Psychic Readings History | Psychic Places
Places have an atmosphere about them, the result of long centuries of habitation. Buildings, like trees and rocks, absorb the energies of those who pass through them. Intense energies survive for long periods and can render a place uncomfortable or even uninhabitable. Was there a place that you avoided as a child, perhaps even crossed the street so as not to get too near? If so, you remember that feeling – probably in the pit of your stomach. But there may also have been places that you wanted to spend more time in, places that acted as a kind of refuge. A tree house or a teepee. A small chapel or a large cathedral, a play house or maybe a quiet corner of a library. The human soul seeks habitations that nourish it, embrace it, stimulate it, calm it. Our bodies are, of course, are primary habitations but the body needs shelter, too, and the places we are attracted to are important clues to our deepest needs. For me, it was the “silent” places. The space inside the circle of leafy branches of a weeping willow tree, the darkest corner of the public library, even the silence of our puritanically unadorned and featureless church. The church was monumentally unattractive which made it an unlikely choice for one who loved Gothic architecture, Gargoyles, elaborately carved organ lofts, deep red plush carpets, and the soft echoes of footsteps on stone floors. It wasn’t the church itself which had nothing to recommend it aesthetically but the deep silence and solitude one could find there. I guess it is fair to say that I found a measure of privacy in the sheer emptiness of the space. So how big a habitation or refuge does the human soul, the spirit, need? It needs whatever amount of physical space brings a feeling of peace and that can be anything from a tiny reading nook to an empty Olympic stadium. The essential factor is the ability of the place to evoke the spiritual response, that harmonizing of one’s interior state with an exterior space. Some of us search for decades for “just the right” space without finding it. As an element of spiritual development, I do not underestimate the importance of physical environments. I am not a spiritual “purist” who believes we must all be ascetically detached from physical existence. But I do think that somewhere along the spiritual path of development we discover the ultimate “place”, the centre of our Being which like quanta of light occupy no space at all. When we permit our minds to stop churning out thoughts and arrive at the point of primal silence that is Consciousness itself, we have reached the ultimate destination, our true Home – at once intimate and impersonal (in the sense of being available to all sentient beings). Does this mean that I don’t crave the beauty of physical spaces? No, not at all. I still love old ruins, Gothic cathedrals, Norman castles, Arts and Crafts houses, Buddhist shrines, caves of all kinds but especially those with stalactites and stalagmites, yurts, tree houses, windmill houses, light houses, Japanese houses, eco-houses – in short, all places that embrace the human spirit and the human body. But at the same time, I love arriving back at the Omega point, the source of consciousness itself, the final resting place of the human spirit.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2013

Psychic History | Easter

The psychic history of Easter records some instances of a rather strange phenomenon known as the Stigmata. The final week of Lent is known to Catholics as “Holy Week”, the culmination of the myth of “Christ”. Easter is, of course, much older that Christianity or any monotheistic religion for that matter. It refers to the miracle of oestrus, the source of all animal life on planet Gaia. But once Christianity really got going, the process of gestation and birth was replaced with the suffering, torture, and death of a “God”. What was once a cause for joy had become a time of penance and renunciation of the beauties of life. Lent is the gloomiest time on the religious calendar, a full forty days of fasting, no sweets, no movies, etc. Just as the natural world is awakening from winter’s slumber, Catholics paint their foreheads with ashes as a mark of penitence and face forty joyless days until Easter when the ban on life is lifted because “God” who died on Friday has “risen” from the dead on Sunday and is acceptable to celebrate once again. I always think of Lent as a grey time of year, a period of self-denial and ultimately a shouldering of blame for the death of “God’s only begotten son”. There are many things that make Lent an unpleasant time of year but none more objectionable than the Passion Plays that are still performed in various places around the world. And inevitably, stories of the Stigmata are re-told and imitated in the local spectacles of staged crucifixions.

Psychic Easter | Easter
Essentially, Stigmata is the spontaneous appearance of open wounds on the hands and feet of pious individuals, wounds that run with blood usually for three days at a time. Some who have allegedly experienced the Stigmata also have bleeding from eyes and on the forehead. The Church has traditionally viewed these phenomena as indicative of divine favour and evidence that the person so affected is particularly “saintly”. Therese Neumann, Father Pio and Seur Jauana are amongst the better known cases. What I find interesting about this phenomenon, apart from the psycho-physiological dynamics, is that they all got it wrong. It has long since been known that the Romans who practiced crucifixion bound their victims with rope and in those few cases where iron spikes were employed they were driven, not through the palms of the hands and the mid-point of the feet but through the much stronger wrist and ankle joints. Why? Because if the objective was to cause suffering and inspire fear in the populace, the victim had to die gradually. A huge iron spike driven through the palm of the hand would shred the supporting tissue and cause the victim to suffocate in a matter of a minute or so rather than holding the victim in place for hours.

So why do the Stigmatics bleed from the palms and the feet and not the wrists and ankles? Because the images of the Crucifixion they had seen in their lives were those of the artists of Europe who – not being anatomists – assumed that the spikes had been driven through the palms and feet and rendered the wounds accordingly. So, what is the Stigmata, really? Is it a form of hysterical conversion in which the belief of the Stigmatist is so strong that she/he wills the bleeding from where they expect it to originate? In that case are we dealing not with extreme virtue or “holiness” but with psycho-pathology? Are those who undergo a “mock crucifixion” and real flogging every year just extreme narcissists who will literally almost kill themselves for the attention it guarantees them? Would they continue this yearly ritual if no one bothered to shop up and watch? Not likely. Whether the Stigmata is self-induced through psychopathy or the result of voluntarily being flogged and mock-crucified, there would be no show without an audience. Do we really want to be beaten into submission to “God” or would “God” be more impressed with humans who were grateful for the amazing planet we live on, for the Universe that we so little understand and for all the beautiful mysteries that surround us? A “God” that wants us to suffer is himself insufferable. I’d take my chances with an utterly impersonal Force that is the source of all that is than live in abject fear of a “God” that bears far too great a resemblance to human psycho-pathology. Wouldn’t it be nice if Easter were only a cause for celebration of the return of the plant world to fecundity in a panoply of colour, the singing of birds of every size and hue and the cries of baby animals as they tumble into this world we call home?

© Delia O’ Riordan 2013

The last place anyone doing psychic readings want to finish up is in The Red Zone. Red lights, red flags, the letter X painted in bright red, all are ways of warning us of danger. But there is also an invisible Red Zone, one that is trickier to navigate around. The Red Zone to which I refer is the one at top end of the Stress Meter.
We are told that Stress is the “price we pay” for living in the age of technology, of intrusive corporatism, of mindless over-population, and of highly combustible religious and political fanatics attached to self-detonating devices. Looked at so baldly, it is no wonder that philosophers have called ours The Age of Anxiety, that state in which we are plagued by possibilities but unable to remove the potential threats they represent. We live continually on the borders of the Red Zone where the unrelenting pressure to solve problems provokes the stress-triggered form of Dissociation.

Psychic Readings | The Red Zone

Dissociation refers not only to extreme instances of things like fugue states or multiple personalities. Dissociation can mean the mundane losses of contact with our awareness that we call daydreaming or being “zoned out”. Most of us who drive cars will recognize the state in which we drive for a time but are unaware of doing so until we suddenly “come to” and realize that we were functioning on auto-pilot and not consciously “paying attention” to the road! Those moments are disconcerting to be sure but they are soon forgotten. We don’t think of them as “pathological” but they are moments of Dissociation where there is a splitting off of action from awareness. Most such moments pass quickly and without causing harm but then there are the more damaging examples of Dissociation in which we lose touch with the part of our brains/minds that we rely upon to guide us to make responsible choices. Dissociation is like a short-circuit in the brain that causes the mind to go blank and then suddenly “re-boot” itself. It is in these dangerous seconds that Dissociation can wreak damage because the interruption can lead one “off-message” very quickly and our thinking can become muddled or worse.In our hectic and chaotic societies, Dissociation finds many outlets: absorption in virtual reality games, mass entertainment of all kinds, addictions of all kinds, “X-treme” so-called sports and other high-risk activities, and workaholism. Extreme examples of Dissociation abound in popular entertainment, usually in some form of amnesia attributed to trauma. But what science is beginning to understand is that prolonged stress can have effects similar to those of abrupt trauma. Anyone who has been over-worked and insufficiently rested for a period of time may suffer occasional memory lapses, difficulty naming objects, drawing a blank when asked a simple question or inability to remember something like a telephone number or pin code that one uses daily! When this happens, it is disconcerting to say the least. When it happens repeatedly over a period of time, it can be destructive both to the experiencer and his/her companions and work mates. The worst part is that this form of stress-induced Dissociation can happen even to long-term meditators if their usual practice is disrupted for any reason. Disturbances that include lack of sleep, irregular hours, skipped meals, performance anxiety, frequent illnesses, concentration problems, etc. are warning signs that stress – even self-imposed stress! – is at dangerous levels. Lapses in awareness, disrupted thought patterns, and loss of psychological/emotional sensitivity put you in “The Red Zone”.

Personal Visit To The Red Zone

Unfortunately, I recently spent a few months in the Red Zone before I realized that I was there! In this case it was an 18 month period of “working without a net” – ironically on the Internet! – that eventuated in a kind of career crisis known as the mini-burnout.  As a “newbie” to the Web and a first-time website owner, I was greener than any cabbage! To do well on the internet one must master a vertical learning path that feels nothing like a “curve”. The objective in my case was to produce daily articles that would lead to the highest possible Google rankings in Search Engine Optimization terms for my field, Psychic Readings Online.  My stress levels were soon off the scale as I struggled to come up with ideas, shape them according to SEO principles, and keep up a psychic practice at the same time. To do my readings, I needed to be able to shift instantly from analytical/critical mode to receptive/intuitive mode but most of my waking hours were spent in the analytical/critical thinking mode of writing, editing, and publishing articles that would please the Google Search Engine’s “Spider” – the cyber sleuth that “reads” and ranks articles for Google. I was in way over my head and on top of that have a phobia about spiders. Not a good combination.

