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Robert Clarke

Thursday, June 5,2003.

Manchester airport has a rail spur to the train station. Very convenient. I get the train to Crewe, and a cab from Crewe to Burslam, in Stoke-on-Trent, where Robert Clarke lives. The itinerary I’d printed up for myself includes the phone numbers of the friends I’m going to visit, so I borrow the cabby’s cell phone and call Robert to tell him I am on my way. I say “Robert…” and he bursts out laughing; says he knows from the accent who’s speaking. Accent? Me? I heard his clipped North of England accent, of course, but it’s funny to hear how broadly we come across to them.

Robert and I have not met before. My friend Colin Wilson had sent me an account of Robert’s work and manuscript on dreams and the meaning of our lives, and Robert and I spent some months exchanging emails, and I sent him my book Muddy Tracks, which he understood. Hampton Roads published his manuscript as The Four Gold Keys.

Sometimes people just click. It had became clear in our email correspondence that Robert and I saw things much the same way. But as soon as we sat down to talk in his front room, it was as if we’d been friends for many years. Dreams have told him that his last two lifetimes were in America, and David’s, of course, was British. We find a natural harmony between us, very nice.

I had penciled in this side-trip to England specifically because I knew that Robert was having health problems and I non-rationally knew that I could help him. And in fact, as soon as we sit down in the front room and his elder brother Ken fixes me an excellent cup of coffee, this is the first thing Robert and I set out to do. Because it could help each of you who are reading this, I will spell out the technique a bit. It is something The Guys Upstairs gave Rita and me in a series of meditations, and it is very powerful and cannot do harm. Of how many techniques may that be fairly said?

Get into a comfortable sitting position and close your eyes. Take a few slow deep breaths, briefly holding your breath after you breathe in, and again after you breathe out. Relax. Envision yourself in a waterfall, with the river of life and health flowing through you as well as around you. Those waters – our invisible support from the other side – flow through us day and night, or we could not live, but mostly we live unaware of this silent unfailing support. As the waters flow through you, from your head to your toes, become aware of obstructions in the flow. Pains, chronic or transient. Illnesses, serious or trivial. Anything that obstructs the free flow of the waters: See the waters quietly but effectively dissolving the obstructions. Do this whenever you happen to think of it. You’ll be surprised how many things come up and then go away. I have taken to using it for emotional reactions to situations, as well, visualizing the waters dissolving the quirk within me that causes unwanted emotions such as envy, nervousness, etc.

How does it work? Who knows? Who cares? One theory is that by concentrating our attention on the waters, and the obstructions, we focus our subconscious mind that does the moment-to-moment work of maintaining the body. My theory is that our physical body is laid down on an energy-body template, and once we adjust the energy body, the physical body readjusts itself to match that corrected template. But this is only theory, and as I said, who cares? What matters is that it works. Certainly it works for Robert this day.

Robert and I walk around his town, and have fish and chips together with Ken, who is a talented painter whose work (which seems Persian somehow, though neither of the brothers had seen this influence) makes a deep impression on me. And all the while, for four hours, Robert and I talk, not about trivialities, but about Carl Jung, and the spirit, and religion, and the plight of modern man. Then Robert walks me a couple of miles to the Sneyd Hotel Inn, where he’d made reservations for me at my request. I go to bed at about 4:30 p.m. their time, about 26 hours after I’d started my day in America. I awaken at 11 or so, make a couple of journal notes, and go back to sleep. A good start to the trip. A good day.

Friday, June 6,2003.

D-Day, 59 years later.

I awaken feeling intimidated, a bit. Is it being a stranger? Having no place of my own? Take heed, peregrine! I eat but little breakfast: scrambled eggs, served with underdone white bread, and coffee nothing like Ken’s. Besides, I don’t want to eat a lot. I eat too much and I am looking forward to losing weight if possible this fortnight, walking and moving about.

After breakfast, Robert walks up ot meet me and we walk around a little lake, and here and there, talking. After a bit he takes me into town and I meet his friend Jim. Then back to Robert’s house and we talk yet more, and do some more energy work. I see clearly Robert’s belief system about health. I work to convince him that illness follows obstructions in the energy system, and, the obstructions removed, the physical system repairs itself.

