Tag: Shaman

Are Prophecies Powerful?

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Insofar as they have a huge hold on the wish-life of human consciousness, yes. They also add spice to the narratives in fiction and cinema. Who has not heard of the four horsemen of the apocalypse? The prophet Higgs foretold a boson which now bears his name, billions of dollars later. The newspaper red tops like to quote the utterings of a blind eastern European woman. We may need to excise and inspect the entrails of an ox. The tea leaves foretold a dark handsome stranger though they did not mention his HIV status.

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People can look to prophetic fulfilment and imagine that they are acting in accord with a pre-ordained destiny if they strive to manifest what they think a prophecy means. How they try to manifest  prophecy may suit their preferences and biases. They may refer to their holy books and say, “God ordained that this was our land”. This as if a human authored text is binding in a court of international law. Proof of authorship my Lord? We can get into arguments as to whose God is bigger, harder, more omniscient and more important. Whose God has shares in Lockheed Martin. Many people have died according to human interpretation as to what God is alleged to have said, wished and desired. One could say that it comes down to whose imaginary friend is the more potent. One may seek to precipitate Armageddon because it was written. One has no idea as to which prophecies people are trying to enact or are perhaps beholden to.

The notion of prophecy and things foretold runs through human history, human imagination and human religion. Were it not for the dreams of the pharaoh and Joseph, the Egyptians would have starved. Foretelling is an attractive notion. People hold prophecies in their religious texts as gospel, literally. There is something otherworldly about prophecy and even the ardent sceptic senses something, a hint of it, wafting on the breeze. Prophecy around the campfire and by candlelight enraptures more, a sophisticated ritual oracle becomes near definitive. The shaman says and so it will be. People may resist the prophecy only for it to manifest verbatim in a totally unlikely and perhaps infeasible way. To doubt prophecy is to spit arrogantly in the eyes of the Fates, to defy the will of Olympus.

Humans may not be as scientific and rational as they profess. Some things run primordial in our veins.

Of course the most powerful prophecies are the secret ones, hidden, far from the eyes of the profane. These secret prophecies are only for the adepts, the in-crowd and the big cheeses. They are written in arcane runic script by the Bards for eyes of their Kings. They are etched in stone and jewel. And these prophecies are often about power and things of global import. They speak to the fate of the planet, of kingdoms and of mankind. The prophecies of climate change are discounted because they lack the shaman’s hocus pocus. They have spectacles and beards, simulations and error bars. They are cold and graphical. Time will tell on the incoming disasters wrought by human folly, the belief that there is always tomorrow. If true the foretold will come around no matter what the nay-sayers wish. It was written and prophesised thus and in peer reviewed journals.

A flavour of the enticing nature of prophecy can be found in The Secret Doctrine.

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Yet this secrecy and this profound mystery are indeed disheartening, since they alone – the Initiates of India and Tibet – could thoroughly dissipate the thick mists hanging over the history of Occultism, and force its claims to be recognized. The Delphic injunction “Know Thyself”, seems for few in this age. But the fault ought not be laid at the door of the Adepts, who have done all that could be done, and have gone as far as Their rules permitted, to open the eyes of the world. Only while the European shrinks from public obloquy and the ridicule unsparingly thrown on Occultsists, the Asiatic is being discouraged by his own Pandits. These profess to labour under the gloomy impression that no Bija Vidyǎ, no Arhatship (Adeptship), is possible during the Kali Yuga ( the “Black Age”) we are now passing through. Even the Buddhists are taught that the Lord Buddha is alleged to have prophesised that the power would die out in “one millennium after His death”.  But this is an entire mistake. In the Digha Nikǎya the Buddha says:

Hear, Subhadra; The world will never be without Rahats, if the ascetics in my congregations well and truly keep my precepts.

