Introduction
Having lived this life of dross and shared it, helped spread the raw material of it around, I have reached the stage of yearning. I yearn to turn it into gold.
I have been on this earth for more than seventy years and, literally, from day one it has been a time packed with drama and intrigue. Uncertainty has been one of my foundation stones, and far from fearing it I love it, seek it out. I suppose the downside of that is that living a conventional life was not to be my fate.
Born into the British working class means that I never start anything at the top. I start at the bottom and struggle my way to the top, stay there for a while. Like Nijinsky did with his leaps: “I leap and then hang there for a while and then I come down.” Then I, too, come down. I repeat this pattern over and over again.
It recently occurred to me that it might make good sense to record in writing some of the more bizarre events in my life, including, as it does, my adoption by a couple called Doll and Frank and some very unsavory experiences in my childhood. If relating my tale has any worth at all it will be in the fact that it may help another person going through similar trials to know that the path has been trod before (by millions) and it is possible to survive and live your own choice of life.
And then there are the visions. If you are unable to relate to the adoption and the brutal childhood, you might be able to relate to the visions.
A beloved aunt once asked me how I had managed to get through all the mud, and I answered honestly that I had “always had something with me.” I still call it my “something” and it’s still with me, always will be with me. What is it? I do not know.
Throughout childhood it seemed like a very loving friend. I experienced it as existing outside me, and when it visited I felt totally safe and secure, loved beyond any love we can imagine, cared for by something that knew much better than I did what was right for me. Sometimes it was simply the feeling of all those qualities being with me. That would make me very joyful and I would want to dance and sing—even at times when the most dreadful things might be happening.
At other times the experience has been of a second reality coming to exist alongside my everyday reality. In fact, the “extra” reality always seems to be the “actual reality” and the everyday becomes secondary for the duration of the experience. The vision always carries more authenticity, seeming more concrete than the walls around me and the ground I stand on.
These instances have been occurring ever since I can remember, and it took me some decades to come to terms with the fact that they lay outside the usual range of experience and that other people did not have their own “somethings.”
I have included my own interpretation of each vision as I relate it to you, even against my better judgment. I was hesitant to do this because I believe it is not possible to communicate a completely accurate understanding of what each or any of the visions is about. Each one seems to have a wholeness of its own and my intellect can only partially grasp at the meaning. So my attempted explanations will reflect only my own level of knowingness, my own ability to fathom something unfathomable. Even if I have managed to secure a very slight recognition of the whole, the visions have empowered me, brought me joy and hope and widened the horizons of my life tremendously.
These days the source of the visions seems to lie more within me—they are more integrated—and it was only when I began to write some of them down that it slowly dawned on me that they are quantum! What a discovery that was. I have lived with a growing familiarity with the quantum level of life ever since I learned to meditate in 1977; and here I was, living it for all these years without understanding it!
I believe my “something” in its many forms has kept me whole when I might have easily disintegrated altogether. But it has achieved something else that I feel may be even more important, although it may not apply in every case. I believe it has changed the outcome of a difficult situation in at least one instance, and that instance is to do with my relationship with my adoptive father, Frank. One moment in a vision changed the future in a way that I could not have foreseen and would never have thought possible. To be able to change outcomes is a mighty, mighty ability and one that I am assuming every individual would welcome.
Although, as I have said, I have had these quantum experiences for as long as I can remember, it has been the regular practice of Transcendental Meditation that has stabilized and integrated them to the degree of them becoming part of my sovereignty over the events of my own life. Just to know that has been an empowering thing for me.
A recognition of quantum physics is becoming increasingly important to all of us who want to participate in our own future. In order to make that participation as effective as it can be, it is necessary for the individual human awareness to be able to experience the more subtle levels of life where quantum physics resides and its mechanics are active. Transcendental Meditation is a simple mental technique that facilitates the experience of these levels with ease. Anything that allows us to experience these levels would have the same result—enabling us to utilize the enormous power and energy we find there. I know that I have been able to access this precious field for most of my life, but it was only after learning the technique of meditation known as Transcendental Meditation that I was able to accomplish that at will, rather than having it happen randomly, unexpectedly and without any intellectual understanding of what was going on. Being able to culture the ability to contact the transcendent at will and on a regular basis has made my life infinitely more dynamic, purposeful and enjoyable.
Throughout the book I refer to the concept of quantum physics and provide brief explanations. I hope this will help clarify any wonderings you may have of “what is it?”
Here is my story set out with visions and narrative for you to enjoy. Telling it to you achieves the alchemy I am yearning for.
The symbol used on the cover and throughout the text of this book, the spiral graphic, is known as “The Rik.” Vedic Science— the non-religious science of consciousness—acknowledges that all of life as we know it and experience it is, at its source, a wave of sound.