At one point I take a little nap, and nod off in the chair in his sitting room. I wake up, less than an hour later, remembering the last part of a dream. I had a bow and arrow and was aiming it at the sky, quite pleased, because things would be all right. When Robert rejoined me he came out of a brief sleep to remember dreaming of a rainbow, which, he said when I told him about the bow and arrow, was more or less the same symbolism.

In the evening we go to a pub, a real pub, not a tourist pub, and I enjoy it. (I find myself unable to order a “haff” pint of Guinness, and instead ask for a “hof” pint. It sounds a little phony to my ears, but to say it the American way would have sounded jarringly different.) At one point Robert gets a funny look on his face. I ask if he is in pain, and he says he is. I point to him across the table and send energy, but more important, I think, is the fact that I am talking to him, telling him what I am doing. To his surprise the pain goes away and stays away. We were expecting to be met by Robert’s friend Jim, but I suspect that he will not show up, and he does not. Instead, Robert’s godson Steve comes in and joins us, and I know why Jim was not meant to show up. Had Jim been there, the conversation would have been vastly different. But Steve is used to talking to “Uncle Robert” about dreams and spiritual things. He instinctively understands them. This 26-year-old with great alive eyes does not belong in this depressed midlands town.

After a while I demonstrate to Steve, and then to Robert, that they have an energy body, using the nearness of my own hand to help them feel their own aura. Steve, as soon as he feels it, jerks his hand away, startled. He is astonished – and now he knows, he doesn’t have to believe. I tell Steve that he ought to get out of the area, as the pressure of the environment holds him down. He and Robert agree. And I say – out of what knowing, I know not – that he might study to become an energy healer.

Robert says my book changed his thinking. He is quite complimentary about it, and embarrassed about it. I take a couple of pictures of Ken and him, my first photos of the trip. By then it’s nearly midnight. We say goodbye, feeling great affection for each other.

One day in April, 2003, I realize that I want to go to Iona, the “holy isle” off the Scottish coast famous as St. Columba’s residence in the sixth century. Within a few days, I plan the trip. I borrow a backpack and fill it and a small suitcase with sweater and sweatshirt, warm woolen jacket, flannel shirt, two dress shirts, a pair of blue jeans, and a pair of good pants. This in addition to the short coat I would wear en route. For reading material, I choose, after some hesitation, The Lives of the Saints (Brendan, Cuthbert and Wilfred), and The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. Both books are small, lightweight, and likely to match my mood.

Wednesday, June 4, a friend takes me to the Charlottesville bus station for the long bus ride to Dulles airport. I begin snoozing as soon as the bus starts at 9 a.m., figuring it will be long hours before I get to sleep in a bed again..

At Dulles, the woman at the check-in desk advises me to take their 1 p.m. to Newark, as they are experiencing weather delays all up and down the east coast, and it would be better for me to be in Newark waiting than in Dulles. Good thinking. As it is, the 1 p.m. doesn’t get off the runway until 2 p.m.. Then up out of the grey clouds into the bright blue sky, and 35 minutes later back down into the same grey overcast we’d left,  Departure for Scotland is scheduled 8:35 p.m.

Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport, although it does give one time to memorize the “security” announcements threatening to seize and destroy one’s unguarded luggage at the first opportunity. Also the no smoking announcements come every fifteen minutes. Six hours is a long time to wait in an airport.

The night before, Rita Warren had asked if she was picking up a bit of depression on my part. I said she was, and compared it to the apprehension I had had before I did my Gateway at The Monroe Institute in 1992, which my friend Kelly Neff had said was normal before a transformative experience.

Well, there I was with nothing pressing to do. Why not ask someone’s take on things? I wrote:

“For some years now, and increasingly in recent months, I have been in contact with what most would call past lives of mine. I don’t think of things quite that way anymore, but suffice it to say I have become aware of other lifetimes that are closely connected to mine. Being located outside time and space, these other lives are as “present tense” as mine. (We are all living in the eternal present, after all.) Of these other lives, the one who has shaped me most actively is a Welsh-born journalist, traveler, psychic investigator named David Poynter who lived from the 1870s to the 1930s. I am in contact with his spirit and he with mine, let’s put it that way. Since I learned the knack, I can contact him at will. In fact, in a TMI program in March, he came through on a tape recorder for the first time, which added a new dimension to our interaction.”

