fields".

"This is the most exciting and puzzling event so far this year to appear in Wiltshire. This formation appears to deliberately straddle a public pathway. This is a little baffling as there is plenty of room in the barley field to accommodate a pathway free design."

It seems unlikely that the maker of this formation would have accidentally overlapped it with the walkway. Here we see similar symbolism: a complex pattern of intricate, encoded knowledge overlapped and perfectly aligned with a walkway accessible to the public.

I began to come across imagery of an A emerging from geometric patterns or words.

My coffee machine started overflowing and while investigating the problem I noticed this:

I found a library book "A You're Adorable" around the house, with the A directly centered on the barcode, which is of course encoded information, on the cover. Adjacent to this is a an angel hugging a baby.

An advertising campaign for a new TV channel, "A-Channel", took over the subway system. Here we see a large A next to an image of fingerprints. Fingerprints are code in that they are not directly readable, but act as a unique idenifier of an inidiviual person. There is also research supporting the idea that fingerprints can act as diagnostic indicators of genetic diseases such as schizophrenia and diabetes. This would mean that they carry information.

The image used for Daniel Pinchbeck's November Reality Sandwich post "Breakdown or Breakthrough" is highly significant in its unintentional evocation of the A-dream imagery. The image is of text with a leading offset capital A. The text has a mirror reflection above it. The lower text, which is readable, deals with the current economic situation. The upper text, also showing the capital A, is backwards, thus appearing alien and indecipherable. I interpret this as a symbol of two levels of information - one dealing with everyday matters, received through the conventional channels such as academic research, media and communication with others. The upper level of information we can equate with the sky symbols, which is not always consciously available to us, but is becoming more so, as symbolized by the A. It is information received through less conventional channels such as psychic mediumship and synchronicities. It can pertain to any aspect of reality. Both types of information, I believe, are valid and essential, and must be evaluated by the individual.

Spontaneous access to knowledge is usually associated with altered states of consciousness. Psychologist Stanislav Grof has observed numerous cases of this kind, in sessions where an altered state is induced using LSD or meditative techniques he developed. In "The Holotropic Mind", he presents cases of transpersonal experience where the subject, in an altered state, experiences the consciousness of animals, plants, and even minerals.

A Belgian woman describes an experience that took place during one of Grof's workshops:

"I had an increasing sense that my consciousness had a distinctly oceanic quality until I felt that I actually became what can best be described as the consciousness of the ocean. I became aware of the presence of several large bodies and realized that it was a pod of whales.

"At one point, I felt cold air streaming through my head and had a taste of salty water in my mouth. A variety of sensations and feelings that were alien and definitely not human imperceptibly took over my consciousness. A new, gigantic body image started to form out of the primordial connection to the other large bodies around me and I realized I had become one of them. Inside my belly I sensed another life form and new it was my baby. There was no doubt in my mind that I was a pregnant whale cow.

"And then came another wave of the birth process. However, this time it had a different quality than the previous episodes. It had gargantuan proportions, as if the ocean were stirred from its very depth; at the same time it was surprisingly easy and natural. I experienced my genitals in the most intimate way, with all the nuances of these birthing activities associated with profound visceral understanding of how whales give birth. What I found most amazing was how they use water to expel the baby by sucking it into their genitals and working with hydraulic pressure. It seemed significant that the baby was born with its tail first."6

Grof described this woman's experience to a marine biologist, who confirmed that the details she gave of whale birthing were accurate. She had not previously been aware of information on this subject. Grof continues, "This is just one of hundreds of confirmations of extraordinary insights that people have received while in altered states. I have been repeatedly surprised by the voracity of these insights, which often involve highly specific and detailed information even with people who had no previous knowledge, interest, or experience in the subject."

According to Laszlo,

"All we experience in our lifetime - all our perceptions, feelings, and thought processes - have cerebral functions associated with them. These functions have wave-form equivalents, since our brain, like other things in space and time, creates information-carrying vortices - it "makes waves." The waves propagate in the vacuum and interfere with the waves created by the bodies and brains of other people, giving rise to complex holograms. ...

"Generations after generations of humans have left holographic traces in the A-field, and the information in these holograms is available to be read out. The holograms of individuals integrate in a superhologram, which is the encompassing hologram of a tribe, community, or culture. The collective holograms interface and integrate in turn with the super-superhologram of all people. This is the collective in-formation pool of humankind."

"We can tune our consciousness to resonate with the hologram in the A-field. The transmissions of information in a field of holograms is known: it occurs when the wavefields that make up two (or more) holograms are "conjugate" with each other. The effect is similar to the more familiar effect known as resonance."8

It is interesting that Laszlo tells us that we are in fact already accessing part of the A-field on a daily basis: that of our own hologram.

