Extracts from chapter 2. Journeys in Another Dimension

 I do not know why I was chosen, if indeed I was. Perhaps it was connected with the fact that I had been researching into shamanism. As a doctor interested in alternative treatment methods I had decided to learn more about this fascination mode of healing. Indeed it became quickly clear it was far more than just a healing system. It was a kind of ritualized magic on its own terms...

...To me the operative definition of shamanic power is this: some event or transposition in alternative reality which creates a significant change in this reality. If all that take place is altered perception in the shamans head, critics rightly could argue that it is no more significant than hallucination. But if something happens in our ordinary reality, as a result, then power has been exerted. It matters not whether you call it magic.

For example, a prenatal x-ray showed a foetus with an occluded oesophagus; when born it would not be able to swallow food and would quickly die; operative intervention is not often successful. In this case (true story) the shaman visited the foetus in the womb and rejoined the oesophagus. One week later x-rays are normal and the child is born with no problem. Such an intervention fits my definition of shamanism.

I have no truck with the scientific community who says this cannot happen. The history of science is ablaze with contradictions and overthrow. There is not a major scientific theory in the last five hundred years that has not been proved wrong – eventually. Yet the present custodians of knowledge cling to their narrow view as if it were inviolate and could never be challenged. They forget it was once “scientific” to say the earth was flat, that heavier-than-air machines would not fly and the atom could not be split into smaller particles.

The reader would do well to think of this when considering the possibility of flying, as described in this text.

           Blue sunset over Broadford Bay 

Extracts from Chapter 3. Contact

It was one of those long lazy July days so magical in the Hebrides. I had climbed to the peak of a little-known promontory at the north west of Skye, well-named the “air peak” (Biod an Athair). As the ground fell away at my feet, I found myself sitting on the edge of a breathtaking cliff, over one thousand feet above the waves below, so distant their sound barely ascended to my eagle’s perch. It was a scene of uttermost serenity, where earth, sky and sea fused in a blue haze of aching beauty.

I noticed the figure about half a mile off, walking along the ridge towards me. He was not wearing a cagoul or boots but seemed to be wrapped in some kind of cloak. I presumed he was a local man and knew the locality well enough to be able to spurn outdoor gear. He carried a stick but seemed nimble and not at all bent.

Suddenly my skin began to bristle with that electric tingle, which is akin to fear, but not quite so negative.

I tried to dismiss the feeling. Perhaps the wind had turned a little chilly; the weather changes so quickly in the far north. I returned my gaze to the scene that had been ravishing my eyes for over an hour.

After what seemed just a few seconds, I can only suppose it must have been longer, I turned with a start to find him standing right next to me. He had covered the intervening few hundred yards unnervingly fast. Again I got the prickling feeling and stood up to confront the stranger. I could see now that he was tall, with greying red hair and shaggy beard, his face wrinkled but kindly and non-confrontational. His eyes were piercing blue and looked patiently into mine as I took a few moments to size him up.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, indicating the panorama. I suppose it was as good a way of saying hello as any.

I nodded agreement.

          The view from Biod an Athair

 After a few moments conversation, it becomes clear this man is one of the Old People…

 Then I realized, substantial or not, this being had flown several hundred yards along the cliff top. An idea so daring and outrageous leapt into my mind, that I tried to dismiss it. But it wouldn’t go away.

“I hope you don’t consider this rude or ridiculous but, I mean….”

“Speak your mind, Doctor. I believed there was some moment hanging on this encounter. But if you cannot speak your mind, maybe I was wrong.”

“OK. Could you teach me to fly? Flying without wings, I mean; magical flying?”

There, it slipped out. I felt pretty foolish but it was the question I would most want to ask a fairy. Wouldn’t you? It had not escaped my notice that this figure, this being, was without wings.

“You don’t want much, do you?”

“What did you expect me to say was my greatest desire --- a pot of gold on the mantel shelf that fills itself eternally?”

“Many might have chosen that.”

“Well to me that would be a stupid choice.”

He didn’t answer but just smiled wryly.

Sunset at Glenbrittle

Extract from Chapter 4. I Pass The Test

 I wasn’t sure I would ever see him again. But he was there, waiting for me on the shore.