So here, sitting in Newark Airport (which, if you didn’t know it, is a smoke-free facility which promises to seize, damage or destroy your unattended luggage) I haul out my journal and ask him why the tension/depression/anxiety connected with the trip. “Why can’t I just do the trip as best I can and see what happens?”

“You are doing just that. Don’t be hard on yourself in an overbalancing way. But the other elements are there, too, we recognize

“Anxiety – lest plans not come through due to circumstances beyond your control.

“Depression – because you ask yourself `why am I doing this? I am not prepared, I am not even sure what I am doing, let alone why.’ You worry that you will go, return, and in between miss all your opportunities.

“Tension – because a good part of you knows better, a large part disagrees and both parts are waiting to see.”

Pretty good analysis, I’d say. Sitting unobtrusively on a bench against the wall in the waiting room, I play a TMI CD called “Catnapper” that lets you get a full sleep cycle in 30 minutes. It’s one of my favorites, and it works this time as always. I awaken refreshed. The terminal building is cold, and I am glad to be able to pull out a sweater from my backpack. Time passes, and the lounge very gradually fills. I spend some hours reading about the voyages of St. Brendan in The Lives of The Saints.

At nearly 7 p.m., I pull out my journal to ponder.

“Well, what am I to make of the voyages of St. Brendan? An otter who not only brings a fish, but firewood to cook it with! So much of it seems just Irish tall tales – and yet there is something at the root of it. That “something” is the character of St. Brendan himself. The tall tales mixed with the true tales – around him. So who was he really? His utter reliance on God shines through everything. But all their beliefs, their rituals, their world, really – it’s incomprehensible what it once must have meant. It doesn’t mean to us what it did to them. It can’t. And I was raised Catholic! I’m one of the few people left – or rather, my generation is – who can still remember even that shadow of the theology. But it wasn’t to us what it must have been to the people who wrote and read things like the life of St. Brendan. It’s almost inconceivable, now, that people could read that as non-fiction. I suspect there must have been a different sound to them – perhaps the difference between thinking humorous exaggeration straight fact. Yet there was more. They lived in a magical world, a world not shaped – cursed, I am tempted to say – by science as arbiter.”

My good friend Robert Clarke will explain to me how such tales are written, in effect, in code. Thus the otter carrying firewood is not meant to be a statement of fact but a  metaphor. It makes a lot more sense when he explains it.

Finally we board, we taxi, we fly. New England, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, and then the British mainland pass beneath us while we eat, we snooze, and we eat again, working our way eastward through five time zones. Through much of the flight, as previously through much of the waiting time in the terminal, I am in a no-thought space, not sleeping, not waking. A weird feeling, to be moved from this quiet near-sleep state to a waking state by the small jolt of the wheels touching down. We land at 8:30 a.m. local time, and by 9:30 I am through passport control, have retrieved my luggage and gone through customs (no one there) and am waiting in a British Midlands line to get my boarding pass for the 9:45 to Manchester, England. The temperature is about 50, so I figure my packing was about right.

Never underestimate the power of a helpful suggestion, or encouragement. My friend Melynn Allen had an idea, and passed it along, and the result – so far – has been nearly 17 years’ worth of blog entries. Here, lightly edited, is what I find in my computer journal:

&&&

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Melynn calls, all excited with an idea. She has put together a blog and she wants to help me do the same. Using WordPress, which is what the HRPC blog is using, so I’m already familiar with it.

This really does sound like what I need. And she is enthusiastic about helping me, paying a karmic debt, she calls it. And that is precisely what I need – someone younger, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, energetic, who believes in me.

This could do what I had thought to do with my webpage (which, she points out, is static rather than dynamic.)

Photos, poems, transcripts – and it’s just what I do already – as she says.

Plus the potential to sell e-books, via a shopping cart. The shopping cart would cost money but everything else would be free, at least until we hit the limit of what they offer (20 GB she thought, which is a lot!), and then you upgrade.

This is perfect!