A similar contradiction of the view brought forward by the Brahmans is made my Krishna in the Bhagavd Gita, and there is further actual appearance of many Saddhus and miracle-workers in the past, and even in the present age. The same holds good for China and Tibet. Among the commandments of Tsong-Kha-pa there is one that enjoins the Rahats (Arhats) to make an attempt to enlighten the world, including the “white barbarians”, every century, at a certain specified period of the cycle. Up to the present day none of these attempts have been very successful. Failure has followed failure. Have we to explain the fact by the light of a certain prophecy? It is said that up to the time when Pban-chhen-rin-po-chhe (The Great Jewel of Wisdom) condescends to be reborn in the land of the P’helings (Westerners) and appearing as Spiritual Conqueror (Chom-den-da), destroys the errors and ignorance of the ages, it will be of little use to try to uproot the misconceptions of P’heling Pa (Europe): her sons will listen to no one. Another prophecy declares that the Secret Doctrine shall remain in all its purity in Bhod-yul (Tibet), only to the day that is kept free from foreign invasion. The very visits of Western natives, however friendly, would be baneful to the Tibetan populations. This is the true key to Tibetan exclusiveness.

Page 396, The Secret Doctrine, Volume V, Adyar Edition, (1950), H.P.Blavatsky,

The Theosophical Publishing House, London UK.

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Written long ago she writes of Tsongkhapa and the Panchen Lama. The succession in Tibet now of political import after the invasion decades after her writing. Now there are “two” Panchen Lamas and an ageing Dalai Lama.

The problem with prophecy is that political narrative can be adapted to fit and thereby claim provenance. Human resourcefulness remains. The desire to spin and use propaganda is strong and a prophetic belief in supremacy can fuel war and destruction. The crusader set sail to the {un} Holy Land to claim some turf in the name of his God. Imagined Divine right fertilises the soil with blood, bone and sinew. The cleavage of body by sword and munition seems justified in the minds and perhaps hearts of the brutal, punitive and primitive.

Not a lot changes. Humans do the same thing over and over. They may even cite the supposed glory of victorious precedent. It is not very evolved.

The impact of prophecy on human doings and history is profound. So yes, prophecy is powerful. It is also very weird in the magical sense of the word weird. Prophecy is a harbinger of portent. It is a messenger of sorts. Of course all good prophecies need to be vague and to an extent open to interpretation.

These ones always comes true.

Dreaming Colour – Shaman – nagal Woman – Light – Dream 13-09-2025

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Here is this morning’s sequence.

Around 6:15 AM back from the bathroom I lay in bed. I was unsure if I should get up or if I would go back to sleep. So I began a raja yoga thought form meditation building a form and a triangulation. I was having difficulty holding the form which is unusual. I started to notice breakthrough of dreaming colour of a passive kind. I decided to follow the cue and absorbed myself into the dreaming colour.

I am to explore. The visual field fills with a light blue and indigo blue light nascent and forming like clouds in time lapse. The colour assumes shapes similar to a Mandelbrot set though much more poorly defined. It is fractal. The visual field is breathing and transforming. The light is struggling against an inflowing darkness a kind of black ink diffusing into clear water effect. I allow the blue to swell excluding the ink. There is and ebb and flow of dark “ink” and vibrant light-indigo-blue. The dreaming is struggling against the incoming darkness. I know this to be caused by the darkness and evil currently expanding into the world. Unpleasant evil is on the rise. The dreaming of mankind is impinged by this darkness and it struggles to dream in, dream true. I observe and will the dreaming colour, the light-indigo-blue, to fill the visual field like a tide washing up a beach. It marginalises the darkness but does not exclude it completely. It holds the darkness temporarily at bay. The session lasts for between a quarter and a half earth hours, though it seems more eternal. I feel energised by the power of the dreaming.

I allow myself to leave the dreaming colour and build the raja yoga thought form and triangulation with ease.

The dream starts upstairs at Monty’s with Robin he is trying to find us a new house to live in. We are exploring the upstairs of a house. He says that it is bigger than the one at Monty’s, which it is. He has other places to show me. But first he wants us to meet someone.

The scene now change to the cafeteria of an ethnic shop come garden centre somewhere in the UK, query Wales or Borders. I am sat at a large round table with the wife to my right and Robin and a Mexican looking woman opposite. She is opposite me; Robin is opposite the wife. On the table is an earthenware bread basket and rectangular beaded place mats set with tiny turquoise stones. The feeling is very South America. On the walls are chianti-like wine bottle with a straw protective covering. Robin says that we should all join hands in a circle. I say that this is not a good idea, specifically for her, you. I look directly at her and she returns the gaze.

