All posts by eggiebear

A damnably nice chap!
My thinking..., My Thoughts, sychic phenomena

THAT’s HER IN THE CORNER THERE.

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There is a type of ghost or spirit, call it what you will, that is attached to, almost a part of, a feature or place. The Spirit is not tied to the place having died through a traumatic Passing such as a murder or other type of violent death nor is it resisting moving on to the Spirit Plane by haunting a place; it just ‘is’

In Ancient Egypt such a ‘presence’ was called a ‘Ka’ and frequently inhabited statues and the such, it did not ‘haunt’ or wander around weeping and wailing, it just ‘was’ These Spirits still exist.

Such Spirits often remain unobserved or unnoticed, which is how they see themselves; just a part of the fabric, rather like, I suppose, a brick would see itself as part of the fabric in a wall. These Kas may be all around us we don’t know and trying to find and contact one would be very tiresome because they don’t want to be contacted…why would a brick in a wall want to talk to you?

In the 1970s I lived in a flat in Ilfracombe in North Devon, the flat was part of a Victorian house (my living room and bedroom were 2 halves of what was once a ballroom!). As I grew accustomed to living in this flat I felt that I could detect a supernatural presence in one corner of the living room. It was not haunting or intruding in any way, I am not sure that it was aware of my presence at all or if it was aware it did not give a fig for my being there. It just ‘was’

I made various attempts to let it know that I knew that it was there but with no response. The old guy I had met on Flatholm Lighthouse had been curious, worried and interested in what was happening, this Spirit was not, it was just there.

My clairsentience enabled me with a bit of effort to detect that the Spirit was an old lady from the Victorian era (inasmuch as I could sense that she had been there for a long time) but that was all I could ‘see’. Like a statue she just stood there.

I called on a Clairvoyant friend of mine to try and contact the woman for me (since I couldn’t have a dialogue with this woman because I couldn’t hear or see her how I expected her to respond to my contact I don’t know. Did I expect her to dance around the room in the shape of the word ‘hello’ so I could detect her?)

My friend, a Spiritualist Medium, was able to see the woman and could talk to her but she did not get any reply (I hadn’t spoken to the Spirit just to the corner of the room where she was)

The Ka of the lady remained in the corner for a time and did not trouble me at all, although my friend and I did refrain from any hanky-panky in that room from then on.

There came a time when with the help of a Psychic circle we were able to get some sort of conversation going with the Ka and we found a way of putting across to her that there was a welcome and restful place waiting for her on the Spirit Plane.

There was still no reply or response from the woman but she did begin to fade and eventually disappeared.

lighthouses, My thinking..., My Thoughts, sychic phenomena

Not so spooky but creepy goings on on a Lighthouse

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The ghost that I met on Flatholm was the only psychic event I witnessed connected to Lighthouses but there was another occasion…

When I was transferred to Les Hanois Lighthouse in the Channel Islands I the Principal Keeper gave me the usual look around the place, familiarization with the equipment and was given the history of the place:

During the war lad the Germans occupied the Channel Islands and they put a squad of soldiers on the Hanois and left them out here for months. One of the Jerries hated it so much that he got depressed and shot himself in his bunk…the bunk that you will be sleeping in tonight…

There was even a hole in the woodwork of the bunk which I was reliably told by the PK was caused by the bullet after it passed through the soldier’s head.

A lovely tale which I relayed to new arrivals over my time out there. I don’t think that it was absolutely true but I was glad a little while after I arrived when I was able to move to a different bunk!

Books and Literature, My thinking..., My Thoughts

Spooky Goings on

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A number of years ago I was working on Flatholm Lighthouse on an island in the Bristol Channel. From this lighthouse we kept a watch on an automated Lightship some 5 miles away, we did this by observing her position on a radar screen every hour or so. The radar equipment was sited in an old store cupboard attached to the Engine Room.

Whenever I checked on the radar, especially at night, I felt that I was not alone in that room, there was a presence there of someone full of curiosity and wonder as to what I was doing in that room and what the machine I was looking at was. All this made me feel uncomfortable and discombobulated and a bit chary of going in that shed.

It then occurred to me that there was a presence in that shed that felt as uncomfortable as me.

I was what is called ‘Clairsentient’ I couldn’t hear spirits like someone Clairaudient or see them like a Clairvoyant but I could certainly feel their presence. I did some research and probing around that room and met in a corner of it the Spirit of a man standing there feeling very confused and worried about what was going on. I know he had been dead for a long time from before the Lighthouse was electrified, he may have been a Lighthousekeeper, that I am not sure about, but for some reason he had taken up residence in that shed and avoided the rest of the Lighthouse complex. I suspect he felt safe in there and by staying there could avoid contact with all the modern gizmos around the place, he had been able to do that because the shed had only been used as a glorified broom cupboard for decades and he was in there on his own.

The turmoil and upheaval of putting the radar machine in there caused the old boy much distress and when it was fully installed his solitude was destroyed and he spent his time cooped up with this machine of which he knew nothing and understood less. It was no wonder he cowered in the corner while this bleeping, flashing monster dominated the room and his life.