"Normally the most direct and evident resonance occurs between our brain and the hologram we ourselves have created. This is the basis of long-term memory. When we remember a thing, a person, or an event from many years ago...we do not address the memory stores in our brain: we "recall" the information from the hologram that records our experiences."9

This idea is supported by the work of neurologist Karl Pribram which states that long-term memory is stored holographically across the brain and is not local to a specific area. That we generate our own hologram, which becomes part of the larger hologram, is expressed in Jennifer's dream imagery of the observatory, which we can safely take as a symbol for the observer, projecting the A-field information into the sky. One of the common elements of near-death experiences is known as the "holographic life review". An example:

"All my life up till the present seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic, three-dimensional review, and each event seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of good or evil or with an insight into cause or effect. Not only did I perceive everything from my own viewpoint, but I also knew the thoughts of everyone involved in the event, as if I had their thoughts within me. This meant that I perceived not only what I had done or thought, but even in what way it had influenced others."10

Here we see an individual, who's body is clinically dead, with full access to his own hologram as well as to those of others affected by him during his lifetime.

Laszlo speculates on an evolution of consciousness, where we do not need to re-tune to altered states, or die, in order to achieve lucid transpersonal awareness.

"Ideas such as these differ in specific detail, but they have a common thrust. Consciousness evolution is from the ego-bound to the transpersonal form. If this is so, it is a source of great hope. Transpersonal consciousness is open to more of the information that reaches our brain than the consciousness still dominant today. This could have momentous consequences. It could produce greater empathy among people, and greater sensitivity to animals, plants and the entire biosphere. It could create subtle contact with the rest of the cosmos. When a critical mass of humans evolves to the transpersonal level of consciousness a higher civilization is likely to emerge, with deeper solidarity and a higher sense of justice and responsibility."11

Whenever we feel empathy and put ourselves in someone else's shoes, we are experiencing transpersonal consciousness. Perhaps a greater emphasis on an empathetic mode of being by a critical mass of people can result in, as Laszlo suggests, a quantum leap in which we all go online and boundaries dissolve. Perhaps it is happening regardless of our actions, and the best we can do is to become compatible with this mode of being. How things play out is to be determined. One thing that seems for sure is that any of us can be informed at any time.

The preceding paragraph was intended to close this article. I wrote the closing while at a relative's cottage. The following day, something occurred that seemed to be in reponse to the closing paragraph. I was in the washroom helping my toddler to use the toilet. I stood facing her, and directly above her was a picture hanging on the wall. For no apparent reason, the picture fell off the wall and smashed the lid of the toilet into pieces. The pieces remained in place and no one was hurt. I examined the back of the picture frame and the cardboard backing had a cutaway with a hole intended for hanging. The nail that it had been hanging from had slowly worn away at the cardboard simply by force of gravity, until after a decade or so, the cardboard gave way, as I stood facing it.

The picture was of several sailboats. The first, second and last sails showed a capital A followed by some numbers, some of which showed backwards and like alien symbols. The message on the poster was "We cannot direct the wind. We can adjust the sails."

I removed the loose pieces of the toilet lid. With half the lid remaining, it looked like a cut-away in a technical illustration, where part of a container or covering is rendered invisible so as to display the inner contents or mechanism. A search on "cut-away" in reference to technical illustrations turns up the following definition:

"...the usual practice is to cut away a quarter segment to expose the inner details while still maintaining the external shape... this type of illustration is particularly suitable for showing internal flow and principles of operation."12

I feel that this is intentional symbolism, once again with the theme of information that was previously abstracted away from us, becoming directly accessible to our senses.

The smashed toilet:

An example of a technical illustration using a cut-away:

In this same theme, I photographed the following scene on my street in which we see a digger breaking through the sidewalk to provide access to the water and gas pipes underneath. The red wooden barrier on the right forms an A next to the post reflecting the camera flash. At the time I didn't notice that on the arm of the digger are some letters that are defaced or obscured with the exception of an A.

In this context, another meaning of "A" could be the word Apocalypse, which is popularly considered a sort of destrcutive reckoning event in the near future. However the word itself is dervied from the Greek apokalyptein meaning "uncover". The components of this word are apo, a prefix meaning "away from", and kalyptein, meaning "to cover, conceal".

I thought that the falling picture would be the final event to integrate into this piece however that was not the case. Upon returning to work after my vacation, I attended a management training course. During this course I began to experience another set of synchronicites that seemed to add new themes to those presented so far.

The man presenting said he also teaches a course in "experiential learning", which is about ways of learning that involve direct experience as opposed to academic methods.