As someone who had experienced full-blown workaholic “burn out” earlier in my life I should have recognized the signs of impending trouble. Instead, I just re-doubled my efforts to keep going, producing five to seven articles a week to keep the Search Engine ranking of my work high. Although I wrote about things I care about, my energy went into matching the structure of my articles to the exacting standards of Search Engine Optomisation requirements. Without my realizing it, my articles had gone from informative or spiritually alive to intellectually critical and opinion-riddled. I had fallen into the trap of writing for a machine rather than for people. Worse, I had strayed from my own spiritual path and it was showing.

Dissociation, that odd state of separation between personal perception and objective reality, had taken hold and even my memory began to falter. When I looked back at how I struggled to remember common words, found myself unable to use my cellphone because I could not think of the pin code that has been unchanged for fifteen years, and other frightening ellipses in my awareness, I was terrified that the cause could be Alzheimer’s which had claimed my mother. I was even too terrified to be tested, especially with regard to the odd feelings of emotional numbness and so I kept heading blindly toward disaster. No doubt, my memory is not what it was two decades ago but when I finally worked up the nerve to do the cognitive abilities test, the result was blessedly re-assuring. The culprit was a prolonged period of self-imposed stress in making the transition from private life to life on the Web. The crunch came at the end of January this year when, after a six week hiatus I tried to get back to daily blogging. Although the break had brought intellectual rejuvenation, the emotional and psychic side of me were still in Dissociation mode. After an additional period of “withdrawal” from living on the net, I think I have reached a state of re-integration and can now approach my work online with more of my Self and less of my “Shadow” dominating my life. As any good Jungian would have told me, it is the “Shadow” that provokes Dissociation when the Self is overwhelmed. One cannot murder one’s “Shadow” but it is possible to be aware when it starts to surface on the perimeter of The Red Zone. Better still to adhere to daily spiritual practices like meditation that will gradually increase the psychic distance between living in the light and being swallowed by the Shadows. Om mani padme hum…

© Delia O’Riordan 2013

Meditation For The Love Of It is available HERE.

Image credit: Georges de la Tour, Magdalene’s Mirror, courtesy Wikimedia.

Psychic readings often reveal little surprises, forgotten moments in our lives that suddenly appear in the mind of the Psychic.  I am reminded of those moments in the delightfully Taoistic stories of Christopher Robin’s friend, Winnie-The-Pooh. In Winnie’s world, it is the little moments that matter most. Pooh Bear is presented as a simple soul whose innocence and guilelessness is contrasted with the purblind pedantry of Owl, the narrow-focus thinking of Eeyore and the desire to impress of Piglet.  Owl and Eeyore in particular take themselves rather seriously. Owl is a Learn-ed bird although he often gets things muddled to good comic effect. Eeyore is a pragmatist who wants answers and solutions to problems, puzzles and mysteries in his life. Owl is concerned with Why of things; Eeyore is concerned with the Imperfection of things, Rabbit is concerned with the How of thing. But, Pooh, being “…a bear of little Brain”, is only concerned with the Is-ness of things. His tummy IS hungry much of the time. His favourite day Is whichever day it happens to be. His favourite time is any time it’s time to eat or visit friends. Pooh is a creature of Earth. He is curious but not obsessed with finding out things. He is aware that life contains both pain and joy, gain and loss, but he doesn’t fret about any of it. What is, simply Is and there is really no way to avoid or hide from What Is. Often, it is even hard to understand what Is-ness is happening in the present moment but, for Pooh, accepting is more important than understanding.  He has learned that understanding often comes only after a lot Is-ness has happened. Pooh Bear is content to Be who and what he is and has found that Be-ing is the best way to live a happy and harmonious life, although he would consider “Harmonious” to be a cumbersome and difficult word whereas Happy is simple and clear. Pooh lives instinctively. He knows that Simplicity and Clarity lead to Happiness which is after all what Life is for. That is, if it is For anything.  Co-incidentally – or not – that is what Taoist Masters have been saying for about two and a half millennia now and as Owl knows and Eeyore suspects, Taoist Masters are Very Learned indeed and know what most difficult words mean.  But they also know that life is not about difficult words; it is about Being Aware.

 Psychic Readings | Pooh Tao

The thing is that in order to be Aware we must first just Be because Be-ing (experiencing the silent source of consciousness) is the ground from which all else arises.  Before we can Do, we must first Be.  Taoism and Pooh-ism are the science and art of Be-ing.  Both are about simple Awareness, the state of non-distraction in which the mind is silent. Silence is the pre-condition for the experience of Awareness.

Words distract us from Awareness. They name things, label people and describe events but words do not get to the root of things. To get to the root things, one must Be At One with what Is. In other words, we must Be in Silence so that Awareness can operate outside the scope of the physical senses. Pooh understands this concept as he proves when he and his friends Rabbit and Piglet  get lost in the Hundred Acre Wood one day and keep ending up at the same old sand-pit at the top of the Forest. Pooh suspects the sand-pit is following them around and suggests that they walk away from it and then try to find it again and perhaps they’ll find the way Home instead. Rabbit thinks it a silly idea for Rabbit believes in Reason and Logic and both are against Pooh’s argument. However, being of an Empirical disposition, Rabbit decides to demonstrate the absurdity of Pooh’s idea and he walks away and then starts back again but Pooh and Piglet, having waited for 20 minutes, have left the sand-pit. Unlike Rabbit,  Pooh, a bear of Little Brain, is getting tired and his tummy is telling him it’s time to eat. Suddenly, Pooh Bear has an Idea!  If everyone will just be totally silent for a while, Pooh believes he will be able to hear the twelve pots of Hunny calling to him from his kitchen!  But he’ll only be able to hear them and follow the voice of the Hunny Pots if no one speaks. In this way Pooh believes that he can find his home. And so he and Piglet set out silently listening for the Hunny pots.

What is Pooh telling us here? Several things at once, actually. If several people are suggesting solutions to a problem but their approach is not working it is time to switch tactics. Pooh is offering an intuitive solution to the problem of getting back home from the Hundred Acre Wood. He thinks  perhaps the best way to solve the problem is not to Try. Trying keeps bringing them back to the sand-pit. Perhaps, not trying is the answer. Pooh’s solution is to let the Hunny Pots “speak” directly to his empty tummy so he can follow the sound of the Hunny Pots home. Piglet is doubtful that it will work but Pooh insists on trying his solution with the result that he and Piglet find their way home to the waiting Hunny pots. Pooh may be a Bear of Little Brain but he has the uncanny wisdom of a Taoist Master. And therein lies the secret of a happy life lived in harmony with What Is. Listen to your Inner Taoist and you won’t get lost in the Hundred Acre Wood we know as Life.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2013

What is the connection between psychic readings and The Tao of Pooh? Good question. Well, we are in a new year if the calendar is to be believed and the desire to be improved fires the human psyche at the turn of every new year. Partly, it is because of the inescapable sense of time lost as one year draws to a close. I’ll leave out, for now, the more esoteric understanding of both time and space that quantum physics has given us. What matters to me here and now is…well…here and now – wherever “here” is and whenever “now” is.

Psychic Readings | The Tao of Pooh

The core of our relationship to time is – at least in Western culture – intimately tied to time as a commodity, a thing to be used toward a specific purpose and, with purpose, comes human will, the belief that hard work sustained by Willpower will lead to a better life. Will + Work + Time = Life. So each year we try to muster the Will to improve ourselves or our circumstances, to “advance” in life as measured by our societal expectations. The problem is that – apart from “courses” in philosophy – we give very little thought to how we NEED to live our lives with congruence between our internal existence and the external goals we set for ourselves. I’d be willing to bet that most – perhaps all – people who make New Year’s Resolutions are convinced that they need more self-discipline, by which they mean more “Willpower” – the ability to force oneself against one’s inclinations in order to accomplish something we have labelled as “good” or “desirable” or “necessary”. As a culture, however, we have overlooked or ignored other less structured approaches to life, approaches that are not geared to external goals but internal ones. “I want/need to exercise more” seems to be motivated by a desire for good health – at least that’s what all the magazines say. The “highly motivated” person approaches health as a mechanical process and his/her body as a machine that needs constant care to run at optimal efficiency.Theoretically, humans could live for 150 years and many of us want desperately to do that. But why? Is it really about prolonging life or is it really about postponing death?

Let’s suppose for a moment that we lived on a world where everyone lived for precisely 150 years regardless of their physical condition. Progressive diseases have been radically slowed down so if you have ALS or Parkinson’s or MS, you can count on suffering until your 150th birthday. There are no exceptions and suicide is totally against “the rules”. We are obligated to live out the full sentence. Now, do you still want to live to be 150 no matter what?

Western culture (with its gazillion faults) seems always to have been geared in the direction of “progress”, at least in the material sense. And therein lies the heart of the problem: we failed to realize – as a comity – that alterations to the physical world do not imply concomitant internal alterations in the direction of psychological – much less spiritual – evolution. We are now learning the folly of the belief in “progress” in the material sense without corresponding “progress’ in our psychic and spiritual evolution. We are beginning to realise that more efficient machines don’t “save time” . They never did and never will because you cannot “Save” time the way you save money in a bank. More efficient machines are more likely to steal human jobs by replacing us with mechanical and electronic devices that create more pollution, force us to work more hours (for those who still have what we call “jobs”), and leave us with less and less privacy in which to just BE. Which brings me to the only New Year Resolution that makes sense to me: resolving to withdraw from everything electrical, mechanical, electronic, and chaotic for at least fifteen minutes each day.