The Piper’s Cave was close by the old McCrimmon school of piping at Borreraig. Legend has it the music masters sat in there, alone with their thoughts, and composed the old classical music of the pipes, haunting pentatonic melodies of great power and beauty, written at a time when the rest of Europe was still struggling to shake off its mediaeval musical limitations. The slow rhythmic beating of the sea was undoubtedly a factor in their many compositions. This very cave was said to be where the great master composed his glorious tune Maol Donn or McCrimmon’s Sweetheart. I can play it myself, on a good day and with a tail wind!

The shelter was indeed fortunate, since it turned out to be one of those wetter than wet days for which Skye is famous. Not for nothing it is called the “misty isle”. Arguably, we were also less likely to be interrupted though, as it happened, a family did progress down to the shore while we were there. A small boy entered the cave and looked around with curiosity. For a moment he seemed to stare straight at us and then ran off as his mother called. It was as if the child had seen nothing but a vague dark shadow, with no forms.

The first question floored me. “Why would you like to learn to fly?”

I had not expected this as an opener. It was probably the hardest question of all. I certainly had no ready answer.

“I don’t exactly know,” I started off, “It would feel amazing and powerful and invincible.”

“But these are just reasons of self-aggrandizement. Not very worthy motives, if you don’t mind me saying. If I were to teach you anything about flying, you would have to persuade me better than that. What other reasons can you give?”

I hesitated.

“Speak!” He demanded, “Don’t wait for the intellectual dross to surface”. He banged his stick on the ground.

“What I mean is that I want to learn something new, something that science cannot yet answer, something magical and wonderful from another place.” 

“That’s just veneer; surface flim flam. What is the real reason? Answer!” He banged down his stick again. Now he sounded like one of the Zen Masters of old. “If you call it a stick, you trick yourself into accepting restricting labels. If you say it is not a stick, you lie! Speak!” demanded Shuzen. Pupil after pupil could not answer and was subjected to a blow with the stick. Until one student grabbed it from the Master and snapped it in half. “Good!” beamed Shuzen. “You’re learning fast!”

There are many accounts of the stick being broken over the pupil’s head, as the exasperated Master tried to get his point across.

I tried not to flinch...

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Extract from chapter 8. Is space real?

            A month later I returned again to Skye. The weather was very different, Atlantic squalls washing in all day, bringing endless grey clouds and rain. I spent most of the day walking at the Northern end of the promontory and was quite hurt when he did not appear.

Next morning I drove to McCleod’s Tables, low flat topped peaks near Dunvegan. According to legend, Alistair Crotach the eighth McCleod chieftain, had entertained the King here. When in Edinburgh the King had asked McCleod what he thought of the table settings and candelabras at dinner; Great McCleod, in oaty Highland fashion had replied “My Lord, if you come to my castle I will treat you to a feast with tables more grand than anything seen here and candles more numerous and beautiful.” (He may talk like this to a king because in Scotland every man is considered the equal of every other, princes and lords no better).

Eventually the King came to Dunvegan and the great clan Chief laid his feast under the night sky atop McCleod’s Tables. “Tell me, Lord,” he said, “Is this table not grander than anything you have and the stars not more splendid than any candles or candelabras at the Court?”

He won his point.

Today there was no royal view, just sweeping rain mist, the kind that gets under clothes and into every nook and cranny. I climbed to the top of the larger Table and looked out over the edge to where the slope swept down towards the road. I wondered what it would be like to lean forward and just fly out into the free air. Suddenly, he appeared. I was startled.

“I didn’t expect to see you here”

“Funny, I expected to find you,” he said, without a hint of expression.

But it was a kind of joke, of course. I smiled appreciatively.

“Such a poor view,” I mused.

“We may perhaps take that as a cue for a discussion about space and point of view.”

 
McLeod's Tables

Extract from chapter 9. Through An Eagle’s Eyes

Lying in the afternoon sun on the summit of Ben A’Siga, I tried to vizualize space in a different way. I let my mind drift upwards and outwards from the earth, off into the remote blue of the heavens. It was easy to gain the sense of infinity, though I played with the idea it was just a construct of consciousness and had no real meaning, except in the world of mathematics. After all, we could talk about an infinite number of apples or pebbles on a beach. But we were not able to experience an infinite number of any object; only about three dozen apples at once and doubtless not more than a few bucketfuls of pebbles, before it all became conceptual mush.