This really is what I want to do. As she says, I’m already doing it!

If I could sell e-books at $10 a pop (or whatever) it wouldn’t take all that many sales to provide as much money as the royalties on many more sales. $15 book – 10% royalty (net) – maybe eighty cents per book. So I need to sell a dozen books conventionally to match what I would make on one e-book more or less.

Everything would depend on my being able to get the blog out there and noticed – and she could help me do that.

Okay friends, thoughts on the subject? A theme for the blog? General commentary on the pattern of my life?

Well, choose.

Theme.

Intuition is your theme, how to live life connected more deeply. Religion and psychic affairs are two aspects of it, but intuition is the key. Misleading as a word, though, as “connection” would be, too. What you want is to lead people to realize that they don’t need to fear. Fearlessness, Fearless Frank. How about Fearless Living?

Interesting idea, not one I would have thought of. I’ll google it when I get on the machine.

What was your search for magical powers if it was not a reaching for a way to live without fear?

Fearless Living. I do like that. Or maybe Living Fearless, or Living Without Fear. No, the first sounds best. Well, that didn’t take long!

&&&

In the event, I didn’t call it Fearless Living or anything like it, and neither did I make any great amount of money out of book sales. But for years it provided me with  daily incentive to put something out there. It certainly encouraged me to post my conversations with the guys, and in a reciprocating process encouraged even more conversations.

From the habit of conversing came so much more: Chasing Smallwood, for instance, and The Cosmic Internet, and other books.

A few years after Rita Warren died, she and I began a long series of explorations, all of them posted piece by piece. Bob Friedman, following those conversations, suggested that he put them out as a book, and published them as Rita’s World  in two volumes, then Awakening from the 3D World and It’s All One World.

And besides the records of my conversations, I posted other things that drew my attention, striving to produce a source of hope and encouragement for fellow explorers. Seventeen years and counting, and all flowing out of a friend’s helpful suggestion. We influence so much more than we sometimes realize!

Sunday morning at 8 a.m., Stephan pre-empted Peter van Daam’s usual exercise period  to show the presentation he had intended to show on Friday night: Remote Viewing, the History of an Idea and Why It Matters. I was particularly interested to see him trace his work with psychic George McMullen, whose abilities he had documented in two classic books, The Secret Vaults of Time and The Alexandria Project. (Years ago, having read and been fascinated by the latter book, I had been glad to snap up George as a Hampton Roads author telling his own stories.) Stephan showed the intrinsic differences between lab research (concentration on variance from chance; concentration on a statistical outcome; statistical analysis as an end product, and involving only a single discipline) and applied research (statistics only a part of the analysis; use of psychics; no baseline for chance, and invariably multidisciplinary). He showed how in his projects he set out to create a “meta-mind” in which the psychics functioned as the intuitive side and the scientists as the analytical side. And he gave us insight into his four-team approach (teams of parapsychologists, archaeologists, specialists, and record keepers) in the pre-fieldwork, fieldwork and post fieldwork phases, and showed, in short, how he has gotten such interesting and important results. I was glad, after all, that we did get to see the presentation.

After another RV session (in which I did not participate, and which I therefore cannot describe) we came to Ingo Swan, who said he was tired of force-feeding audiences, and therefore had not prepared a talk but would answer whatever was asked, as this would tell him what people wanted him to talk about. Some ingots from the fire:

– In the 1980s he had thought RV doomed to disappear without a trace

– RVers and institutions like A.R.E. “fly in the face of the social commitment to keeping humans uninformed.”

– In order to have a controlled society, it would be important to get rid of telepathy.

– At 71, he said this appearance was perhaps his “swan song.” He is tired of  being here, wants a new body and is already planning his next life.

– If society were 60% telepathic, there would be no need to make decisions.

– We are trapped in our past, and trapped in our language. (The very word ESP for instance, sounds like it makes sense, but doesn’t.)

– We are born with ESP but the self gets collapsed down until we fit in. And we must fit in, because the others are aware when we don’t – even though they don’t know how they are aware.

– We are not taught Awareness 101. We should be taught, for example, Sensing Danger 101 (direct instinctual perception).