By “stealing” or better yet creating a regular period of “down time” every single day of our lives and using that time to do Nothing but breathe and let go of any thoughts that come to mind, we will learn what it is to just BE. BE-ing is, in fact,  the natural condition of life. Our Do-ing should follow naturally from our Be-ing. But until we learn how to Be, we won’t know what we really need to Do. The daily experience of just Be-ing in silence and an interior state of peace helps us to distinguish what is necessary in our lives from what is optional. Make no mistake: Be-ing is a supremely revolutionary choice because it shows us that most of what our society deems ‘necessary’, isn’t. Or is at least of questionable value. But in our manic world, how and where do we learn Be-ing?

If you are having difficulty with the idea of taking fifteen minutes – or even less – everyday to just BE, there is a little book that can help you to see the point of Doing Nothing Consciously. It’s called The Tao of Pooh, as in Pooh Bear  - the ingenious creation of writer A.A. Milne in the 1920s. The Tao of Pooh was written by Benjamin Hoff and it is a little gem, especially for those of us who did not have the benefit of the Pooh stories as children. The Winnie The Pooh stories are brilliant teaching stories in the tradition of Taoist thinking. They are little allegories on wisdom and folly, the two poles of human life from which our plans and schemes, hopes and dreams swing gently or wildly depending on our choices. The Tao is not a thing but a way of living in the world without going mad or driving others mad. The Tao is about sanity in a world where humans have so overcomplicated living that our way of life is killing us. The Tao of Pooh is a gentle way of letting us live without chaos and conflict. It’s about doing less and accomplishing more. It is the real “work smarter, not harder” solution to the problem of surviving in the work world and every place else. The Tao of Pooh was the wake-up  call I needed when I recently lost my way and couldn’t seem to find it again. It is the way back from wherever we are when we’re not living from our true selves. The Tao of Pooh is the truth we look for even when we don’t know we need it.

To be continued…

© Delia O’ Riordan 2013

Guess you’re wondering what the connection between God and Rape is. Just scan any newspaper at random and the connection will become clear. All patriarchal cultures have created some version of  ”God”. Whether he is referred to as Shiva, Mazda, Mithras, YWH, Zeus, Marduk, Allah or “God The Father”, the dominant concept of “God” for the past two thousand years has been Male. And therein lies the connection between God and Rape. The problem is the Almighty HE. What I have written is not at all spiritual. I was shaking with rage as I wrote it.

God and Rape

There is a deadly pathology deep inside the human male genome and it has come to the point of critical mass. There is an atavistic loathing of females lurking not far beneath the surface of all but a handful of  decent men on this planet. It is bred of two things:  denial of access to the breast and the vagina which males seem to feel is their birthright and any denial of that access is an intolerable insult deserving of punishment and, ultimately, of death.  I am sick of making and accepting excuses for male criminality which has – since the dawn of patriarchy –  been a way of life. No, you’ll argue, the whole system of laws in the world is the product of male culture.  Thank you, you’ve just made my point! What is the most frequently committed and least frequently reported crime in the world? Rape. What is the second? Female infanticide and murder. What is the usual punishment for rapists? A slap on the wrist if and when some other males can be bothered to find them and bring them to book.  There is not a single country in the world with an effective set of laws against violations of the rights of women to absolute security of their person. Not one. So, yes, the problem is male attitudes and male behaviours. They make the laws; they break the laws; they wink at each other when they pretend to punish each other for sex crimes and they tacitly endorse the abuse of women and children in every society on this planet, the recent rape on a bus and the  beating death of a young woman student in India being only the most recent example blatant enough to  be deemed worthy of media interest. Who were the Delhi rapists? What sort of backgrounds did they come from? These are the questions the media raise. The answers make no difference because the rapists just exercised what they deemed was their right to sex on demand. After all, in a patriarchal world with male gods galore, men are an entitled group. They were born entitled. Even stupid, primitive men like the Delhi rapists feel entitled. But the truth is every man has a CHOICE before having sex – with or without consent – but the vast majority claim ‘they can’t help” themselves; it’s just the way men are. They NEED sex. What utter f- ing rubbish!

Need vs Entitlement

Humans NEED clean air and water, nutritious food and shelter from the elements. Beyond these physical needs, all else is optional but in order to have a civilized society humans NEED emotional nurturing, respect for the sanctity of their bodies, access to education and vocational or professional training. But even a literate population is not enough. To be FULLY HUMAN each of us needs a code of social ethics and a sense of morality based on absolute respect for the rights of everyone, whether they are children or adults. How can it be ethical for human males to use human females as punching bags? How can it be ethical to rape another being, human or animal?  How can it be ethical to force women into marriage and then  burn them to death when their husbands die? How can it be ethical to punish girls for wanting an education, for wanting a career, for wanting to remain un-married indefinitely – for wanting a bloody life of their own? How can it be ethical to encourage sons to “get experience” before marriage but demand that daughters remain virgins? How can it be ethical to force 51.7% of the population of the entire planet to stay at home after dark whilst the other 49.2% roam the streets freely? How can we as a species condone the abuse of more than half of the human race at the whim of prodigally tumescent males? Do not DARE to search for “reasons” for this male violence. There isn’t any apart from opportunity and the knowledge that 90% of rapists never go to gaol or even stand trial.

The Penis Is  A Weapon and Should Be Registered As Such

Let’s face it, the penis is the primal and primary weapon in the war against women. Women don’t want a war; men live for it. And when they can’t participate in any other kind of war they fight the undeclared war against women. Hence, every fundamentalist religion and every “macho” culture on the planet. When they are bored what do men want? Sex. When they are frustrated with life what do men want? Sex. When they are celebrating their power, what do men want? Sex.  When they wake up first thing in the morning, what do men want? Sex. Men have come to dominate the world with the penis and every extension of it you can think of: from cave man clubs to guided missiles, the penis is the model. Women fear it because it is the weapon used for rape. And rape is both the inspiration and the reward for war. Think that’s an overstatement? Every army in the world has done it and continues to do it.  Look at Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Congo. Look at Srebrenicz, Iraq, Syria, Egypt.  Look at the rapes in the Nazi and Japanese death camps. Look at present day India. And then look at any woman on the street avoiding eye contact with males, holding elbows close to her body, protectively a holding should bag to her hip, wearing dark glasses everywhere, keeping a neutral and distant expression in the eyes unless she’s in conversation with a trusted female friend. Every female on the plant is a potential rape victim. How many males are so threatened? Perhaps as many as 10%? Most males don’t allow themselves even to think of the possibility that they could be raped. All females have to consider the possibility of being raped every day of their lives.

Rape Is The Culture of Men

What does that tell us about human culture? It tells us that rape runs this planet. It is the universal threat. And men know it. Which is one reason they insist on their women being invisible to other males. It’s not to protect women but to protect men’s own perverted notions of their property and their “honour”. When you look objectively at the world, males leave us no alternative than to turn against them to free ourselves. Males are our survival teachers and they have taught us well. The enemy is the penis and until we neutralize it or men learn how to control it, we are always in danger.   So don’t dare look for excuses for the Delhi Rapists in their “backgrounds”. The youngest member of the gang was also the first to attack the victim’s boyfriend and hold him down so he could not protect his girlfriend. The press tracked this “young offender’s”  mother who was starving on the street because her son had not sent any money to his family after the first year he went to Delhi – which was somewhere between 5 and 7 years ago!  She and her five other children hadn’t eaten in three days. And before you point fingers at her for having too many children – which I agree is the case – think about what happens to wives who refuse to have sex with their husbands in patriarchal societies.  Women cannot use birth control without the knowledge and permission of their “husbands”  – men so stupid and primitive that they think their “manhood” depends on their ability to impregnate women. Place the blame where it belongs:  on the pointed heads of the idiot men.

The Victim Accuses Her Killers

In the Delhi case the “youngest suspect” was identified by name by the now deceased victim and by her boyfriend, separately, twice in front of two different Magistrates. On her death bed, the Victim also wrote the names of the other four of her torturers from what she heard as they raped and beat her for two hours before throwing her into the road with the rest of India’s garbage. This appallingly tortured woman lived long enough to WRITE the names of her attackers. In the midst of her suffering she had had the presence of mind to memorize their names! She was an educated young woman and even in the most devastating circumstances she managed to use the only weapon she had: her mind. Thanks to her ability to use her mind, the police had no excuse not to find and charge her attackers. Typically, she did the hard work for them. Just like a woman.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2013

<

What is The Shift?  New Age books are full of predictions that the world was on the brink of an historic – even cosmic – change in our attitudes toward both spirit and matter on or around the 21 December 2012.  Not a change brought about in the usual ways through science or technology or even Space exploration. The change that was/is contemplated by millions of believers is a change of mind, a change that will originate in the hearts and consciences of humans who will come to see – or be forced to acknowledge – that the way humans currently live is toxic both to us and to our planet. This toxicity is not only – or even primarily – physical; it is intellectual, emotional, psychological, and ideological,  a form of deliberate blindness to two things in particular: that life has meaning and that denial of reality does not exempt us from responsibility for the consequences of our denying reality.  Life on our planet as it is currently lived does not run only on fossil fuels; it runs on another fuel: the irrational denial of the consequences of human choice.

Spirit vs Matter | The Shift

What is needed today is a value system that reflects the things that previous generations neglected or ignored: the central importance of living in balance with nature and with each other; an ethic of ‘fair trade’ and ‘fair practice’ that applies to everyone; a willingness to make radical changes to our economic lives without resorting to violence or totalitarianism to achieve them; and a totally different view of the nature, meaning, and place of work in human life. What I describe is not an “event” tied to a calendrical deadline. We are not being blinded by a flash of enlightenment on the road to Damascus; we are being deluded by our own wishful thinking and desire to escape the harsh side of human life. Who wouldn’t want that? I’d love to wake up to a world full of caring, altruistic fellow humans who are ready to reconstruct our world and introduce real civilization where no one – especially not women and children  - will walk in fear of attack, where no one is subjected to abuse of any kind, where no one has more than one child and at least half of us refrain from having any at all so that we can pay attention to those who are already here but have no homes or parents to care for them. I would love to wake up to a world where the priority is decent housing, clean water, nutritious food, well-made shoes and clothes, useful and humane education, a health care system that focuses on service not profit and a world-wide ethic of ergonomic principles applied to every area of life. In short, a sane and civilised world in which all life  - animal, vegetal and mineral – is respected and protected.