One night while I was on duty I crossed over to the shed to check the radar. I explained to the room and thereby the man what a radar machine was and how it worked, I told him it was nothing to worry about and wouldn’t hurt him and over that duty period and my next night watch I explained it all again and even told the old guy how to look at the screen and how to identify what he saw there.

I’m not sure of how much of what I said he understood but from then on the disconcerting feeling of fear and confusion that had filled that shed evaporated and I felt no qualms about going in there again.

My Thoughts

The New Me is the Old Me part 2

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So one of the purposes of my last post was to write something in a time limited fashion. What I wrote was not in deathless prose but I did ‘complete’ it in a relatively short time.

Why does that matter? I hear you ask. It matters because I became so engrossed in my novel that I lost all track of urgency or deadlines; I also tried to create an artistic atmosphere in the narrative that reflected the absence of personality of the Protagonist and provided no point of sympathetic contact between the reader and the Main Character, what I was creating was a long rambling story with no ‘excitement’ or interest. Hell it was boring! But I became so engrossed in the novel that although I had ideas for short stories I tried to fit them within the novel instead of leaving them as stand alone structures. I lost all sense of beginning, mounting narrative and ending; the three act structure of a story line.

I tried to set my self word count targets for my writing day and sometimes I achieved those targets but not in a meaningful way. I could not say at the end of my stint at the word processor that my narrative had progressed or developed in any way, all I could say was ‘I have written x number of words today’.

This has taken me two hours to write so I am going to call it a day now and write another blog post next week.

My Thoughts

THE NEW ME IS THE OLD ME.

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I

I have realized after a long time of trying, that as a writer I can’t write novels, so I have stopped writing the novel that I have spent the last umpteen YEARS on. The project actually began as a short story but like Topsy it just grew and grew. It started one day in 1986 when I was travelling on a train from Newcastle to London when I got it into my head to write a short story about a vampire so I penned a few pages and worked on it for a few months after I had got off the train. Then I put it aside for a while, too long a while as it turned out. I hadn’t written ‘The End’ at the completion of the story (a habit I later adopted to tell myself to not write any further) I decided that the story needed a prologue so I wrote one as an introduction to the action, the prologue took the reader back 500 years to the birth of the vampire and then from a short prologue it grew into a life story. It wasn’t a full biography but a series of episodes from the vampire’s life concentrating on 100 year intervals. 

The premise of the story was that a vampire was not the debonair lovable rogue that hung around with his blood sucking chums as portrayed in modern occult novels but was a lonely despicable parasite that fed on the life force contained in human blood.

The story was about the final days of the vampire as he finally faced his mortality, something he had been trying to run away from for years. I would explain more about it but it is an episode that I am working up into a short story so there’ll be no spoiler here!

My forte as a writer was/is in short works, flash fiction, humorous satire/piss taking and essays and so that is what I am going to get back to doing on this blog and other selected sites.

My novel is not dead, I shall strip out some of the good scenes and rewrite them in other formats; flash fiction, essays and the like which I hope you will enjoy. So watch this space folks!

To be continued…

My thinking..., My Thoughts, Philosophy..., Self help

BEING WHAT YOU WANT TO BE

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I was reading a post on Facebook a little while ago where the poster was trying to give comfort to people with depression and anxiety by saying that they needn’t be too harsh on themselves as they did not choose to be so affected by their emotions. A nice comforting sentiment but not totally true.

Depression is called the illness of the past because we become depressed about something that has happened to us. Anxiety is the illness of the future because we become worried/anxious about something that is going to happen to us ‘We think’ .

Anger is the illness of the present as we become agitated about something that is happening to us in the here and now.

In my experience both as a Therapist and a sufferer of depression it is by our own choice that we endure it ,and the same goes for anxiety, it is our choice to put up with it.

The best, although difficult way to treat these inflictions is to accept that you’ve got them but to decide that they are no longer helping you, thank them then ask/tell them to go.

Depression is a reaction to an upsetting or distressing event and as such shuts down the brain and body to give you the chance…to force you to take the opportunity…to withdraw from life around you and to sit quietly whilst your mind works out how to cope with the outcome of the negative event that you’ve just experienced. The process of the mind adjusting to the loss takes about 2 weeks; not 2 weeks from the tragedy or whatever but 2 weeks from the time you tell yourself, or behave as though, you are depressed. Some people, most people can stay in the depths of depression for years by continually reminding themselves that they are depressed. Stop saying it, stop behaving like it, and it will go within 2 weeks.

Anxiety is trying to protect us from danger and threat, particularly from a threat that may take us off guard. It pays special attention to our peripheral vision, physical, social and psychologial, where. it assumes, threats lurk around and loom over us.

The reasoning for this is that if something is in our central vision, dead ahead of us, we can work out how to deal with it , either fight it or run away from it (interestingly in the jungle and other wild places lions , tigers and other carnivores know that only food runs, so flight is not a real option, we would have to find a more effective way of dealing with the danger.

