It's an ability and it's up to you to use it wisely.
Just in case I've made it all sound a bit too mundane, I invite you now to look at something truly extraordinary.
This amazing picture is a nature deva. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could see and communicate with great beings like this when we walked in nature. What an adventure!
The picture comes from a book called The Kingdom of the Gods (1952) by the theosophist Geoffrey Hodson. I came across this book in Bristol public library in my early teens and thought it was terrific—it has many pages of colour plates like this. I later discovered that Hodson's contact with nature spirits began in Sheepscombe Valley, Gloucestershire, about a mile from my childhood home. And now I live in the Cape Province, where he continued his investigations.
HOW I DISCOVERED THAT I WAS NOT PSYCHIC
As a child I wished I could see auras and nature spirits like these—talk about “added value”! I used to sit on Sheepscombe Common and it certainly felt special, and was very beautiful scenery, but I never saw any of the fairies and devas Hodson described. I read the classic books on seeing the aura from our public library and I tried really hard, gazing with half-closed eyes when in a meditative state…etc., etc.
I had no luck with crystal gazing either. I could sort of sense things sometimes—I have plenty of planets in Fire and am supposed to be intuitive—but I was also an intelligent boy having a scientific education and did not want to delude myself. I would not be satisfied with anything less than real clairvoyance, to REALLY see these things.
Later in life I had similar trouble with tarot reading—the symbols are so complex. If I ask for advice on my physics revision and I get a picture like this in the spread, what am I supposed to make of it? “Get on your bike”? How was I supposed to get a REAL reading from the tarot spread and not just wishful thinking?
That was my problem with dowsing too: if I got a friend to hide something in the room and I set out with the pendulum to find it, I'd find myself thinking “I bet he hid it under that cushion” and sure enough the pendulum would then swing in that direction. In other words, the pendulum was simply following my conscious guesswork while I was trying to develop REAL divining skills from my deep unconscious.
So what was all this business about REAL REAL REAL?
Looking back, I'd say that I was blocking my psychic abilities in the manner described above. I very much wanted to gain psychic powers, but I did not want to be crazy. That meant my psychic powers had to be real and provable, not just delusion. So when I began to experience anything psychic, how could I be sure it was not a delusion? Only by testing it thoroughly.
What if I was trying to see fairies and I caught a glimpse of something odd out of the corner of my eye? Rather than just experiencing the oddness from the corner of my eye, I would stare hard at it. Then: “Oh well, I guess it could just have been a leaf moving in the wind…”
Basically my process was this: I want to experience the paranormal. How can I be sure that what I am experiencing really is paranormal? Only by exhaustively testing it to make sure it is not just a trick of the light or whatever. Then how do I know when to stop testing? Only when I have convinced myself it is normal, because if it still seems to be paranormal it might mean that I have not tested it hard enough. So I set out to discover the paranormal, but any glimpse of paranormal activity presented me with a problem that could only be solved by proving to myself that it was not paranormal. (What I have described is one of the basic paradoxes of any scientific investigation of the paranormal.) So I was blocking the paranormal, and I continued to do that until many years later when I began to discover the techniques described in this book.
Over the years I have managed to whittle away much of this resistance to psychic noise, to the point where I can do pretty good tarot readings, use the pendulum regularly, and have even sometimes enjoyed seeing fairies and human auras. It isn't quite what I was hoping for as a child, but it certainly adds value to my existence and I believe it could do the same for you.
So this book is about how I did it. A series of simple exercises or practices that you can explore in everyday life to allow your intuition more room to play in. I'm pretty confident that you will be able to see fairies by the time you finish these exercises.
ABOUT THIS BOOK—PREPARATION AND MATERIALS NEEDED
This book is based on a six week online course that I ran during 2008 at Arcanorium College. It consists of an introduction and six weekly sets of course notes with exercises for each week. I have modified the notes for this book and have added sections summarising some of the feedback with my responses and extra thoughts.
When the course requires some materials for the exercise I will explain what is needed, but here are some preliminary notes so you can prepare in advance.
For the fourth lesson it will help if you already have a fully pictorial tarot deck. What does “fully pictorial” mean? Many tarot decks have a combination of cards, some with pictures and some with abstract symbols—typically you have the twenty-two trump cards with pictures, and the court cards (King, Queen, Prince and Princess)—but the remaining cards, like The Six of Wands, just show a pattern of six wands with no people in the picture. What you need for lesson four is a deck where nearly every card has a picture with people in it. The Waite/Rider deck is a common and readily available example. My personal favourite is the Crowley/Harris deck, but it is too abstract and symbolic for the exercises in this book where we require simple people pictures on each card.
Another related project is to start collecting postcards or photographs, also for use in lesson four. Try for a range of at least twenty to thirty images with distinct, strongish themes. By that I mean don't just collect twenty landscape postcards, or twenty pictures of buildings, but go for a real mixture—say a postcard of a cathedral, one of a hillfort, one of a pretty flower, of a car, of a train, a ship, a mountain, an office block, a busy street, a beach, a humorous theme…and so on. By all means include several in the same category as long as they are each distinctive. For example, there is nothing wrong if your collection includes several car pictures, as long as they have very different styles, such as a sports car, a family saloon, an off-roader and a hearse or whatever.
For lesson three you'll need a dowsing pendulum. I'll explain in the lesson, so this won't be any problem, but by all means look out for a nice one in advance if you feel like it. You might also like to try other divining tools, but in this book I only describe using a pendulum for the sake of simplicity.
You see, this book isn't really about teaching you to dowse, or to read tarot, so much as using those as tools in order to reveal that you really do have clairvoyant abilities so that you can then recognise them and go on to develop and use them in your own way.
Quite a lot of the exercises are best done outside in a garden or in nature, but there is plenty of flexibility, so you need not feel bound by that.
FIRST, A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MAGIC
This course was first presented online at Arcanorium College, a website for people with a general interest in magic and the occult. Although the course did not call for any prior knowledge, I did assume it would be taken by people with some familiarity with magical culture. The same probably applies to most of this book's readers but, just in case, I'll begin with an extra introduction to the magical mindset.
If you don't need this section, by all means move on to the start of the