How To Achieve “The Shift”

Before we reach enlightenment on a grand scale we first have to reach basic awareness on a grand scale and that is what would take a real miracle – the kind that usually happens only in religious fiction.  We may proclaim ‘belief’ in one or another religion that offers us a phony sense of safety and an ersatz freedom from fear of the universe but we live out the scenarios from the myths that preceded our religions – the stories of cruelty, injustice, exploitation of the innocent, dominance and abuse of power, insane rivalries, petty malice and the entire catalogue of human idiocy.  If there is a genuine “shift” occurring it is not approaching the point of critical mass that theoretically could change the world’s mind-set. Does that mean we should give up the idea of an enlightened humanity? Certainly not. But it does mean it’s time to stop deluding ourselves that this or that Solstice will ring in a new “paradigm. We do not need to shave our heads and don robes in order to change ourselves. External symbols of change are just changes of costume. We need to remain ourselves whilst re-constructing our way of seeing and doing in our lives. Being true to our inner selves does not make us superior to anyone else. We don’t get bonus points for achieving our potential in some aspect of spiritual life. In fact, there is nothing to “achieve”. We are not special because we maintain a spiritual practice; we are merely being what  a human can be. It’s not a competition and ego-gratification has no place in spiritual practice.  Our task is to become more fully human in order to become…more fully human. The Shift is the act of accepting what we do currently not want to acknowledge: Human technological culture destroys more than it creates and dooms us as a species to pre-mature extinction through war and planetary collapse. But as always we have a choice: to face the fact that we are more than just physical beings, we are self-aware and that makes us responsible for the outcome of events that we set in motion. We affect reality on at least two planes: the physical and the conscious. Right now we are denying the abuse of one and denying the reality of the other.  So, what would constitute a real Shift? A radical change in our thinking and a change in our way of doing things. If we fail to adopt a consensus on these questions, we will have “the war to end all wars”, except this time there won’t be any point in surviving.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012

The Shift and Shift Happens are available  HERE.

<Most people who go for psychic readings are looking for predictions about their futures.  Whether their prime concern is their love life, their careers, their health, or whether their house will sell in a depressed market,  clients are driven by the need for information that they don’t have access to through the usual sources – counsellors, financial advisers, career consultants, realtors, etc. When a client comes for a psychic reading and we immediately “connect”, the psychic impressions flow smoothly into my consciousness and some of the most amazing cases in my practice have been the result of that connection. I rarely have any information beyond the first name and date of birth of my clients and often I have only a first name. So what is it that makes some readings spectacular and others just so-so?  I have given much thought to this question. Every psychic loves it when a reading turns up detailed information that can be verified over a relatively short time period. But there are also some readings that do not seem at first to be promising yet end up going incredibly well. I can think of one in particular in which the client had a friend make the appointment for him. This was a classic psychic reading in which predictions came true.

Psychic Readings | Predictions

All the information I had was the client’s first name when I met him at my front door one evening in the dead of winter. The client was obviously uncomfortable and I surmised he had never been to a psychic before and in fact probably did not “believe” in all that “stuff”.  As I looked him in the eye I asked him who “Stephen” was? That was the name I had been given for the appointment and I had no idea why I was even asking the question! I was simply following an inner prompting. The client was immediately suspicious and defensive so I reassured him that I had no personal interest in “Stephen’s identity”, it was simply something I felt I must ask. As it turned out the client’s friend had given me a false name when he made the appointment. So I next asked who “Richard” was and from the shock on his face I could see that the name I had “heard” psychically was actually his. Again, I told him I couldn’t care less what his motive was for giving a false name, I just wanted to be certain that the information I was picking up on was for him and not for the alter-ego “Stephen”!   My next impression was that both men were professionals in law enforcement and/or the military. The client again looked at me in alarm as though I had just threatened him in some way. This reading was not getting off to a happy start!  It took a few more minutes to persuade my client that I did not have the faintest idea of who he was and didn’t care! The only thing that interested me was that he get his money’s worth from the reading and that would happen only if I could relax and simply pass on to him whatever impressions came to me. After persuading him that if we took a few deep breaths together the reading would go more smoothly, I was able to close my eyes and received information unhindered by Richard’s initial discomfort and the reading proceeded to answer the questions he wanted me to concentrate on. I never saw that client again but I did hear from his friend, Stephen, a few months later who let me know – as a courtesy – that the primary issue that had prompted the reading had been resolved in my client’s favour as I had predicted it would be. The friend also wanted my continued reassurance that the contents of the reading were absolutely confidential and would remain that way.

 Total Confidentiality

The issue which had brought the client to me became a matter of public record which I would never have taken notice of if his friend hadn’t sought my agreement to keep the reading confidential. I did not read local newspapers and to this day rarely look at one so I would not have read about Richard’s case in the normal course of events.  Ironically, I only learned of his true identity because he was so worried about my keeping his confidence. Thereafter, I made a point of assuring every client that the contents of every reading are kept confidential and if it is any consolation, I forget the content of most readings by the following day. The reason seems to be that psychic functioning is mainly a right-brain activity and unless there are truly exceptional revelations in a reading the contents do not stay with me. That is how Amazing Cases come to be so amazing!

© Delia O’ Riordan 2013

In psychic readings history Synchronicity is a much queried subject. I’m often asked to explain the difference between ordinary co-incidence and synchronicity.  The Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung used the term synchronicity to indicate the connection between two or more events that are  acausally related. Which means: two or more events occur in which the elements have particular meaning to the person experiencing the event but the elements do not have a ’cause and effect’ relationship. To make the distinction clearer, here are a few entries in my Synchronicity Notebook for 2009:

24 December 8:11 AM: Had been reading Marley and Me earlier. Went on computer for filmography of actress Loretta Young for the profile on ‘spiritual movies’ and I happened to glance at the credits for an early film of hers. My eyes stopped on the name of the cinematographer: Peverell MARLEY.Hmmm.

Next, I checked on some facts for a biography for actress Jane Wyatt and found that she had attended The Chapin School. Wyatt later played the mother in a family sit-com of the 50s called Father Knows Best. One of her onscreen children was Lauren CHAPIN.

Wait, it gets better. I had been asked to write a review of a therapeutic card deck for a local magazine. When I opened the envelope I found it was The Soul Cards, the work of artist and therapist Deborah Koff-CHAPIN.

Triple hmmm.

Psychic Readings History | Christmas Story

But the sequence wasn’t over yet! Every Christmas Eve I like to watch one of two favourite films, either “The Holly and The Ivy” or “The Bishop’s Wife” – the original 1947 version with Loretta Young, David Niven and Cary Crant. The devastatingly handsome Grant was entrancing—and perfectly convincing, honestly he was!– as an Angel named…Dudley. So on that Christmas Eve I settled in with a glass of wine and watched a new DVD print of  The Bishop’s Wife.  There had been an interesting trend in both the UK and Hollywood at the end of WW2. Once the guns were silenced, stories with a mystical twist began to appear on the cinema screens. These were stories, not for children, but for grown-ups – for the generation that been born between the wars, suffered through the Depression and struggled against the horrors of Fascism for six long years. With more than 30 million deaths during those years, one can understand how ghosts and angels, miraculous survivals and encounters with death were less strange-seeming than in more tranquil times. Films like The Pied Piper, Miracle on 34th Street, It’s A Wonderful Life, Stairway to Heaven, and The Bishop’s Wife brought those subjects out of the realm of private hopes and fears and cast them in larger than life public dramas of survival. And the films that centred on Christmas gave people a safe context in which to let some tears flow and the seeds of hope to be planted. So, I watched The Bishop’s Wife in a state of appreciation for the delicacy with which some heavy topics were treated and the charm of a story well-told worked its magic.  As the credits rolled at the end of the film I noticed something funny: one of the supporting actors was actually named DUDLEY Diggs. What were the chances do you suppose of the central character being named Dudley and a supporting actor in the cast also being named Dudley?  If both had been named Joe, it would be a co-incidence but with an uncommon first name like Dudley showing up twice in the same film, the odds against such an occurrence start to approach six figures to one.

Yet Another Dudley?

After the credits for The Bishop’s Wife had finished,  I switched from video to TV and started flipping channels. To my amazement,  there was DUDLEY Moore in a re-run of a Command Performance from the Royal Albert Hall! Three Dudleys in the space of one evening? Hmm.

9: 18 PM  I was about to switch off the TV when a trailer came on. It was from the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim as Scrooge. The trailer was the scene in which Jacob MARLEY, The Ghost of Christmas Past, appears to Scrooge. I seemed to have come full circle since reading Marley and Me that morning! But the sequence was not over yet. My notes for 27 December 2009.  10:44 AM:  I was checking some details for an article about Hawthorne’s “Gothic” short stories.  As I scanned the list,  one title fairly leapt from the computer screen: “Old Esther DUDLEY”.  That’s four references to the uncommon name of Dudley in the space of three days!

What could this succession of ‘co-incidences’ possibly mean? Perhaps it was a vivid reminder that, as Jung came to believe, there is no such thing as a co-incidence. Things happen in patterns and they happen for a reason. If we write them off as meaningless, we miss an opportunity to see deeper into the nature of reality. It is easy to skim the surface of life without thinking about what events mean in context. We could be confronted with synchronicities every day of our lives yet deny their reality but to do so is to deny an important aspect of our own reality. If we are not real to ourselves, how can we be real to anyone else? By acknowledging phenomena such as synchronicities, we learn to live more fully in the present  moment, the NOW that is all there is. As the writer Dan Millman observed, “There are no ordinary moments.”