Perhaps space was like that – infinite and yet meaningless. Just an idea that had no root. There was no need to be afraid of infinite distance because it didn’t exist, objectively. But then, isn’t that what the fairy was saying all along, that there is no universe as such, outside our minds?

My thoughts were interrupted when I spied an eagle, a golden eagle. He hovered close and I kept still. The idea suddenly came to me that he had come to see me, personally.

I was “invited” by the eagle to fly with him. He was my totem animal, I knew that. I was to see the truth through his eyes. I grappled with the shift of viewpoint needed and did not find this easy. The eagle seemed to be hovering, as if waiting for me to climb aboard. Then, in a blink, I got the idea and I knew I was seeing through the bird’s eyes; I could see myself, a small figure on the edge of the abyss. We circled higher and higher and were soon lifted up into cloud. I could see nothing for a time. I felt queasy.

Then, when the mist cleared to permit a view, what I saw below was definitely not Skye. I was on a glorious cruise above all earthly realities – I could see whole worlds passing below, like wildebeest trekking on the plains, universe after universe, all the same, yet each and every one totally different. It was breathtakingly exhilarating. I began to feel a sense of the lost identity of divine being, with all-knowing powers, that we had lost in ages past.

My mentor may have strange methods but he did seem to be expanding my consciousness in vast and enthralling ways.

“Very good doctor.”

I looked around for the voice.

He was the eagle!

The realization brought me to earth with a bump and I saw once again from my own eyes, from a human body clinging feebly to the ground. I was partly vexed at him, for the trick, and partly ecstatic from the thrill of it all.

The eagle swooped low over my perch and then vanished out of sight among the towers and bastions of the precipice.

Next day I tackled him about the deception.

“I fell for your trick, being a bird”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You.. were the eagle.”

“I was not!” He sounded most indignant.

“But, you spoke to me.”

“The universe may have spoken to you, or your own inner light. But it wasn’t me.”

“Whatever it was, I flew like a bird.”

“Interesting Doctor. But you don’t want to be a bird. They fly by the laws of physics. That is not magical flying.”

It was somewhat deflating.

 
The view from Ben A'Siga (actually Meall na Suiramach)

Extracts from chapter 10. The Time Before Time

  “You are very patient with my enquiries,” I found myself saying

“Patience is not a concern for us,” he replied.

“Yes, I suppose. You must have infinite amounts of time.”

“No, you are mistaken. The whole point is that we don’t have any time. It’s meaningless.”

I must have looked surprised.

“Time is the basic illusion. When you are free of that, most secrets of the universe will surrender.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Take flying that you so earnestly desire. If you were to leap into the air you would be flying, even if you were back on the ground again in seconds. But if you were to hang there and time stand still, so that you did not fall back quickly, would that not be flying as you desire it?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Well then, time is the key, as it is to many things.”

“So flying is really just conquering time?”

“No, I’m not saying that. But conquering time is freeing yourself from all the limitations of what humans are pleased to call the real world. Do you not see that without time, space surrenders?”

“Because I could just be in every place at once, visit them all in turn but all at the same time?”

“Exactly.”

“Wow! This really was something new for me.”

Some time later he was leading me down what I have come to call THE TUNNELS OF TIME…

 Now as it happens, I have quite good past life recall. I have never had any problem with reincarnation. To me the weird  idea is that you only live once. We spent the next two hours looking at mediaeval knights, Vikings, then Roman gladiators. Several incarnations were in eighth century China, as a monk, seeking enlightenment, but I lapsed after that; it was certainly not all upwards towards better things. I had been lover, bandit, prince, murderer and philosopher. There is no doubt our pasts are pretty macabre and despicable. I died many times, usually violently and stupidly. But then who wants to die in bed? When you know you will come around again, death has less fears and this tends to make you reckless!

Earlier and earlier, he always wanted more.

“I’ve found a memory of being eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger.”