– Most of our switches (our abilities) are turned off. How do we turn them on? Simply find the switch and imagine it’s turned on. To turn it on, “Ask. Maybe you’ll get a dream.”

– “Don’t concentrate on blocks. Look for the good and wonderful in you.”

– “Compassion is the philosopher’s stone, the answer to everything. From compassion comes all the things that strengthen compassion.”

And for me, that was it. A three-day seminar followed, but I didn’t attend it. I’m sure that if it was as interesting as the conference that preceded it, the attendees went away happy.

[Footnote, 2024: Depending upon the depth of your interest in learning to practice remote viewing, you may be interested in Stephan Schwartz’ course. I have no vested interest in this; I get no kickbacks from it, but it’s hard to think of a better resource for those interested.: https://www.nemoseen.com/remote-viewing-course/ ]

Saturday’s first speaker was Edgar Evans Cayce. Hearing his quiet Virginian accent and his gentle and effective humor, I could imagine that his father must have sounded much the same. He described his father, and the process of giving readings, from first-hand memory, one of few people left alive who could do so. As the author, with his brother Hugh Lynn Cayce, of The Outer Limits of Edgar Cayce’s Power, he was able to speak with some knowledge and authority of where his father seemed to get information, and what variables affected it. The former included unconscious memory, telepathy with people living or dead, clairvoyance –Edgar Evans said his father was always right when exercising clairvoyance – and either the akashic records or the mind throughout time and space. The latter included the state of his health, and the emotions and ideals of those around him.

After Mr. Cayce, we did our second RV experiment. This time, three people, one of them a cameraman, went out to an unknown destination somewhere within 20 minutes of the A.R.E. When the 20 minutes was up, Stephan called them, ascertained that they were there, and led us through 15 minutes of RV’ing. When the team returned, they showed the film of where they had been, and it was not at all hard to tell whether or not you had hit the target, for the four possibilities were the Cape Henry lighthouse, a water park, an exhibition center with an RV exhibit (Winnebagos, not psychics!) and a road construction zone. Here, for the first time I actually was able to overcome my tendency toward analytical overlay and self-imposed consistency, and got many elements of the target, which was the lighthouse. A very funny feeling, to suddenly “get it.” By show of hands, it seemed much of the audience did, as well.

After lunch, Dale Graff talked about remote viewing and dreams, telling how an early experience while canoeing on a remote Canadian river led him into the field. In desperate need of a replacement pair of boots, he dreamed where he would find them (though he didn’t know at the time the meaning of the dream) and indeed found them – in the middle of nowhere, apparently abandoned by someone – the next morning. It’s the kind of thing that tends to get one’s attention, I suppose. He differentiates between what he calls CSP (Conscious State Psi) and DSP (Dream State Psi). He’s onto something important here; I wish I had better notes!

Then Henry Reed of the A.R.E. spoke of RV as a tool of self-realization, and I was particularly pleased to hear him single out Skip’s book as being explicitly about spirit. Henry gave a striking example of what he called “value added.” One could give an RVer a set of coordinates and ask “what’s there?” That’s standard practice. But one could then ask, for instance, “how can it be made a more peaceful place?” And this is not standard practice. Should it be? Henry mentioned the difference between Doing Trust and Being Trustworthy. Of course, they are not the same thing. The point is, if Remote Viewing is to become more than a parlor stunt or a scientific demonstration of possibility, all sort of ethical and developmental questions arise.

And after supper, Russell Targ spoke entertainingly and well about just this same kind of thing. He began by noting that Hal Puthoff had been put in front with the scientists while he himself was back with the mystics. Riding that laugh, he pointed out that a mystic never asks you to believe anything, but invites you to find out for yourself. (I found this particularly simpatico, of course. It was Bob Monroe’s approach, all the way.) .Harking back to the Vedic traditions, and ranging freely through modern quantum physics, Russell then talked about the use of psychic abilities for self-inquiry. As he put it, 100 years of data demonstrates that “materialism doesn’t make any sense.” He quoted the Buddha as saying that we give meaning to what happens to us, and paint ourselves into a corner, and we suffer. That is, suffering is the creation of our prejudgment; separation is illusion. To become free, we must trade our conditioned awareness for naked awareness.