To learn more, visit the Synchronicity and Consciousness department of Delia’s “A List” Amazon Shop HERE.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2011

Spirit always matters around Christmas and one the ways to revive it is through Christmas stories. I’ve been thinking about Christmases past, the ones that never quite lived up to our hopes. Each year we promise ourselves that things will be different but somehow the conflicts that weren’t resolved last year come back to haunt us like Jacob Marley’s ghost and we find ourselves trying to ‘just get through the holidays’.  Rather than ‘just getting through’ why not change the game? Right now. This moment. Don’t worry you’ll find no religious sermon here about the ‘meaning’ of Christmas. If we’re honest we know it means radically different things to each of us. The sentimental want  at least the illusion of a happy family gathered together in love and mutual appreciation. The more cynical have lower expectations and are content to go through the motions and leave asap after dinner to get on with their lives. The vengeful arrive itching for a fight over last year’s inadequate gifts or petty arguments. The schemers watch and wait for the opportunity to create new conflicts for their entertainment. No matter what combination of the above may be true of your family, there is probably a drama or comedy to reflect it in a way that can break down some of the barriers and get us to see our foibles and faults, rivalries and resentments in a clearer light.  It is difficult to remain in a state of hostility when our pettiness has been laid bare for all to see in the person of a movie character.  Just as Scrooge is shown how his bitterness has affected even those he most loved, we can come face to face with ourselves in a way that allows us to gracefully shed the negative persona and shift gears to a more loving and lovable self.

Spirit Matters | Christmas Spirits

The Greeks were right about drama: it holds up a mirror to the Soul and offers us a way to let go of the past and change our present. There are many holiday films available on TV, from rental shops, and to purchase online, and even some instant view films for those with Amazon accounts. If you want to give yourself and those you love a truly meaningful yet entertaining holiday season, you might want to consider setting aside a time each evening after dinner to sit together and watch a movie that takes you out of your milieu and frees you to find a new level of joy, the spirit that is really behind all the hoopla. Here are a few examples of movies, some for the family and some that may be more interesting for grown-ups. Many of them are available on Amazon as Instant View movies so you can watch them when it’s convenient rather than waiting for a TV schedule. A Child’s Christmas In Wales (above) offers an alternative to the many versions of A Christmas Carol.

The Bishop’s Wife was made in the aftermath of WW2 and there is something about it that lends it a healing power without being preachy. Cary Grant plays Dudley, a most handsome and charming Angel sent to help a Bishop played by David Niven. The Bishop has become caught up in an ambitious plan to build a grand cathedral.  This project has become so all-consuming that the Bishop has withdrawn emotionally from those around him.  The Bishop’s Wife played by the exquisitely beautiful Loretta Young observes the changes in her husband with growing unease when Dudley arrives unannounced and soon manages to charm everyone – except the Bishop.  The delightful Monty Woolley plays an old professor trying to finish his masterpiece, Elsa Lanchester is the Bishop’s maid and James Gleason appears as the comedic cab driver to round out the cast.

The Holly And The Ivy is a vintage Brit Christmas drama with Ralph Richardson as a vicar besieged by family problems. Denholm Elliott, Margaret Leighton and Celia Johnson struggle to conceal their secrets but somehow they all fail and come face to face with the realities they sought to avoid. This is a grown-up story of genuine crises brought to a head by returning to their family home for the holidays. Each character finds a new meaning in life, a new sense of freedom in coming to terms with a life challenge. Unsentimental yet sensitive drama.

The Mousehole Cat is a unique children’s film. I’m not a fan of animated film but this is so exceptional that I feel I can recommended to even the most anti-animation viewer. The story is an old one, part of the rich folklore of Cornwall that harkens back to a vision of the world that bears many resemblances to those of North American Indians. The forces of nature are likened to animals in this mode of story-telling and animal traits are borrowed and used to good effect in a human/animal collaboration that brings out the best  in both. Children LOVE this little film!

I have refrained from including films like It’s A Wonderful Life and the original Miracle on 34th Street because they are so readily accessible on TV. However, I included the original Christmas Carol as an antidote to the remakes of more recent times because the Alastair Sym protrayal of Scrooge has never been equalled and certainly not surpassed.

All of these films are available in Delia’s Christmas 2011 Amazon Shop  HERE.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2011

In my psychic readings history I have done a variety of types of readings on everything from missing keys to missing persons, job prospects to marriage prospects but I had never been asked to do a reading based on the end of the world. That is, not until today. As a psychic you would expect me to be pretty open-minded on most subjects and I think I am. However, as the possessor of a left-brain in reasonable working order I also employ reason, logic, analytical thought, and subject conclusions advanced by anyone to empirical criteria before accepting or rejecting them. That works for most aspects of life in a three dimensional setting and psychic sensing/intuition aids in the rest. But the end of the world? Pulllleeeeze! What prompted the request was the anxiety of a young girl who is terrified that the world is going to explode or be destroyed in some other fashion this Friday, the 21st of December! I have written in these pages before that I do not subscribe to the belief that the expiration of the current Mayan calendar means the end of life on earth. The reason should be plain to anyone with even an ounce of intelligence! All calendars expire. The Western calendar which is used in the industrialised world is only one of many. There is a Jewish calendar, a Muslim calendar, a Chinese calendar, etc. They all come to an end at some point and begin again the following day or night (depending on methods of calculation). Why would the Mayan calendar be any different?

Psychic Readings FAQs | Mayan Calendar

The Mayan people of Central America created a remarkable society. They were excellent astronomers as were most ancient peoples. They were competent architects and builders as were many before them. They had a form of mathematics and many forms of divination. But they did not predict the end of their world or of ours. When they constructed their calendar, they simply reached the outer limit of their mathematical system at which point their calendar would begin again. In fact, recent research has turned up evidence that the Mayans themselves realised that their system of mathematics needed revision and they abandoned their famous calendar. It fell out of use until some misinformed and gullible Westerners (viz. Jose Arguelles and the brothers McKenna of Timothy Leary’s lab) “re-discovered” it and jumped to entirely wrong – but highly profitable – conclusions that let them cash in on the millenium madness of the last 15 years of the 20th century and the first 12 years of the 21st. So here is my prediction: December 22 will succeed the 21st and we will still be facing the fiscal cliff and Middle East madness, Chinese attempts at thought-control and censorship, Messianic insanity on the Far Right and global warming that will give Florida a white Christmas or Lappland a green one.  In other words the 21st won’t be much different from the 20th or the 22nd.  I have no idea when the world will “end” but our sun still has about five to eight billion years of life left in it and if we don’t stupidly destroy this planet before that, we’ll long since have embarked on intra-galactic travel and maybe even inter-galactic travel and 21/12/12 will not even rate a footnote in history.

It is time to stop terrorising ourselves with Apocalyptic nonsense and let our children and grandchildren enjoy the innocent pleasure of an imaginary realm in which St. Nicholas visits their homes and leaves behind some token of his passing and elves eat the candy left on the window sill for them as they quietly climb back on the sleigh. If we are so desperate for an alternative to reality, a myth in which kindness, generosity, and gratitude reign is not a bad start.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012

“Follow your bliss” has entered psychic history as the motto of everyone from supporters of legalising marijuana to DIY eco-house builders. The phrase originated with Joseph Campbell the 20th century scholar of world mythology and its effects on human development. What Campbell meant by “bliss” was both highly individual and universal. Bliss is the opposite of suffering. Bliss is about freedom from self-imposed limitations on aspirations and accomplishments. In fact, bliss isn’t about accomplishment at all. It’s about realisation – the realisation that we have access to bliss every second of our lives. Instead of which we are wallowing in false prophecies that appeal to our paranoia about ‘hidden forces’, ‘invisible governments’ and secret societies who supposedly control the world. The peddlers of paranoia have been building castles of fear that will come tumbling down on Friday, the 21st December 2012.

Psychic Readings History | Ascension to Bliss

There are so many minds (using the term loosely) focused on 21 December that something is bound to happen, right?  But which scenario will it be? The entirely bogus end-of-the-world “Mayan” extinction? The collision of the mythical planet Nibiru with earth? The Melchizedek Merkaba “Ascension” of 144,000 humans to another dimension? The sudden increase in our DNA from 2 to 12 strands? Or the fulfillment of the Apocrypha, the “Rapture”  through Armageddon in the Middle East?  Out of that smorgasbord  there is  only one that has a chance of happening: Armageddon. Ironically, it is the only event over which humans have real control but instead of focusing on preventing it, the world’s attention is as divided and chaotic as ever. Millions of people have been distracted from the real danger we face. Things like the “fiscal cliff” capture the collective imagination when we should be questioning the plausibility of the concept. Like most manufactured crises, this one is arbitrary and un-necessary. The truth is that all of the major disasters we face – apart from natural ones – are the product of the clash of human egos played out on the stage of public life pitting one group  against another: corporate power against the public interest; the “power players” against the rest of us.  The worst thing about the current set of crises is that they are totally un-necessary.

What is Ascension?

Think about it: why do we need the notion of “Ascension” at all? Is it not an admission of failure on our part? The motivation behind “Ascension” is the desire to escape from everything: from our own flawed lives; from the environmental mess we have made of our planet; from the necessity to change the way we live; from anything that we feel powerless to change. That is all “Ascension” is: the profound desire to escape from what we ourselves have created. In a sense the “Ascension” scenario is the result of addiction to other forms of escape from our present circumstances: recreational pursuits including drugs, addiction to work as well as addiction to avoiding work, addiction to games of all kinds, addiction to sport either as participants or observers, declaring wars of all sorts, etc.  We’ve become so alienated from the present moment – the NOW – that we devise ever more elaborate ways to escape noticing it. The great irony is that we are closing the door on our only real means of “escape” – the experience of pure consciousness right here and NOW.