She has dark black hair with a few streaks of grey-white tied tightly back into a bun. She is of a similar though older age as me. She is slight and wearing a thick coloured line-patterned “poncho”. She has a single large “silver” earing in her left ear. Here eyes are obsidian black. She does not think it a bad idea to hold hands. She reaches out her right hand, which is small, tanned and leathery. As she does this the sleeve of her turquoise shirt rises up to reveal a silver ethnic bracelet. She offers me her hand. I can feel the palm-chakra in my right hand begin to burn and radiate heat. I say that I know she is a shaman to which she makes no reply but has a reciprocal knowing.

I bring my hand close to hers and we grip. She initially winces at the impact of heat from my hand. There is an instantaneous rush and a kind of melding. The room around us disappears. I know that she is a nagal woman. For what seems a long time we are sat there without chair or table for support suspended in space holding hands.

She then shows me by mental projection a truly brilliant white four pointed star of immense radiance.

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The basic outline is as above. But the visual image was truly dazzling filling the entire visual-dream-field.

She asks me what it is that I do.

I say that I work quietly persistently against darkness and that I have always done this.

She says that I am a light and that I have always been a light a part of the light a greater light.

She says that I am not alone we are all connected.

We sit there joined isolated in space-time for a considerable time.

On letting go of hands we are back at the table in the restaurant. The others do not seem to have noticed. We have some food and browse the ethnic shop. I pick some items up and go to the till to pay. The cash register is not modern. The woman puts the items in a hessian bag and tells me to take care of them because the last time I was here I broke a few things. I discuss with the nagal woman how I once had a male student who I knew was a proto-shaman and more. I knew that he was like me and that he was not yet ready to learn this. He needed to have a shaman’s breakdown first in order to be ready. Just like I did thirty years ago. The feeling is that he is now ready.

The woman at the till is a confederate of the nagal woman. Something drops on the floor off the till and I kneel down to pick it up. She has pushed it. As I do this the nagal woman places a fine wooden tube into my left ear and blows with some force some plant material and a tiny diamond-like gemstone. I see them moving down inside the opaque tube and feel them enter my beingness via the ear.

I am kneeling in a position like martial arts seiza with my back straight and my eyes front. I have no shirt on and am in white linen trousers. I am looking East directly into the dawn. The light flows past my head like a wind blowing my hair which starts off longish black. I initially have no body hair on my torso. I am kneeling in a wind, a gale, of light. The kneeling form changes shape and I can see the face take on different forms which I know are different lives. She tells me to remember and have more faith because I am a light. By mind I tell her that I am made to endure and to wait. I may seem not to be doing but I am, I am waiting. She smiles and removes the wooden tube. We are back in the ethnic shop at the garden centre.

The scene changes and I am at a cottage with a wooden five bar gate. I am on the drive. The wife is in the house and Robin has asked me to look after a young dog. He is going on holiday and the dog needs a good home. I take the lead of a black and white springer spaniel type dog who is very exuberant. I close the gate and let it off the lead. It jumps the gate and Robin thinks it will run away. I call it and it jumps back over the gate and straight up into my arms. The dog has decided that I am OK.

The dream ends.

What is on the Cards – Tarot – V&A

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I first started looking into Tarot around 2001. At the time I was an academic in Physical Chemistry at Imperial College London. I was very busy and a part of my job involved considering the second order non linear susceptibility of surfaces and probing these with femtosecond laser pulses.

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It probably wasn’t on the cards that I would share these two interests. Needless to say I did not soap box about tarot to my colleagues, lead ballons and all that.

Last night YouTube suggested a short video from the V&A about tarot and the history thereof. I watched it and found out about Minchiate and subsequently Sicilian tarot. I also found out that you can request to examine and handle some of the collection. The video was well made and interesting.