“Far too recent. Go back, back and back.”

At first I didn’t believe this was possible but, surprisingly, I saw a clam on a distant seashore, millions of years ago, and knew it was me. Weird. As the sea washed it, it oozed water from the corners of its maw and I knew with certainty these were the first tears I shed on earth!

“Earlier,” he urged. As I protested, he started to bang his stick and raise his voice. “Come on, Doctor, you’re not trying. Demand that your unconscious mind open out. There is much more there.”

“Listen, are you really a fairy or some kind of freak New Age guru?”

“Shut, please and concentrate.”

“I can’t, this is crazy.”

“Do it!” he snapped, bang bang bang with the stick.

It was at this moment I began to wish I had channelled one of those voices that spoke in vague comfortable metaphors, instead of meeting this demanding irascible character!

  (we went a lot further back, some 8 quadrillion years, to be exact... the Big Bang? "Consciousness didn't have a Big Bang, Doctor," he told me "It always was and always will be, without beginning and end!"

Extracts from chapter 11. The Memory Problem

 Further south I came to the hamlet of Skudaborg with its striking Pictish broch. The Picts were probably the nearest we have to an aboriginal people in Britain, before the Romans drove them back to Caledonia in the north. Their name is said to derive from the Roman Pictii, meaning “painted” people. This supposes they were tattooed but I think dyed with woad is simpler and more likely.

I somehow knew I would find him there.

“I have been here before,” I told him. “This fortification is very old, say about three thousand years. Yet there is a puzzle.”

“Which is?”

“The outer face of the stones here have been fused by some great heat, a process we call vitrification.”

“Why is that such a problem to you?”

“Because the temperatures required to make it happen are enormous. Wood fires could not possibly generate sufficient heat. Science has no explanation of how this took place, yet it did. Here is the evidence on Skye.”

“Ah, and you were wondering, in the modern fashion, whether it may have been caused by an atomic blast from an ancient rocket ship visiting the Earth?”

 “Well, after yesterday, I believe it could have happened. The recall was good, strong and clear, with the exact same qualities of memory. No different to remembering yesterday, or one year ago.

“You accept these memories are true?”

“I do. What I have trouble accepting is how or why I have been carrying around the baggage for such aeons of time!”

“The mystery is not memory but time itself. Have I not said that if I made more time for you, you would have less of it?”

“You did.”

“Well?”

“It’s true. Despite opening up all those huge tracts of the past, time seems less valuable, less important.”

Extract from chapter 12. The Fall from Grace

 When I kept my appointment and I was surprised to see a female figure coming towards me. She too wore a cloak, dyed with the soft red of crotal, a lichen which grows in the Isles.  She was far younger and fairer in countenance than the figure of the past few days.

“I was expecting someone else,” I said nervously. “Or perhaps you are that same person in a different form?”

The question sounded silly.

“The being you met was one who you would probably call my father.”

“But he isn’t really?”

“Hardly, in truth. We are both immortal. We have always lived and always will. That makes me as old as he is!”

“From what I learned yesterday, I am every bit as old as you both.”

“Doctor, you are learning fast!”

“I am glad to talk with someone new. Your father must have grown weary of my questions and demands.”

“On the contrary, he told me you were very receptive and interesting to talk to.”

“So what shall we talk about?”

“My father thought you might appreciate a history lesson”

“History? That seems strange, when yesterday he was trying to convince me that time had no meaning. What is history without time?”

“Real history is beyond time. It is a sacred composition of all realities to which one is heir. He thought you might like to hear a little about the  progress of spirit in this sector of the conjoint universe.”

“Try me.”

“Actually, progression is a poor word. It seems a regression, really.”

“How do you mean?”

“Long ages ago, those we now call human were gods and goddesses. In this condition a spirit would have no definite attachment to a body. In other words, the being could exercise consciousness WITHOUT the need of physical senses and the dynamics of interaction with material substances.”

“In other words, we THOUGHT it and it happened.”

“Nowadays you would call it magic. But we are talking no more than the properties of a conscious entity which controls creation - indeed which MADE creation, long long ago. It might be interesting to you to speculate with me how such an all-powerful being became trapped and weakened by its own ideas, considerations and restrictions that curtailed its limitless freedom.”