What is Bliss?

Pure Consciousness is ours for the taking, every nano-second of every day. It is a natural state of bliss that is available to every human regardless of circumstances! The one thing that we go out of our way to avoid – just Being – is the answer we are looking for! And we are looking in all the wrong places. The world does not have to “end”. Time does not have to be “overcome”. Space does not have to be “conquered”.  We do not have to destroy ourselves or our planet in order to escape. We don’t need to escape. We need to stop “doing” and start BEING fully present to each nano-second in order to accomplish everything we want to do! The daily experience of pure consciousness is FREEDOM from all the things we try so desperately to escape. The most important truth we will ever learn is that we are already FREE of the things we think hold us back. They don’t. We DO have choices at every moment in every situation.

Most of us live blindly. We cut off our awareness of alternatives in order to ‘fit in’,  to be what we think is ‘normal’, to be what we are expected to be. We enslave ourselves; no one does it to us. And we can stop being slaves. We have the means to change anything we want to change. We were born with that power. It doesn’t come from outside of us; it IS us. We are consciousness made visible in physical form but our form has no power on its own. We fill the empty shell of our bodies with our consciousness. Consciousness is the source of our energy. If you doubt that think for a moment about Stephen Hawking. Would you deny that he is powerful? His body is powerless. His power comes from consciousness and his consciousness expresses itself through the products of his intellect. Hawking is like a miniature star, a sun that goes through the entire life cycle and then re-cycles itself by leaving the body behind and releasing the energy back to the universal field of consciousness from which it came. That is real ascension: rising into wordless consciousness.

We can “ascend” any time, any place, under any circumstances. We’ve just forgotten how to do it. All it takes is a simple shift in awareness from pre-occupation with “stuff” – mental stuff – to complete absorption in this nano-second, the NOW. The “Power of Now” is not some woo-woo New Age delusion; it is real. In fact, it is the only thing that is “real” in the sense that we cannot create it or destroy it. Consciousness created us. Learning how to use its power is the only way we can create the sort of life this planet deserves from us.  If you want to change the world, to end hunger, to prevent war, to stop the destruction of human lives, learn to enter the NOW and do it for a few minutes everyday. What will happen to you? You will experience ascension every day and it will free you. If enough of us do this, there will never be an Armageddon and we won’t need a Merkaba to escape the confines of earth. We will transform ourselves by actually using what we have already. Sit down. Close your eyes. Breath deeply and when a thought comes floating into awareness release it like a balloon. Breathe silence in and thought out. Silence in; thought out. Silence. Bliss.

© Delia O’Riordan 2012

Follow Your Bliss Card Deck is available in Delia’s Happiness Shop HERE.

Image credit: Butterfly Nebula courtesy NASA.

One of the things that I suggest to many of my psychic readings clients is to try to keep a journal. I have found that material that comes through in psychic readings may in fact be a type of ‘portal’ – a connection to ancestral energies that can inform and enlarge our world if we actually use what they communicate in the reading. At the very least, I recommend that clients go over the taped reading and jot down points to follow up on. In one memorable reading, a client’s grandfather came through with the amazing – to us at least – information that his collection of car memorabilia included an extremely  rare set of prints from the 1920s showing beautifully detailed illustrations of classic cars. Because the prints were only one set of 500 that had been made at the time, their value would have grown considerably.  My client, Valerie, didn’t know a Volkswagen from a Lamborghini at the time of the reading but when she took the prints to a classic car and plane museum, she attracted the interest of one of the donors to the museum, a man who is now her husband and resident expert on all things vintage in autos. They had her prints assessed for insurance and discovered that they were worth over a £10,000.00 in 1999. Val could not bear to sell them so she has willed them to the museum to make certain that they would not disappear into private hands. Although she is still not a car boffin, Val  decided to explore her interest in vintage clothes of the same eras as the cars and now has a collection of clothes that will one day accompany the prints to the museum. Had she not come for the reading, she would have sold off the prints at a mere fraction of their value as part of a house contents sale and she might never have met her husband. These synchronicities led to Val keeping a journal of her life which records the unexpected events that led to her marriage. The stories and pictures in her journal now also serves as favourite reading material for her grand-children who, like almost all children, are fascinated by life ‘in the olden days’. If you have had a particularly memorable psychic reading you might want to consider doing something about the information that came through. Go through the tape of your reading stopping it when you come to something that needs verification or opens up an interesting question about your family history or about your current life if information about it was relayed by a deceased person in the reading.

Psychic Readings | How To Journal

Almost everyone I know owns a journal or notebook that was bought with the intention of ‘journal-ing’. You’ll see all sorts of books with advice on “how to” keep a journal but for some of us, getting started proves so scary that we freeze up. What if my journal doesn’t look like the ones in the books? Everybody else seems to know how to do this, why don’t I? We’ve become so used to – dependent upon? – experts to “coach” us that we’re almost superstitious about doing anything without a model to follow. Keeping a journal is a private process, not a competition or a test of character! As our very real interior world is increasingly invaded by ‘virtual reality’ and the demand for us to be accessible 24/7 on cellphones and computers, the danger of losing the connection to our essential self grows exponentially. With the advent of ‘reality tv’ and wide-spread surveillance devices in our homes, work places, schools and public spaces, people are being conditioned to accept the loss of privacy as the new norm. In this invasive atmosphere, where do we go to be totally private, totally free? One place we can go is to a journal where hopes and dreams, losses and lessons learned, moments of gratitude, torrents of frustration and whatever else we are experiencing can be ‘vented’, considered, explored, illustrated, and perhaps even understood in a new light.

Recorder or Explorer?

Journaling is not necessarily about recording events; it’s about exploring the meaning of life events. Of course, listing and commenting on daily events is a good way to keep memories and for many people that is the goal of having a journal.  But I find that taking the “recording or reporting” approach often fizzles after a few days or weeks and the journal ends up in a drawer or back on a shelf somewhere abandoned like that one-off hot pink clutch bag from last New Year’s Eve. On the other hand, approaching journal writing as a process of discovery keeps up interest levels and makes us want to spend a few minutes ruminating in writing each day. For some people the commitment approach works. You know the drill; keeping a journal becomes a moral imperative: ‘I promised myself (or my therapist or my best friend, etc.) that I would do this everyday without fail and I’m going to do just that. Now pick up that pen, sit down and write, dammit.’ This method of journal-ing can work for some but it can also lead to mere list making which brings me to the first principle of journal writing: it should be about freedom, not obligation. A journal is more personal than a toothbrush. It’s not for sharing.

For Your Eyes Only

Journals can serve many purposes. I know friends who keep more than one at a time, a separate journal for drawing/painting, another for project ideas, one for favourite jokes and funny stories, etc.  A client of mine who had difficulty getting started on a journal bought the most beautiful one she could find thinking that the sheer beauty of the book would inspire her. Instead of which, it completely intimidated her and she found she could not write in it at all!  Many of us have this sort of experience at the beginning.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say ‘I open to the first page and freeze’. This used to be me until one day, in a course I can no longer remember the name of, I had a sudden inspiration – or maybe it was a whack on my head from a cosmic two-by-four wielded by a no- nonsense spirit guide. Anyway when I meditated and asked why I had such difficulty starting to write on the first page of a journal, I heard this: “Start on page 2.”  Um, yeah, sure – I knew that…And, wouldn’t you know, I’d get a smart-ass spirit guide!

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012

For books mentioned in today’s post, please, visit Delia’s Amazon Shop HERE.

Spirit really does matter at this time of year and one reason is the seven day period known as the Halcyon Days, one reason I love this time of year in Canada. Many areas of the country were ( pre-global warming) blanketed in snow by mid-December every year and another few centimetres would fall every night giving each morning a clean, sparkling glow. The thick coating of snow muffled the noise even of the city and created places to relax and play that were not available at other seasons. I loved ice-skating in a nearby park in late afternoon when the only illumination came from streetlights and Christmas lights in the windows of nearby houses. Sunrise was around 8 in the morning and sunset was around 4 in the afternoon. I think the longer hours of dark made life quieter somehow. It didn’t keep kids indoors but the sounds of their play were muted a bit by the falling snow and plummeting temperatures.  Of course, some people fought nature and insisted on driving in the worst conditions with predictable results but most adjusted to the limitations imposed by our winters and some – like me – did so gratefully and with a sense of relief that the pace of life slowed a bit for a while. Around the time of the solstice one year I remember reading  in an old encyclopedia  an article about the Greek demigoddess, Alcyone, whose name gives us Halcyon as a description of the solstice period.

Spirit Matters | Halcyon Nights

The story goes that she was the daughter of Aeolus, the God of the Winds and Enarete, mother of the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades, Alcyone being the central and brightest star in the Constellation.  The story goes that Alcyone married Ceyx, the son of the Morning Star. They playfully referred to each on occasion as “Hera and Zeus”. Zeus, however, was not amused and he plotted to separate the happy pair to teach them a lesson about blasphemy. When Ceyx embarked upon a sea voyage to consult an oracle, the threw one of his thunderbolts at the ship.  Meanwhile, Alcyone had a dream in which the God Morpheus disguised as Ceyx told her he was dead. Alcyone was inconsolable and in despair she threw herself into the sea and drowned. As sometimes happened, members of the Greek pantheon took pity on the pair and resurrected them as brightly plumed Kingfishers, called Halcyon birds after the beautiful Alcyone. Her father subsequently calmed the winds around the time of the winter solstice so that Halcyon could lay her eggs and nest on the beach each year returning to the sky once they fledged. As the central sister of the Pleiades, Alcyone is highly visible at this time of year in Taurus and on the nights of 14 and 15 December this year there will be a spectacular meteor shower, the Geminid, with 30 to 50 meteors per hour visible in most parts of the world and as many as 100 per hour in some areas. Wherever you are on the planet take a few minutes to look up at sky around midnight and perhaps you will see the remains of the comet Phaethon as earth passes through its path. The sky will be alight with a truly remarkable phenomenon more spectacular than any Christmas or Yule display we can imagine.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012

Image credit: Wikimedia Creative Commons.