He got onto the subject of bees, saying that they are genetically wired so that when they find a new food source, they do a dance for the other bees that is highly complex and involves triangulation to the sun, and communicates the location of the food source. The bees then go off and find the food. However, twenty percent of the bees are genetically wired to not go to the food source and go somewhere else entirely, in a random fashion. The apparent reason for this is so they will in turn discover locations of new food sources which can then be communicated back to the group.

He expressed his admiration for the work of Carl Jung, and described some behavioural personality types that were based on Jung's work. Much of the day long session involved exercises around determining our behavioural type and how to balance it out and work with people that have other behavioural tendencies.

A folder was handed out with material for us to follow. As I hadn't filled out the questionaire beforehand, I was given a personality profile for "Sam Sample". In the footer of each page was a graphic of two shapes. The left hand shape resembled a capital A. The right hand shape looked like a misshapen A, with the lower right leg bent upwards.

We came to the explanation of this graphic. The shapes were lines on a graph of the behavioural types. The misshapen A was an example of Sam Sample's personality profile, or "natural style", also described by the presenters as the style requiring the least effort, and the A represented the "perceived adjustment" that Sample Sam felt he needed to make based on the answers he provided in his questionaire. Others in the course did not have had a graph shaped like an A, it was only my "Sam Sample" binder that had this shape.

So here we have events that tie into the previous ones presented. The capital A is juxtaposed with the indecipherable symbol, and we have the theme of making adjustments to ourselves to adapt to a changing reality.

What is changing and what should be adjusted? One type of change could be on the collective psychic level, that results in an overall shift to transpersonal consciousness. It may be that we need to adjust to this mode of consciousness in anticipation of this shift. Another type of change could be upheaval in our society and natural environment that would require adjustments of a more practical and material nature. One could bring about the other, or the two could be different aspects of the same change.

There is a Darwinian overtone to this idea of adjustment. I put very little stock in the theory of evolution-by-natural-selection as an explanation for our development, especially the development of psychic abilities. However these abilities are part of our toolkit and could be of immense practical value, especially in times of upheaval. In fact, the upheavals could be what releases these abilities some of us.

Mythologist John Lash refers to the work of Stanislav Grof:

"Today we are on the verge of witnessing a collective manifestation of what Stan Grof calls 'spiritual emergencies.' His recent book, When the Impossible Happens, presents a vivid inventory of such emergencies. ...

"Grof has shown that traumatic experiences normally dismissed as due to 'mental breakdown' or 'mental illness' are actually opportunities to break through into non-ordinary reality and acquire paranormal perception. The 2012 endtime marks a global pandemic of such opportunities."

In very apocalyptic launguage he pictures a scenario where an unravelling society acts as a trigger to unleash paranormal abilities:

"The vast spiritual emergency to be undergone by the human species in ever-increasing numbers, with natural disasters, social violence, and outright madness escalating up to and beyond 2012, will open the seals of paranormal faculties and burst the floodgates of non-ordinary reality. As the world humans have made comes apart in convulsions of fire and flood, a world will arise anew, but first within human perception, because seeing the Next World comes with traumatic extrapolation of the senses toward non-ordinary reality, in the very moment we behold the destruction of the existing world.

"The 2012 endtime will bring physical destruction on an unimaginable scale—this is not a prophecy but a common sense inference based on observable events and data, such as the meltdown rate of the Greenland iceshelf (dystropic feedback). It entails a total planetary makeover in parallel with a visionary awakening and plunge into altered states and paranormal perception, a shift into evolutional anomaly and shamanic magic. The scale of natural law will be reversed: instead of survival depending upon everyone's conformity to consensus reality, it will depend on some individuals entering and navigating the realms of non-ordinary reality...

"For those who lived through the Ice Age, practical and magical skills were complementary. But these skills declined slowly over many millennia, and split apart. Hence early Neolithic cave relics and rock art are markedly inferior to what preceded them in the Paleolithic. We did not evolve from grunting, hairy cave people who hacked out stone implements: we evolved from handicapped cave people who themselves were degenerate heirs of far more skilled, sophisticated primitives. And these skilled, sophisticated primitives were themselves the diaspora of civilizations destroyed by a combination of natural and human-made factors. The mark of such civilizations was high attainment of social order and technological accomplishment at the expense of the dissociation of the magical and practical faculties which, working together, comprise the dual psychosomatic endowment of the human species.

"We lose our survival sense as access to non-ordinary reality becomes less and less common, and even comes to be rejected entirely. This, I would propose, is a peculiar evolutionary rule of the human species."13

Without getting caught up in the terror envisioned by Lash, the takeaway is the idea that paranormal abilities not just something we can aspire to in the future, they are part of our past. They have played a role in our sustenance and can do so in the future.

The Book in the Sky, Part 1
The Book in the Sky, Part 3

Part 3 coming