• “I of my own knowledge…”

    In ancient Egypt (so says Joan Grant, in Winged Pharaoh), the priests used this formula in their teaching: “I of my own knowledge tell you that this is the truth.” Not, “This is what I have been taught,” but, “I of my own knowledge…” Where, today, would we find equivalent knowledge? Equivalent institutions? Our universities…

  • John Anthony West

    Do you know how sometimes a book will sit on your shelf, unread, for years perhaps, and then something — the revolving universe’s timing mechanism, perhaps — draws your attention to it, and you sit down with it, and until you have finished it you are unable to leave it? Whenever that happens to me,…

  • How I came to a magical life

    My life now seems magical to me. It didn’t always seem that way. I started as a solitary, lonely individual, struggling along, afraid of others, afraid to open my heart, afraid to trust myself. I lived (as I would now say) only Downstairs, without day-to-day connection with my higher self or with other levels of…

  • Making sense of ALL of life, not just some of it

    You can learn how to obtain first-hand knowledge of life beyond what our society considers normal. You can learn how to extend your abilities in ways that our society considers to be impossible. Most important, you can experience the world in ways that shed new light on the reality that has been set forth (and…

  • A science-fiction book by someone named Colin Wilson

    A science-fiction book by someone named Colin Wilson It was February, 1970, and I was 23 years old. I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack, a science-fiction novel called The Mind Parasites, by an author I’d never heard of named…

  • Cutting the Anchor

    I know I’m talking a lot, here, about my personal story. But I’m trying to use it to talk about something else, something not always so easy to get hold of. It is as Henry Thoreau said in Walden: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew…

  • No place for psychics

    The fact is, we have a hard time living in the earth because physical matter is not fully our home. Our bodies are of the earth, our animating spirit is not. And the closer you get into touch Upstairs, the clearer this is. We are an uneasy combination of matter and spirit, which makes living…

  • Culture wars

    We all know how hard it is for fundamentalists, the mainline religious, and what are called New Agers to live together. Although the three groups all believe in the reality of spirit, in a very real sense they live in radically different worlds, because they perceive different realities. But those three at least believe that…

  • A wake-up call

    I was living in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area, age 40, in my first year as Associate Editor for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, writing editorials, columns and book reviews, all very happily. I belonged to no church, but I lived, or tried to live, according to my silent prayer, “Dear God, show me the way.” There…

  • Of God and Shirley MacLaine

    Because I attended Shirley MacLaine’s Higher Self Seminar, I contacted what might be called my Higher Self. Because I honestly and openly reported what had happened to me there, I set out upon the path that has brought me to a vastly expanded universe. When I got home from the Higher Self Seminar weekend, I…