There is probably no one more famous in psychic readings history than Michel de Nostredame, better known to us as Nostradamus The Seer, born in Saint-Remy-de-Provence on 14 December 1503 and died 2 July 1566. Actually his exact date of birth is not known but the likely dates are either the 14th or the 21st of December. He was by training an Apothecary but he attempted to register as a student of medicine at the U of Montpelier but was almost immediately expelled when it was discovered that he was an apothecary which was considered a manual trade which disqualified him from taking a degree. Nevertheless, Nostradamus manage to live through at least three outbreaks of plague, one of which took his first wife and their children. He gained some fame during his lifetime for his Rose Pill an alleged protector against the plague but his failure to save his family from the disease greatly injured his reputation as a healer and he turned to astrology and the occult to make a living. Nostradamus traveled extensively throughout Europe, spoke and wrote at least four languages and designed various forms of code that he used to obscure the  meaning of his prophecies, the most famous of which were written in quatrains. The precise meanings of the quatrains (four lines that rhyme) have been argued and debated down to the present day.

Psychic Readings History | Nostradamus

Nostradamus lived during the period of the Inquisition which attempted to destroy heresy in any form but since Astrology was still practiced even by priests the church did not persecute him. Nevertheless, Nostradamus was concerned that his prophecies might attract the attention of the Inquisitors at some point and he composed his rhyming prophecies with care so that they would be seen mainly in retrospect as relating to events like the Fire of London in 1666 and various other calamities right down to the present day. His prophecies are therefore are more like clues to a puzzle that must be sorted and connected with historical events. The problem with that approach is the tendency to ‘read into’ his writings meanings that were never intended by him. It’s rather like searching the Bible for a quotation that seems to fit a current event. The Book of Revelation seems to attract precisely this sort of ‘prophecy hunter’ but the problem is the same: there have been so many periods of strife in human history that anyone can read any meaning into random passages and be convinced it fits. If Nostradamus had a gift of any kind, it seems to have lain in his ability to create tantalizing hints that offered the prospect of uncovering great secrets. Had he lived in the 20th century he might well have been Dan Brown.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012

Image credits:Portrait of Nostradamus, Prophecies, courtesy of  Wikimedia Creative Commons.

December is probably the most spiritual month of the year. Despite the commercialization of Christmas and even Channukah, there is at the heart of it all, spirit. The sacred feast days of December culminate on Christmas Day celebrated on the 25th. It is the central event of the Christian calendar but is preceded by other feast days that are still celebrated in various countries.  Our idea of “Santa Claus” derives from the 4th century bishop, St. Nicholas, whose feast day is celebrated the 6th of December.  The 8th is celebrated by Catholics as day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary who was destined to become the mother of “The Light Of The World”, Jeshua or Jesus. The next major feast day of the month is on 13 December.  Prior to 1753 the winter solstice fell on what is now 13 December in our calendar and on this day Sweden celebrates the feast of “Santa” Lucia, a festival of light. The root of the Swedish word for light is derived from the Latin root word “lux” which is also the root of Lucifer, the Angel of Light who fell into an eternal abyss of darkness when he led a rebellion against “God”.  Likewise,  the “Lux” is the root of Lucia whose day is celebrated with candlelight processions.

Spirit Matters FAQs | Santa Lucia

In Swedish tradition there may also be a link with the Judaic pseudepigrapha of Lilith who appears in 8th to 10th century Jewish mystical lore as Adam’s first wife. Formed of the same clay as Adam,  Lilith claimed equality with him but Adam complained to Yahweh who then created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs thus making her derive from him as a lesser being. Lilith was then cast out of Eden and mated with the Angel Samael spawning a line of demon offspring. Later Christian tradition cites a  virgin, Santa Lucia, from Syracuse who died a martyr’s death for refusing to marry.  Lilith became synonymous with lust and licentiousness but she still survived in folk memory and today still appears in horror fantasy fiction. Such characters exercise a powerful hold on the human imagination and the church made every effort to eradicate them from popular imagination. Consequently, many characters from pagan tradition were re-cast as Catholic saints in the early church which may be how Lilith came to be replaced by the virginal Lucia whose feast day on the Winter Solstice was intended to supplant the native Yule traditions. However, the present form of the Santa Lucia festival only dates back to 1927 in Stockholm when a girl was selected to wear a crown of lighted candles and a white gown. The idea caught on and was adopted by schools and later by civic organizations. Every town in Sweden now observes the feast of Santa Lucia by selecting a girl to represent the saint but all the girls are welcome to participate and many do. The popular image of a young girl with a crown of candles is now at the centre of celebrations in towns with Swedish communities around the world. Regardless of one’s spiritual beliefs, the celebration of light in a time of darkness can be a welcome restorative at the Winter Solstice.

When clients come for psychic readings, I sometimes ask them to write down anything they can remember from recent dreams. The first time I did this I didn’t know why I was asking for the client to do this. It just popped into my head and it felt right so I suggested it without having really thought through what it meant. Since those early days, I have come to realize that when clients make appointments for readings it is often as a result of a prompt from their deep unconscious and clues to the meaning of the prompt are often present in dreams. In most cases where I have made this suggestion to clients there has been a significant dream – usually fragmentary – that they considered but abandoned after wondering about it for a moment then dismissing it. Only recently have I begun to notice that my own dreams are sometimes connected to future readings I will do for a client.  This came as a surprise to me since in many cases my dream would occur a week or more before a client – including first time clients! – even placed the call. Lately I have noticed the presence of animals around the periphery of my dreams – not as participants but as observers! It’s almost as though an animal representing an energy or capacity I will soon need is anticipating my need and showing up to alert me to its presence.  I grant you my life is on the weird side to begin with and doing psychic readings probably increases the weirdness factor but I am wondering now how long these animals have been present without my remembering them or -worse yet – without my noticing them at all? In a sense this rather like a Bev Doolittle (I SWEAR that is her real name!) painting. At first glance her paintings appear to be landscapes but as you look more closely you see animals looking out at you.  Kids love these kinds of things but these paintings are not children’s art; they are deep expressions of the psychic connection between human and animal consciousness.  I say this because I have found that Doolittle’s art serves as a powerful force in connecting clients with their deepest selves. As a person looks at one of the artist’s paintings, it is useful to note the order in which she/he notices the animals. I have found that we are drawn to certain animal energies in these paintings in accordance with a quality or energy we need to connect with at that time! I am aware that I or my clients could be “projecting” here but that is part of the psychic process: the unconscious projects its raw contents onto the screen of conscious perception. That is how we begin to integrate what has been ignored or denied or repressed and kept out of consciousness. The more unprocessed material is harboured in the unconscious the more control it has over our lives. Conversely, the more we make conscious, the more control we a acquire over self-defeating or self-destructive impulses.

Psychic Readings | Dreams

Twice this week I noticed an otter in my dreams. I like otters so I was comfortable with it but it took a while before I questioned its presence. I started to think about otters. They are divers going deep to find mussels and other mollusks to eat. They often live where fresh water streams empty into salt water: near bays and in estuaries. They divide their time between land and water and seem to enjoy floating on their backs whilst they crack open the shelled creatures they consume but they also just seem to enjoy floating for its own sake, letting the water support them whilst the sun warms them. They are playful creatures and seem to have evolved games of tag and hide and seek, often pouncing on each other from the cover of rocks or dams and chasing each other until they collapse in a heap. I love furry critters and otters are amongst the most loveable. But why were they showing up in the background of my dreams this week? To answer that question I needed to consult some Shamanic traditions and here is what I found. The otter represents the healing wisdom of women, sensitivity to deep issues but without suspicion or guile, discovering hidden talents, fidelity, psychic awareness and learning the value of playtime.

Dream Animals In The Real World

It just so happens that two of my friends are healers. Both are qualified Reiki practitioners, and one is studying Chinese Medicine and animal communication whilst  the other is an Energy Healer and studying Shamanic healing. Both are remarkable women, highly sensitive, creative, and psychically attuned. Both ask why they are brought into contact with the people in their lives and neither will settle for superficial explanations. Apart from these connections, I received a request this morning for a reading. The individual works for a well-known animal rights organization, concentrating on the protection of endangered sea life. He has recently run afoul of some rather powerful foes of environmental causes and wants to explore the deeper issues that may driving his involvement in his work. The presence of Otter in my dreams seems to be pointing to an answer – or at least to a direction in which I should look – when I work with this client.  Was Otter trying to prepare me for this client or were the dreams “just a co-incidence”?

