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Hi, thanks for lunch yesterday and your follow-up e-mail.

I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I – you’re describing my remarks concerning your work as “incisive”? It’s 2012, and the time for pussyfooting around is past, surely!

I’ve spent my life pulling punches, afraid to speak my truth, either because I’ve mistrusted my own instincts or to avoid hurting people’s feelings – even damage them beyond repair by being “too honest” (an unconscious projection which, despite my self-awareness work, still kicks in sometimes. I’m working on it!).

I’m glad your talk last night at the Alternative Therapies Centre bore fruit. So you met a pharmacist-turned-purveyor of health foods and natural remedies! I love that – she sounds like someone I’d like. Did I tell you I was planning to study pharmacy myself after “A” levels? I had 4 university offers and even accepted one. Then I had a last-minute change of heart and pursued a different course entirely. Thank heaven I trusted my gut feeling – imagine it! A lifelong slave to Big Pharma? Moi?!

You’re probably right to embrace the “networking” circuit to promote your therapeutic work. I personally loathe it. Not the public speaking – I was born to communicate, and used to teach presentation skills to managers and teachers. It’s just that for me, these days, the price is nearly always too high.

Lately, I’ve been having trouble battling through the clouds of confused – and confusing – energy which seem to gather around groups involved in “alternative healing” and/or “spiritual” activities. I actually experience it as a tangible barrier to my own thinking and intuition. It’s taken me ages to realise that I’m dealing with real energetic interference, and not just my own inadequacies.

Many people are attracted to one form of healing or another for unconscious reasons, and this brings attendant problems. It can feed our altruistic tendencies and even give us a temporary experience of power. But focusing on helping others can be a way of avoiding looking within and doing what’s needed to bring our own shadow material to the surface, where we can own and integrate it. Naturally I recognise this because I did that too, until forced, scratching and bitching, to confront my own disowned fear and negativity; and it’s still going on.

The fundamental problem is that there are intelligences out there using this unconscious human defense mechanism – denying the shadow-self – as a flag to home in on, so that they can suck up the very energy which feeds that denial, i.e. fear. This turns intelligent and well meaning people
into unwitting conduits for an unhealthy – some would say malign – energetic agenda; one which they wouldn’t subscribe to at all if they recognised it for what it is.

On-line networking is just as fraught for me: the internet is flooded with invitations to sign up to this “Abundance Course” or that “Attract Wealth Programme”, “Meet Your Soulmate Class” or “Heal Your Life Intensive”. Most are U.S.-based, free, and packed with enthusiastic testimonials appearing
to suggest that the Holy Grail has been found at last and is coming to an in-box near you via an “expert” interviewee or speaker.

He or she will often claim to have “found the answer” via some eureka experience in his or her previously blighted life, usually at their lowest point. So you resonate, are curious, sign up and sample the free stuff, usually in the form of an audio “teleclass” or video presentation, which is professionally made, enjoyable, even helpful.

I’ve noticed that these “free” courses have one thing in common – well, two, actually, one more worrying than the other. First, each “expert” in the series invariably invites YOU, because you are so special, to purchase, at apparently enormous discounts from their “usual” price, an on-line course which will lead you to total healing, abundant wealth, spiritual enlightenment, accelerated ascension, whatever their focus happens to be. You’ll find the same “expert” speakers cropping up repeatedly, interviewed by different people, but invariably in the same format, starting with the same verbatim introductory bio-script; and I guarantee that the interview-ee will turn up as an interview-er on later courses!

They also aim to share e-mail lists, so be warned: sign up for Expert A’s “free course” and you’ll receive regular e-mails “personally recommending” those of Expert B, G or Z, claiming “life changing” benefits from having worked with them. Frankly, if that were true, Expert A would spend all their time doing other people’s courses and not actually practising their own field of “expertise”!

So you click on the link and sign up for B, G or Z’s “free course” and the game starts. Its name is e-Marketing and prima facie there’s nothing wrong with it – everyone has to make a living and you can always unsubscribe.

But if you do succumb and make a purchase from Z, A will get a micro-commission payment from Z. So maybe that’s The Secret: no actual work, or even “expertise”, required: just do lots of telephone interviews and e-mailshots and watch the money roll into your account!

But the second, less worldly, common factor is more sinister in my opinion: there almost always comes a point in these free teleclasses when the “expert’, usually following a scripted exhortation by the interviewer, will change focus and engage the listeners in a “group exercise”, “visualisation”, “meditation”, “processing” or “healing”.

But I became uneasy about them, and here’s why: the factor which gave me pause was the ritualistic nature of these guided activities, often including words and phrases repeated frequently by the “expert”; and also the inevitable instruction to “breathe in” or “receive” light, energy or healing power from a “higher” source outside oneself. I can testify to the resultant rush of feel-good energy, emotional release, even euphoria; and I can easily understand how some people might get hooked on these calls.

I now wonder whether that’s the point. Call me cynical or paranoid, but I suspect that these “spiritual practitioners” or “coaches” are well meaning but unwitting shepherds, earmarking flocks of vulnerable people on behalf of discarnate, energy-hungry entities, who supply a temporarily uplifting emotional “hit” in exchange for a “way in” to the human energetic system. Are they relatively unenlightened, lower-fourth-dimensional “astrals” who need our energy to maintain their position there?

For me it’s organised religion under another name and I’ll be steering well clear from now on.

I too bought into the Big Lie that there was something “wrong” with me which needed help from priests, “experts” or “ascended masters” to put right. That’s why the world religions were invented; and the New Age has been hi-jacked by those same inventors and repackaged to suit our technology-obsessed needs.

I know now that everything I need is within my own consciousness. So instead of meditating, visualising, or inviting anything in from “out there”, all I do in my silent times is the following:

1) I first quieten my mind as best I can.
2) Then I turn my attention inwards to my own inner essence, core self, however I name my bit of the divine source or Godhead – no intermediary required.
3) I visualise my inner light flowing from my core, first to fill my body and then my whole being, however I experience that.
4) I then imagine that same light flowing OUT through my chest into my immediate surroundings and then all around the planet.
5) I feel gratitude and ask my divine self to show me how I may best grow and serve today.
6) That’s it. Simple as. Nothing else required.

When my “spiritual search’ was kicking off and I devoured David Icke’s early books (The Truth Vibrations and Love Changes Everything), I thought I understood their message. But if I really had, I would have saved myself much hard work, many blind alleys and lots of money! Instead I pussyfooted around for 2 more decades, hoping to find the right person, authority or organisation to show me the answers to the Big Questions of life.

David was right: the answers were inside me all along. So if I could offer a nugget of advice to you my friend, and anyone else trying to make sense of this angst-ridden, high-octane, 2012 zeitgeist impelling us to change and grow at dizzying speed, it would be this:

Be discerning. There are authentic people out there, whose genuine mission is to help us on our transformational journey. We are human and it’s OK to want information, fellowship and support. But be selective, listen to your intuition and only trust those who encourage you to:

1) formulate the Big Questions for yourself, in your own words.
2) Direct those questions ultimately to your own inner divine essence or higher self, rather than to any being outside you.
3) Cultivate patience and wait for the answers to emerge quietly into your awareness….

…..and, in due time, they will.

See you soon, ‘bye for now, This submission has been entered into a contest to win 2 premium tickets + $500 for travel to see David Icke at Wembley Arena, London — October 27, 2012. If you like this article, please share it far and wide, as the winner will be determined by the total number of pageviews acquired before the end of the contest on June 15th. For additional details about submissions, please visit our Contest Page.