I first met the late Trevor Ravenscroft while gardening at a friend’s residence. He entered the garden as I was perched up a tree examining a rogue vine. He said hello and mentioned how delightful it would be to be a gardener. I said I was interested in alternative agriculture/gardening. His eyes lit up and he spoke about Rudolf Steiner and how he studied bio-dynamics, self-sufficiency, burying cow horns, moon phases etc.

Ravenscroft was a big gentle man with a big gentle voice. When he spoke people listened – not because he was asserting himself in any way but because he sounded like he came from a different time. His voice echoed across decades of metaphysical wonder.

Ravenscroft’s breadth of experience and knowledge was extraordinary. Whilst serving as a Commando officer in World War II he was captured on a raid attempting to assassinate Field Marshal Rommel in North Africa; he studied under Walter Johannes Stein (a personal student of Steiner); was spiritual adviser to Shah of Iran before he fled that country and was a teacher, author and investigative reporter. A remarkable life of adventure.

His studies with Stein gave him insights into the occult that formed much of the book The Spear of Destiny – an occult classic. It is a riveting read of good versus evil. Of a talismanic spear passed down through history – the spear of Longinus that pierced the side of Christ. Whoever held the spear, held the destiny of the world in their hands. And it goes on. I asked Trevor of the world and where we are heading. He said malevolent forces are building in strength and sometime very soon the forces of darkness and light will get in the ring and have the biggest wrestling match since Lucifer fell out of the sky to annoy us all. This comes out in his later book The Mark of the Beast. He also wrote the Dup of Destiny which is about the holy grail and consciousness.

Much of Ravenscroft’s ideas are based on Judeo/Christian mythology that, to me, has been interesting to study but doesn’t leave much to base a life on. At the time I was being introduced to a range of metaphysical philosophies and studies. What attracted me were the Taoist and Buddhists teachings: reverence for nature, balance, acceptance, the middle path, meditation, rhubarb rhubarb. Ravenscroft came from the old Western school – the fighting of good vs evil, the struggle, the knights, the Holy Grail – great stories.

While these parables are indeed beautiful and they show many metaphors for our lives; in essence the Western metaphysics, as it was taught, had a firm grip on “we are on the good side and those other people are the evil ones”. This is the duality that we mere mortals on the earth fight with everyday. To give up this fight we need to embrace these opposing forces. As the Judeo/Christian and Muslim faiths continue to step into the ring to biff each other, then the silent, ineffable beauty of the oriental religions will flower more an more in this world. It is already happening as more Western people turn to an inward dialogue, which inevitably leaves them to abandon the crass triumvirate for a more gentle persuasion.

Anyways, Ravenscroft did have many insights that I could relate to. One was the other worlds that exist within our own. That evening we were sitting around the dinner table and our host had cooked up a delightful meal. Someone commented on the food. Trevor immediately said in that big deep voice “Yes – and what do the dead eat?” There was complete silence – no tinkling of spoons and forks, the birds stopped chirping, the stereo seemed to give up its volume.

To sum up Trevor’s comment he might say the spirits are all around us eating what we eat, sleeping with us, helping us with the washing up (a definite bonus, who wouldn’t want them around?) These beings are the spirits that live just outside our 4 dimensional reality in a nether world that we can only see under certain circumstances.

It is easy to start believing in good vs evil if you have to make sense of all the spirits, walk ins, ectoplasmic entities, poltergeists, lizard DNA people – the list reads like a Monty Python sketch. And the more you read the more pythonesque it becomes. Trance states can induce all sorts of weird images and feelings. When we pay a visit to “the other worlds” it can get so freaky that we conjure up all manner of personalities to “keep it real”. Never underestimate the power of the mind. We try to make sense of such things by creating familiar experiences distorting the facts. So in essence Grandma at the séance isn’t Grandma but an energy you have created – so the dead are not the dead really but energies that we conjure so our creative minds can make sense of an extremely emotional and potentially disturbing phenomena.

As a pre teen child I deliberately visited a little world of my own just before sleep. It was a dark inner world I can best describe as ‘strange geometry’. It is difficult to explain but I would concentrate and sort of force myself to relax, and my mind would “float” in and “hover” around this “world”. It was scary but I was fascinated. I could mostly do this at will and the closer I “hovered” to this geometry the scarier it got until the shapes took on a personality and I would back off. At the time I had no idea what it all meant and soon left that world behind. Until one day in my twenties I spontaneously visited the same place and all the memories came flooding back. I was overjoyed to find it again.

So what is it? Well it’s a place that I can still go to but the personalities have disappeared. Why? Because I’m not fussed anymore – I have a better understanding of what it is – a strange dimension of geometry perhaps that sits “alongside” our own.

I have picked the brains of countless numbers of people who have had such experiences and more often than not they conjure the stuff without knowing. It is a fact that some will go to incredible lengths to convince themselves and others of all sorts of nonsense. Explanations are often simple and much less esoteric. One is sleep deprivation. If you want to have a surreal day of altered states try not sleeping for 48 hours. Another is drugs. For example big drinkers begin to lose rod cell function in their eyes causing flashes of light in their peripheral view often mistaken for anything from ball lightning to a Pleiadian visitation. If you really want to find out what that strange vision or floating feeling was then try and get it back a number of times to bring out the lucidity. A one off event is often hard to comprehend. Ravenscroft was a perspicacious metaphysician because he took time out to study and analyse such phenomena. Another is Stuart Wilde. He has some most interesting things to say about the alternative states of consciousness

None of this matters of course if you just love indulging in a bit of paranormal activity. Rarely a month goes by without some strange event crossing my path and in it’s wake, leaving my universe a little more perplexing, fascinating and terribly exciting. Meditation is a good way to touch on other worlds. One thing that can help you is accessing certain brainwave rhythms. Checkout the Brainwave Meditation pack I put together.

The last word: It may not be an out of body experience but an out of spirit experience. The other worlds are not what they seem.

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