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« Le minchiate est un jeu de cartes du début du XVIe siècle, originaire de Florence, en Italie, qui n’est quasiment plus joué depuis le XXe siècle. Très proche du tarot, mais plus complexe, il se caractérise par le nombre important d’atouts qu’il utilise : 40, là où le tarot n’en comprend généralement que 21, pour un total de 97 cartes. »

The V&A has a nice web page on the history of Tarot, click here.

In the past I was more often found across the road in the science museum where I, on occasion, explained various exhibits to a little person. Often I would attract a small crowd who pretended not to listen in to what I was saying. The science museum seemed more natural, home turf.

The idea of emailing the V&A collection room to ask to inspect tarot cards from my old Imperial address tickled my fancy. Would they note it and find it odd?

Anyway I have a PowerPoint slide pack course in which I relate tarot to the Kabbalah tree of life and the various paths thereupon, to the Toltec Jewels of Awareness and to the evolution of inherent and evolving awareness. If I remember correctly Théun used to say that it was the Toltecs who invented tarot as a means of communication under things like the catholic inquisition. Anyone who threatened the supremacy of the church was subject to torture and death. The church had a stake in keeping control and power and it burned others on stakes. Tarot being arcane could be hidden under a cover story from prying eyes.

I’ll wager that more people use tarot than second order non-linear hyperpolarizability tensors. Hyperpolarizability is more arcane than tarot.

Back then I looked in detail at much so-called occult literature with the skill set of someone who can read matrices, and spot patterns. I found a lot of the published work shoddy and inconsistent.

I have a weak notion, that I am probably uniquely placed to relate so-called occultism, Toltec, Tarot and Buddhism with the critical thinking of a once pukka scientist.

In the 1990s I never knew that tarot was on the cards for me, though I had started to use I Ching for divination and shamanic journeying to request guidance from the universe. The shaman’s drum and the optical parametric oscillator do not see natural bedfellows. Seemed pretty darned normal to me.

The history of things like tarot will always be largely the overt and exoteric because the esoteric and hidden, is not in the public domain.

I personally cannot get on with the more modern tarot decks, using the tarot de Marseilles almost all of the time. I don’t do cartomancy but allow the major arcana to add pictorial clues to whichever Jewel of Awareness is in play or needs to be used.

I do dream tarot cards from time to time. This may not be common.

Let me be clear occult as I use it means difficult to see, partially hidden from view and not the bleeding obvious. It has nothing to do with Satan nor any dark ritual magic.

There are enough evil people in the world who are successful in the ordinary socio-political and pecuniary sense. They don’t need upside down pentagrams and goat heads. They are just nasty evil selfish people.

I still don’t know what is on the cards for the rest of this year / life …

Granny Was a Gwrach…

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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Gwrach y Rhibyn

The legend of the cyhyraeth is sometimes conflated with tales of the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn or Hag of the Mist, a monstrous Welsh spirit in the shape of a hideously ugly woman – a Welsh saying, to describe a woman without good looks, goes, “Y mae mor salw â Gwrach y Rhibyn” (she is as ugly as the Gwrach y Rhibyn) – with a harpy-like appearance: unkempt hair and wizened, withered arms with leathery wings, long black teeth and pale corpse-like features. She approaches the window of the person about to die by night and calls their name, or travels invisibly beside them and utters her cry when they approach a stream or crossroads, and is sometimes depicted as washing her hands there. Most often the Gwrach y Rhibyn will wail and shriek “Fy ngŵr, fy ngŵr!” (My husband! My husband!) or “Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach!” (My child! My little child!), though sometimes she will assume a male’s voice and cry “Fy ngwraig! Fy ngwraig!” (My wife! My wife!).

If it is death that is coming, the name of the one doomed to die is supposed to be heard in her “shrill tenor”. Often invisible, she can sometimes be seen at a crossroad or a stream when the mist rises.

Some speculation has been asserted that this apparition may have once been a water deity, or an aspect of the Welsh goddess Dôn. She is the wife of Afagddu, the despised son of Ceridwen and Tegid Foel, in some retellings of the Taliesin myth.

