The Aqua Course quickly became a vehicle to continue my studies in spirituality and healing arts without having to conform to the constraints necessary to achieve an M.A. or Doctorate, and while my abilities as a student would never be honed sufficiently to break new ground in either religious studies or complementary medicine, it felt natural to continue the learning process with the tools I had acquired in academia but with the freedom to roam wherever I wished.
Although I abandoned the Aqua Course title fairly soon, due to its provocative title, and not really wishing to enter into a skirmish with my Evangelical brethren. I tried many other ways to organise the topics I wanted to explore but without much success. I was still writing and researching a great deal however, and as the internet, the virtual ‘Web of Wyrd’, became greater and more accessible I soon started to gobble up all the weird and wonderful material I found there, collecting data and trying to make sense of all the crazy conspiracy theories and speculations and such. After the initial intoxication I felt after drinking in the outpourings of kindred souls like David Icke, Graham Hancock, Tom Campbell, and Michael Tsarion et al, I felt that I needed to focus on one or two areas that I knew something about rather than try to make sense of the whole crazy bag ‘o mashins.. To make it more digestible, I began to explore the relationship between Christianity and the indigenous Shamanism of the British and Irish Isles, with a view to enriching my own faith as a Christo-Pagan Anglican and meanwhile finding out what my place might be in the general scheme of things, especially as it is emerging post 2012, which seems to have indeed been a significant milestone in the raising of ‘low entropy consciousness’, as the great Tom Campbell calls it.
2012 was definitely a significant milestone in my own life’s journey. As it happened I suffered a near terminal heart attack and stroke in May of that year, and after spending 3 weeks in a coma and many more weeks in intensive care travelling in and out of states of lucid dreaming, I emerged with a new status, that I couldn’t name at first, but that I ended up recognising as that of a ‘full-time Anarcho-Anglican Shaman’!
Physically I was left with the after effects of a stroke and a strange condition known as Fibromyalgia, caused by the trauma, as well as severe breathlessness brought on by a lung condition called Empyema. And to top it all my severally depleted heart muscle was eventually kept going by a computerised pacemaker that has now turned me into a trans-human digital cyborg.
Spiritually however, I seemed to grow in leaps and bounds, having the time now to devote to meditating, creating, writing, and studying in a way that I was never able to do in my previous life as a jobbing musician and teacher. Tragically much of my ability as a musician has left me and I can no longer cope with the rigours of classroom or peripatetic teaching but at least my consciousness keeps kicking in and I continue to be able to express myself moderately well. I have not been given a clear prognosis and I have no idea how long I will continue in this life with my condition, but my brush with death and my current physical limitations seems to have sharpened my spiritual eye and I am able to focus with a penetrating intensity on the things that really matter to me both spiritually and in my day to day relationships with friends and relations and my various acquaintances.
The question now was what to do with the book? What I had written before my heart breakdown seemed to me to be too didactic and focused on dogma rather than on praxis and the development of low entropy loving action. Also I wanted to have fun with what I write, and allow my creative juices to flow more sweetly. What little music I now make is taking on a similar quality and both disciplines are now merging with my personal shamanesque praxis that is in turn enriching my ‘ordinary’ life as a progressive Anglican Christian participating in the life of my local parish church, attending the communion service, playing Bass guitar in the worship band, and coaching a small weekly meditation group among other things.
What is now emerging is what I hope is a fresh and weightless way of writing, at least to my mind, partly helped along by the discovery of the ‘Blog’, (or web log as it is officially called for the non-web literate). Although it is often narcissistic in nature, the blog and the tweet have become powerful ways to share our thoughts and feelings and to get ‘it’ all out there. The fact that everyone is blogging and not so many are reading or listening is beside the point…a powerful communication is potentially taking place that can be used for either good or ill and there is a freedom about it that borders on the anarchic. My fear however is that the Archons, the controllers of the Military/Industrial banking Empires that try to keep us all enslaved to their debt based economy (or conversely the terror based organisation seemingly opposed to the Empire), will soon censure, infect with viruses, or even pull the plug on the free sharing of data, so that we will be left with an even more profound spiritual wasteland than that which existed before the arrival of the digital age. All the more reason, I say, to write it all out on parchment, paper, wood and stone, and through works of art and architecture, in order to leave a legacy for future generations to discover. The digital data we produce is still too vulnerable, in my opinion, to withstand the solar storms, comets, ice ages, and human interference for it to be a lasting record of the spiritual consciousness and cultural developments that have been produced by un-common people in the 21st century. So let us make hay while the sun still shines and meanwhile leave a codex or two in a jar in some cave for a future generation to discover before the robots turn us into Duracell energy sources.
What remains here is a collection of randomly connected blogs and short essays born out of my own experience and research, focusing on ideas and praxis that have made sense to me over the past 50 years or so. If they make any sense to you, then that’s great, if not leave it be and move on…maybe it will make some sense further on down the line, maybe not.