 
The beauty of Skye in summer

Extracts from chapter 23. The Engine House Of The Universe

       I was truly humbled by the healing power of knowledge. Increase of life and zest goes hand in hand with expanded consciousness. I resolved I would follow its path all my days as a physician. For this insight alone I felt an immense love towards him.

       Still my curiosity would not rest. “Is there truly a Tir-nan Og, the Land of the Young, where immortal beings preside?”

       “Doctor, you may see it on a clear day from the top of this very hill,” he smiled. I suspected an attempt at gentle humour, if not irony. “But this morning,” he added, “I have little doubt that you will be able to overlook the horizon in the West and see what lies there.”

       I stood poised on the awesome brim. Below me lay the solid familiar Earth and the seas beyond, above me freedom, immortality and undreamed of powers of mind and spirit. There were no prescribed instructions for this moment. I simply tried to concentrate, calm my fears and shut out the rest of existence. This was between me and the Cosmos; no, between my higher self and my other weak human persona. The secret I felt sure was to just fall forward and do it, just like bungee jumping – which, just for the record, I have always been far too scared to attempt!

      There is a Zen parable of the moment of truth which comes to us all. A man is chased by a tiger and scrambles over the edge of a precipice, so that it cannot reach him. He clings to a vine to avoid falling down the precipice to his death, waiting for the danger to pass. But then a little mouse comes and begins nibbling the vine above him. In no time it will gnaw his support to shreds and he will fall. What should he do? Which death to choose, the tiger or the plunge? What is the key to life and death?

      Just let go....

 
Would you jump off this cliff top? Have you the belief?

What really happens in this story? Does the doctor really fly? Maybe he kills himself and the book has been channelled by his friend, Keith Scott-Mumby!

 You'll have to read this magical mind-expanding tale to see... 

The final pages are spent on a little philosophical speculation: what if the fairy was merely an illusion? Just for once we can reveal the very ending of the book, without giving anything away!

      If the fairy was just an illusion, powered by the author’s own thoughts, then of course the entire transformation into a spiritually exalted state could also be an illusion. The doctor has simply lost his marbles, instead of gaining a certificate in metaphysics. Mystics have always seemed little better than madmen and women, when viewed from the ordinary human perspective. But their experiences and what they try to tell us as a result may be quite real and the rest of us have missing truths of considerable magnitude. The problem, philosophically (and this goes much deeper down that “scientific proof”), is that there is absolutely no way to know which viewpoint is correct.

     Remember that consensus agreement does not make something true, it only makes it agreed and that is what the fairy tells us is wrong with ordinary reality (the physical universe). If one person sees a fairy and ten million can see nothing, that does not mean that the lone individual is wrong. It may mean that the one person has a special sensory gift which the others do not possess. And there is no way, scientifically of overthrowing this.

     As an awful warning as to where smugness and rigid intolerance can lead you, consider the story of logical positivism, developed by the "Vienna Circle" during the 1920s and 30s, and later associated with Oxford boffin Sir Alfred Julius Ayer. This philosophical argument was founded on the principle that unless it can be tested against the objective outer world, any proposition is worthless. This arrogant and dismissive standard of authority has been used repeatedly to attack metaphysics and religion. It continues to dominate scientific thinking to this day. But scientists the world over are ignoring the fact that logical positivism was trashed decades ago, when a witty and intelligent individual pointed out that the basic proposition of logical positivism (in italics above) could not be tested against objective experience! In other words logical positivism fails its own defining test and is therefore false!

     It’s a wonderful joke. But the ferocity with which scientists continue to lambaste and slander those who do not follow this outdated and twisted philosophy is little short of criminal. This is doubly insulting when their own accepted proofs have demonstrated quite clearly that there is no longer such a thing as an objective universe (Bell’s Theorem) and that a unique personal universe, operating with its own consistent verifiable rules, is a perfectly valid proposition (Gödel’s Theorem).

     Would you rather go with the fairy, who is consistent with modern advanced physics and mathematics, or stick with the dinosaurs who tell you other realities are bunk?

     I made up my mind long ago, which is why I offer you this little book.

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