From Wikipedia

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If I were to show you the autocorrelation traces of two femtosecond laser pulses on an expensive oscilloscope in a dark laser lab it us unlikely that you would be thinking of the witch, the hag of the mist, Gwrach-y-Rhibyn. The two things do not correlate for most.

A part of my maternal family hails from Snowdonia, the foot of Snowdon,  in North Wales and the family legend has it that at least one of my maternal relatives, a granny of sorts, was a Gwrach, a witch, perhaps a seeress. In that context then there is a chance that I inherited the bloodline and hence the “gift” so to speak. As such it was entirely natural {and perhaps inevitable} that I would be interested in shamanism and shamanic ritual.

Of course in terms of someone able to write Fortan programs to calculate Franck Condon factors for anharmonic oscillator molecular vibronic photon excitations that seems far-fetched.

Contextually the vice versa might apply. Why would a shaman piss about with fancy lasers and science?

In Brittany there remains an interest in {and perhaps practice of} witchcraft. This is no way freaks me out. It is possible the practises here were sourced in the Welsh diaspora arriving. They are of similar roots.

I’ll speculate that a blog post like this would not enhance my promotion prospects were I still institutionalised in science academia.

I have always loved the mist and the fog. I nearly died on The Old Man of Coniston once. I was alone and following crows up a trail in the snow deep into the fog, alone on the mountain. It was exciting. Luckily before I got completely lost in the otherworld, I turned back. I have had much similar fun on Kinder Scout in dense fog. There is something womb-like and enveloping.

Of a still and misty night, when the full moon is partially veiled and you heard a voice at your window calling your name, what would you do.

Could you take secure refuge in the omniscience of your infallible reason?

Or would your blood run cold?

Apnoea – British Academics – Full Moon Dream Snippets – 12-07-2025

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Last night I was wearing the apparatus to measure the sleep-state with a view to investigating sleep apnoea. The wrist based device was held in place with some medical elastic gauze as was a pulse oximeter on my left index finger. I had a nasal cannula and two microphones stuck to my chest. It was a warm night. I consciously avoided doing any meditative practice whilst wearing the gizmo. I sometimes do this meditation if I wake up during the night and am a tad bored.

On and off during the night and whilst asleep I was consciously aware of the gizmo attached to my body, in particular the spring on the oximeter was clamping down on my finger. I had the vision of ET with his illuminated finger from time to time. The thought form, “ ’phone home, ‘phone home” amusingly popped into mind. A bit like a Rick Astley song.

I started to get strong visual images of various members of British Science Academia with whom I have had past interactions. None of these physical plane interactions were more recent than a decade. There were “chemists” from Imperial College London, Oxford University and Durham University. Some of the Oxford people were from way-way back pertaining to the molecular spectroscopy community I once interacted with in the last century. There were some from the van der Waals crowd.

Next, I was at some kind of camp in the woods with undergraduate students in wooden chalets. One of whom was very concerned about a patent she had in Germany. I gathered the students around all of whom had invested in her. I said we will call the European Patent Office in Munich the next morning. In the meantime I would take them out for a fire-pit and shamanic drumming in the woods. I picked up my shaman’s drum and we set off.

The scene returns to British Academia. There are now very senior figures only a few of whom I have ever met. I know of them vaguely. There are those in power, VCs and the like. Some are in the quantum area of expertise and there are some from the generation preceding me who must me in their 80s or thereabouts.

There is a sense of much toing and froing, of discussions behind the scene with some handwringing and indecisiveness. There is a sense of gossip and debate about what if anything to do.

The pace of the dream snippets and their interchange is hectic and breathless. It is far from rest full. I am aware during this sequence of the gizmo in my nose, on my finger and stuck to my chest.

I wake up around 6 AM for a loo break.

Back now in the dream and with the students. They are in the chalets with me and warning me that the academy does not like me doing drumming on courses for students and that my motives are very misinterpreted. My helping of the young woman with the patent is mis-construed as a sexual relationship because we appear too close, friendly and not distant enough. The students say that I am being judged. We gather together and start to call the patent office with the land line phone on speaker. I know that the call and the dream is being monitored by technical experts at MI6. They are highly technical and have methods of surveillance of which I am unaware.