© Delia O’Riordan 2012

This series of articles in psychic readings history includes the influence of Angels on psychic phenomena in general and in particular on questions about loved ones who have passed on. Most clients are interested in having questions about their present and immediate future answered but many also hope that a deceased person that they loved will come through. I do not “summon spirits”, I simply close my eyes at the beginning of every reading and I listen. This listening is not about hearing sound in the physcial sense; it is about metaphysical hearing, being silently receptive to whatever information may present itself. In the vast majority of my readings, I will “hear” a name which I immediately pass on to my client. Sometimes the deceased person tells me the nature of the relationship to the client but in some cases the connection is very faint at first and only the name is given and either I sense the connection or the client says something like “I had a Grandmother by that name”. Once recognised by the client, the deceased person often comes through more strongly and will cite events or objects known to the client that confirm the relationship. So, what has this to do with Angels? Frankly, I’m not certain, but over the years I have become aware of another presence in the room when I do psychic readings. This is such a subtle perception that I am reluctant to characterise it. When I’m in the light trance state that occurs almost immediately the psychic reading begins, this familiar sense of another presence is the same as I get when synchronicities occur and I have long since identified the “energy” associated with synchronicities as coming from an “Angelic” source – a sentient and benign energy that gets my attention through multiple number and time prompts each day. [These are almost invariably either the number 11 or a multiple of 11 but sometimes they are numerical palindromes - they read backward the same as they do forward: 12:21, 13:31, 14:41, etc.] This happens so often on most days that I have stopped trying to count them and just stop and offer whatever is behind these “prompts” a thank-you for making its presence known to me.  The “noticing” itself seems to strengthen the synchronistic/Angelic connection but, yes, I have considered alternative explanations such as meaningless co-incidence and sub-conscious self-programming. Neither rings true, however, in the context of the incidents to which they draw my attention. In addition to context, recent research in two areas seems to point to a link between Angels, synchronicities,  and things like NDEs (near death experiences) or encounters with non-human life forms aka “aliens”.

Psychic Readings History | Angels Of Death

I have been working lately with an unusual deck of oracle cards, The Fallen Angels Oracle. As I wrote recently in another post, I do not see these Angels as “fallen” in the sense described in the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis but I have begun to wonder whether these “lost ” Angels might be those reported by people who have had a Near Death Experience. People who’ve been clinically dead for upwards of 5 minutes but are resuscitated often report the presence of an incredibly loving being made entirely of light. Some identify this being with “god” but many sense that it is something else, perhaps a guardian of the gateway between life and death. All agree however, that the being is love personified. If there is a class of Angels whose special responsibility is to receive the soul of the dying human and separate it from the physical body, perhaps this alleged “fallen Angel” is actually the Azrael, an Angel in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions who appears at the moment of death. Do we all see the same Angel at that moment or is Azrael the designation for many Angels who conduct humans into the spirit world?

The more psychic readings I do, the more I wonder about this “energy” that I sense around deceased people as a presence. Is the information I receive in the readings actually coming from this benign source?  Perhaps I won’t know until I meet him face to face but whether the source is alien or Angelic I am immensely grateful for its presence in my life and as I pass people who look sad or worried or emotionally numb, I ask this presence to ease their pain and help them to see something that gives them comfort and a respite from whatever burdens them. If the presence is that of an Angel or perhaps more than one, I couldn’t ask for a more re-assuring presence on this planet.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012

Image credits: Wikimedia Creative Commons: Art of Evelyn de Morgan.

In my psychic readings, I have encountered a condition one might call symbolic or psychic suicide. I wrote in these pages recently about the danger symbolic suicide by basing such important decisions as career choices on external factors such as income potential, prestige, etc. rather than finding or creating work that expresses one’s authentic Self. If the contradiction between our choices and our authentic self is extreme enough, we may not even be aware of it and may lose touch altogether with our essential self. I’m sure you’ve encountered this situation in your life. We all know over-accomodating people, the ones who will put aside anything personal to ‘help’ someone else. They seem to be made of kindness and never ‘blow up’ at people.  A few souls are genuinely kindly to a fault and this characteristic may be an expression of their authentic selves but there are many more who seek approval – or try to avoid disapproval! – by being perpetually at everyone’s beck and call – that is until they reach the breaking point of psychic suicide.

Psychic Readings | Psychic Suicide

The term psychic is not confined to what we think of as “psychic phenomena”. It applies to our overall mental/spiritual state. The arena of personal relationships deeply affects your psyche. We are talking about your true Self – the quiet voice inside that objects when you are treated unfairly or someone takes you for granted or you act against yourself in some self-betraying way.  Instead of acknowledging the hurt, however, you pretend not to notice. Deny such hurts for long enough and you may find yourself contemplating actual suicide. Let’s face it, few of us get through life without having a psychic crisis in which we must choose between life and suicide. But in psychic suicide what is at stake is not ‘just’ the physical body. The authentic Self (we all have one!) is buried beneath all the hurt until death seems preferable to living with the psychic pain. You’ve probably heard that it is impossible to prevent someone from committing suicide and, to a great extent, that is true. Some people are so determined to kill themselves that no one can reach them and they’ll keep trying until they die. But psychic suicide is about being at war with your authentic self and this is a war that can be won.

Actual vs Psychic Suicide

Recently, I discovered that an old school friend of mine whom I’ll call Sally had been in this situation with her younger sister who hanged herself at age 17. Sally and I had lost touch over the years but found each other again thanks to the internet. In a Skype call, she told me about the loss of her sister and how it had shaped her own life, even to the point of marrying her sister’s ex-boyfriend who had attached himself to my friend in the months following the girl’s suicide. My friend felt sorry for the guy and felt she could not refuse him without causing another suicide!  On top of that, she had been reared in an ethic of self-sacrifice and felt it was a small price to pay to save the guy her sister had once loved but eventually broke up with. And so she agreed to marry him – for all the wrong reasons – and spent the next twenty years ‘saving’ him from himself.  He became an alcoholic, gambled away their savings and had affairs too numerous to count. It took those twenty years to bring my friend to her senses when she finally divorced him. However, he remained a stone around neck demanding or begging to be taken back and her life continued to be a living hell until he finally got the message: it was time to find out who he really was and learn to live an authentic life. Ironically, Sally had to learn the same lesson. She had conformed entirely to the self-sacrificing way of life that her parents expected of her. She had ‘rescued’ her husband from every mess he created until she realised that she had been shouldering his responsibilities as well as her own – with one exception. Whilst taking care of her selfish, narcissistic husband she had neglected to take care of herself and finally recognised that she had no idea who she really was. Her sister had commited physical suicide but my friend had committed psychic suicide. I’m happy to report that with the help of a skilled therapist, she at last discovered that her authentic self had a host of suppressed interests and hidden talents that would change her life. She left her corporate job and completely over-hauled her life. She moved to another state, earned a private pilot’s license, pursued her interests in horticulture and eco-farming and is now living a life she had never dared dream of. Those of us who care about Sally are very glad that she finally listened to the voice of her authentic self and took action to claim the life she was meant to live. Recovering from psychic suicide is not easy but it is possible – unlike the finality of actual suicide.

Image credit: Cup of Death by Elihu Vedder courtesy Wikimedia Creative Commons.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012

Can psychic ability be increased through the use of hypnosis?  In a recent discussion about unusual psychic readings someone raised the question of a possible link between hypnosis and psychic phenomena. It’s a good question and one that I have explored over the years from several perspectives. Let’s get our definitions straight at the outset.  Hypnosis is the process of inducing a deeper level of consciousness than the busy-minded Beta state in which most of us operate all the time. Hypnosis affects the mind at both the conscious and unconscious levels simultaneously by inducing a deeply relaxed state in the body  which reduces the level of stimulation we experience during our waking hours. When the body relaxes, the mind tends to follow suit and the background self-talk that dominates so much of our waking life ceases or is greatly reduced. Thus far, the common thread between psi and hypnosis is that both states work better when the subject is deeply relaxed. In hypnosis, the objective is either to un-earth buried memories or to plant suggestions that will help the subject to change habit patterns that may have persisted for years. Chronic pain, panic attacks, phobias, obsessions and compulsions can ofter be successfully managed with the skilful use of hypnotic suggestion. In a sense hypnosis is an “altered state” of consciousness.

Psychic Readings FAQs | Hypnosis and Psychic Phenomena

In the case of psychic functioning, a shift in mental state usually occurs spontaneously and unexpectedly. Psychics often stop moving and close their eyes when they are suddenly overtaken by a psychic perception. In this respect, too, the psychic state is like hypnosis which is most effective when outside stimulants are reduced as much as possible. When I begin a psychic reading I take a few deep, slow breaths, with my eyes closed. As I do this, my awareness seems to shift from the left side of my head to the right. I don’t know how to describe this to someone who has not experienced it. It’s subtle but noticeable and even my body moves accordingly. My head apparently turns slightly to the right although during the reading it may turn to the left if I feel something on that side of me that needs attention. My heart rate slows perceptibly and my breathing becomes more shallow as it is in sleep yet I am fully awake and aware of my surroundings. Once in this state, psychic impressions begin to emerge and the reading commences.

Hypnosis vs Meditation?

As it happens, I was trained in both auto-hypnosis and induction hypnosis to use on others. The father of a university room-mate of mine was a psycho-analyst who used hypnosis in his practice and had perfected the art of auto-hypnosis to the point where he could take three deep breaths and fall asleep anytime, anywhere and wake up exactly 20 minutes later full of energy! As an enthusiastic student I wanted to train myself to sleep no more than five hours a night so I could get the most out of my time. I learned the techniques, practiced them and have used them successfully ever since – apart from the sleep thing. I came to realize that sleep is a necessary function in human life and that we are biologically predisposed to get at least 8 or 9 hours of it out of every 24. Both hypnosis and meditation are effective ways to reduce the intensity of your stress responses but you may prefer to use them for different purposes.

The Right Tool For The Job

For me hypnosis is about enhancing intellectual functioning, increasing memory capacity and dealing with stress. Over the years I added Silva techniques to my repertoire of inductions as well as various forms of meditation that bear some resemblance to the hypnotic state. In Silva particularly, auto-hypnosis is used to prepare oneself for “remote viewing” and I can attest to its effectiveness in this context. As to whether one can enhance one’s psychic sensitivity with hypnosis, I would also have to agree that it can be done. To alter one’s mental state in a non-chemical manner is something that all humans can learn to do. Whether through hypnosis or meditation, the power of greater consciousness is available to us all.

Image credit: Merlin as a Druid with Viviane by Gustav Dore courtesy of Wikimedia Creative Commons.

© Delia O’ Riordan 2012