At the quantum level life is singing to itself constantly. When sound begins to transform into matter, it is singing its old, familiar song. On its way to becoming a new sound it makes its way through the first Rik (spiral) and then into the second. “Rrrrrrrk” is the sound of creation within the Rik. When the sound emerges, it is singing its own new song. That may be the song that becomes a grain of sand, a bird, a whale, or a human being. Life’s song has an infinite range of possibilities, yet the source of all life is the same unified field of pure consciousness where quantum physics has its playground.
Chapter 1
I am sitting upright in a dining room chair. A man is standing in front of me about three feet distant. He is about to offer me some healing. Before he can begin work, there is a burst of orange and golden light that completely surrounds me, blocking out him and everything else. Someone comes toward me from out of the light. They are behind me. They bend over me and put something in my arms. It is a baby. The being stays for just a few moments as I look at the babe. It is very clear to me. The baby is myself. It is time for me to take myself back into my own possession.
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I had gone to stay with my sister, Janet, for a few days in the 1980s. She had some health issues and we were exploring together ways to get her back to health. We had heard of a healer who had a very good reputation and thought it could do no harm to try it. When it came to my own interaction with the healer, the vision I have related above occurred. It interested me afterwards to learn from my sister and the healer that they had both seen the light (both said it was orange and gold and very bright) but did not see what happened inside it. Even though I understood intuitively what it meant, I could not, at that point in time, appreciate the scope of the effect it would have on my life. I will go back to the beginning of this adventure.
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My birth, in February 1945, threw my mother into a pit of despair.
She had been married to the love of her life for five months after a whirlwind romance, and only after a week of marriage did she tell her husband that she was carrying another man’s child.
The love between them was strong enough to last for more than sixty years, and he responded by saying he would support her and wanted to remain married to her, but he would not bring up the child of another.
They decided I would be put up for adoption at birth.
It was wartime and this was the conservative county of Surrey, south of London.
My mother’s husband was serving in the Royal Navy but was given leave to be with her at the time of the birth. The date was set and she was taken to the hospital to be induced at noon. They usually induce labor when they expect complications from a delay, but within an hour and a half of induction I had made my entrance and the wheels of my life were set in motion. The experience of my mother was that I “shot out so fast,” as though I “couldn’t wait to get on with life.”
Janie, my birth mother, and her husband of five months, Chris, were staying temporarily away from their home in Surrey because my appearance and the wedding date math did not match and tongues would wag. They were in a couple of rooms far from home and hoped the adoption would take immediate effect. But it did not. After some weeks Chris had to return to his ship in Scotland, and Janie was left alone with me, as she told me fifty years later, she was desperate to be rid of this baby that she hated, and as the days passed she grew more and more despairing. The town we were in was her original hometown in the county of Essex and she had the company of several of her sisters—she was the eldest girl in a family of four girls and four boys. She was estranged from her father and stepmother, and without the presence of her husband she felt lost and alone with a huge burden to bear. She tried to smother me, but her nerve failed her.
Then one of her sisters told her of a mutual friend of theirs, Dolly, aka Doll, who was grieving deeply for the loss of her own baby daughter to crib death.
Was this the way out?
On May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, Janie and one of her sisters, Lucy, carried me to Doll’s home. They had to make their way through the tables and chairs being set up for the street party that afternoon, one of the thousands of such parties held all over the UK that day.
Doll was, apparently, in no state to make a coherent decision. She had been unable to work since April 1, when her daughter had died, and had suffered a complete nervous collapse.
However, Doll’s bedridden mother was clearheaded and able to set terms for the deal. Janie was to have no more contact with me—ever. I would be brought up as Doll’s daughter. My Aunt Lucy told me many years later that when everything had been agreed, Doll grabbed hold of me and held me fast.
Janie and Lucy left, and it was to be forty-seven years before I saw my mother again.
A few weeks later Janie’s youngest sister, Rose, aged fourteen, came to see me in my new home. She was to become one of the most significant figures in my life—a loving presence and support in spite of all my ups and downs. Back then in 1945 I was lying in my buggy, she said, in the front garden and she peeped around the hood to see me. Her heart leapt at the sight of me and she knew she could never leave me. She asked Doll if she could keep in touch and Doll said certainly she could. Such a simple request from an impromptu visit and a ready assent from my new mother was to provide me with something stable to hold on to when life’s storms threatened to extinguish me. Seventy years later Rose is still a most loving influence in my life. I was a bridesmaid at her wedding; she and her new husband came to see me just after their wedding and took me out for days of fun; every birthday there has been a card from her; and her door is ever open to me. She is my darling Auntie Rose, and dedicating this book to her is such a small thing to do in return for a lifetime’s love.