In the dream I wonder how this whole shebang is going to be recorded on the medical device.

I wake up and the dream ends. I am keen to remove the micropore tape  holding the gizmo as quicky as possible.

Soul Retrieval – Soul Disconnect

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I can make a statement here which will put me at odds with modern “scientific” thinking. It has no material impact on my life because it can no longer impinge on my academic credibility nor university career advancement. There is no way that I can prove this statement. The flip-side is that it cannot be disproved either, it can be designated anecdotal or opinion.

Since the early nineties I can recall instances where I have met “residues” of people who are no longer technically alive and incarnate. They have “visited” me most often nocturnally, sometimes in dreams but more in waking. I have had visitations in quiet places and times during the day. In most cases these individuals have/had some kind of bond with me and in others a strong sense of debt {karma}. They did me wrong.  These instances, whether real or imagined, have coincided with me teaching physics and chemistry at universities or high school privately. Some have been a once only short duration. Some of these have lasted days on and off. Other visits have had a duration of months with irregular and increasingly short visitations, until the visits stop. Some have seemed curiosity driven others by way of penance. Unfortunately, it is not possible to assist “people” to overcome problems which they caused. I cannot help them in their troubles. It is too late.

In some cases, where appropriate, I have done full blown Phowa practice, over several sessions, of visualizing a white Amitabha Buddha field for them and over them. A kind of spiritual WD40.

I had one visit last night. The sense of searching for me by this individual has increased over the last week or so. I do not know for sure if that person is dying, already dead or just having regrets. The feeling is that they are currently still alive in the mundane medical sense.

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In some cases, these visitations are soular, of the soul. In others they are more some kind of emotional / physical residue. At the consciousness level of souls there is a group consciousness. If you like, the white light diffracted into a rainbow, re-members that it was once a part of white light. Contact is soular and although wholly abstract the “brain” constructs a facial facsimile of the meaty body in order to “put a name and face” to the instance. After death these are nearly always more youthful than earth time / age would suggest.

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I have had shamanic training in so-called soul retrieval and have done a number of such rituals myself. The person on the receiving end always reported a pleasant experience and a feeling of being more “together” afterwards. There was an elastic snap of sorts. They seemed beneficial.

Technically speaking the soul cannot be lost from the form except in extremely rare circumstances.

The soul cannot be retrieved because it is the “real” you. It is never lost, it knows what it seeks to do. A reconnection with the wayward personality/meat vehicle might be achieved and enhanced, ritually, by magic. If the soul is fully disconnected that means death of the physical vehicle. A tenuous link can get stretched and the wayward personality vehicle disobey the soul or inner being. A weakening or very weak linkage might allow the soul to wander far from the vehicle on the soular or buddhic plane / level of consciousness. Space in a Cartesian sense does not have meaning thereupon. Geographic, earth bound distances, are no barrier.

The fact of a wandering soul suggests that its control or infusion of the physical personality vehicle is failing. The in toto being is not listening to its soul, its inner-tuition and is governed by materialistic personality whim and desire. The soul is losing the fight and may cut short the life, to wipe the slate clean and start again. The will, the stubbornness, of the lower carnal vehicle is simply stymieing the soul’s learning journey.

It is dark to prevent the soul from imbuing matter. The materialistically oriented personality vehicle thereby lacks a connection to higher purpose and hungrily consumes as an ersatz. This never satisfies for more than an instant. Dissatisfaction pervades.

Often the soul demands things which are inconvenient for the socio-political consuming materialistic vehicle. The small inner voice of calm is ignored and drowned out. The connection to the con-science, that which understands the higher soul group weakens. Behaviour deteriorates and becomes ever more self-centred. The illusion of ME grows more concrete.

The soul is disconnected. The soul is not lost but the vehicle is. Soul retrieval is a misnomer, a reconnection with personality vehicle is better terminology. The stronger the connection, the more profound the infusion by soul, the clearer sense of purpose the in toto being has.

If you, in honesty, are going through the motions of life, then you are not allowing or following the guidance of your true self. The soul.