We can do this by bringing the ‘threat’ or anxiety provoking situation into our central vision ; focus on it, although doing so could increase or sense of harm in the short term once the object is in full view it becomes less of a threat and becomes a problem which we have to deal with.

To be continued…

My Thoughts

‘OWZTHAT?

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Many years ago my friend Chris and I used to play cricket together. We could do this without having to leave the comfort of the pub by using 2 dice in a game called ‘Owzthat?’ It was a fabulous game in which the ‘batter ‘ would roll a dice to score runs, if the dice landed on ‘Owzthat’ the ‘bowler’ would then roll his dice to decide what happened to the batsman’

It might sound boring but, especially played whilst quaffing a few pints of Old Boycott’s ‘Runemout’ bitter, it can get very exciting.

We would choose our teams, not just from lists of cricketers but from people from all walks of life. Oddly enough the named players, although just a roll of a dice, had good or bad runs of form. My female film stars top batter was Hattie Jacques who scored many a century during her career and Marilyn Monroe was a demon fast bowler with amazing bouncers’ One night Chris and I met up for a match, his team were ‘Roman Emperors’ and mine were ‘Crippled Men from Fiction and History’

When Chris came into the pub I told him that before we played our match I was having to have a chat with my team as one of them wasn’t pulling his weight and would have to go.

What is the problem? Chris asked.

It’s my wicketkeeper, he’s pants, dropping catches and missing stumpings, I’ve got to sack him.’

‘Well get on with it you can’t have dead wood in your team Caligula has been practicing his googlies, you’ll need a good ‘keeper’

That’s all very well but my ‘keeper is Davros (who created the Daleks); how do I tell the most evil man in the Universe that I’m dropping him from my cricket team?’

Strange as it may seem to you (probably) but I was really getting afraid of telling Davros the bad news. What would he do to me! Anyway I bit the bullet, told him, fired him and brought in Blind Pew the pirate as ‘keeper who did a fantastic job until Davros regained his form and rejoined the team.

My thinking..., My Thoughts

IDENTITY POLITICS etc

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Communism is the ‘Electrification of the Soviet Union’ was a statement attributed to Lenin, or one of his chums, about the means or aim of achieving the ideal Communist state. Alas he decided that the only way of doing that was by tyranny and instilling fear in the hearts and minds of the people.

But, in principle, he was right, the rejection and removal of the old ways of thought and of a hierarchical society based on class, privilege and superstition should and must be done away with and replaced by a scientific, rational society. He thought that this was a position to be worked towards but required many years of sacrifice by the people. Dissent and disagreement were punished severely, but it was all in a good cause!

With the eventual demise of Soviet communism in the late 1980s and the weakening of social democracy in the west, the socialists or the ‘Left Wing’, if you will, turned their backs on the working classes who had achieved a level of satisfaction with their lot as their conditions seemingly improved. Capitalism appeared to have triumphed in it’s struggle against socialism which had no way, apart from through revolution, to win that fight. As was said of the miner’s leader Arthur Scargill during the prolonged, and inevitably doomed, miner’s strike in the 1980s ‘the trouble was that Arthur came between the miners and their wages. Socialism sought equality and ‘enrichment’ for the nation, the proletariat as a whole, whereas the aspirations of the working man were essentially self orientated hence the satirical song of the worker:

THE WORKING CLASS CAN KISS MY ASS

I’VE GOT THE FOREMAN JOB AT LAST.

Socialism as a political force began to die out, even the UK Labour party, supposedly socialist in its philosophy, adopted or adapted to private enterprise and the end of nationalisation. The two main parties of the left and right of British politics drew closer to each other until some of their policies were almost identical.

The Socialists, the Left Wing , needed a new cause to champion and they saw this opportunity with Identity politics and Transgenderism.

The ‘philosophy’ of Postmodernism that was increasingly adopted in the late 20th and early 21st centuries with its rejection of science, rationalism and objective truth in favour of Individualism and ‘Lived Experience’ meant that personal choice and self identity became the way forward. The activists for this way of thought adopted an aggressive attitude towards those who dared to challenge their logic. They claim that it is possible for a man to become a woman just by claiming that he is one. Once he declares he is female he does not have to look, behave or think like a woman, he does not have to possess or demonstrate any femininity but must be treated like a woman and can use female only spaces and join in women’s sports. Anyone, including women, who object to this are accused of misogyny.

Although these activists are called ‘Left Wing’ they have little or nothing in common with political Socialists. I feel in a bit of a bind myself as a political ‘Left Winger’ because although I agree with Left Wing policies about equality in the wider community I am a firm believer and advocate of there being only 2 sexes and genders based on one’s genetic and chromosomal structure from conception.

If a man wants to put on a frock and call himself Deirdre that is fine but if he asserts that by doing so he merits all the benefits and legal rights of being a woman then needs to be brought to book and be made to face the reality of his biological sex.

Poverty is a matter of nurture not nature, it is not innate within a person but is the effect of the society that person lives in. Sex and gender is a matter of nature not nurture, you are born what you are and the society around you cannot change that.

Think about it.