a little game I play

Here’s a little game I play when I’m dabbling the uncertain waters of numerology and looking back on some of the significant years of my life.  You might like to join in.

I was born in the London Borough of St Marylebone :: 1927 december 05

I take each individual digit of my date of birth and add them together :-

1+9+2+7+1+2+0+5 = 27

2+7 = 9

Now let’s see how significant for me have been each of the years ending in ‘9’.

1939. I am 11 years old when I hear on the wireless the voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain telling us we are once more at war with Germany.  So I shall remain here in Caerphilly with Uncle Harry and Auntie Lilla instead of returning to London. The countryside, the boys’ grammar school, the scouts, the people I meet are all so famously new and different.

1949. I am 21 years old when I come up to University College Oxford to read for an Honours Degree in Music. I have just finished two years of compulsory National Service in the army. Many of the men in college are older than me.  They have been through real war. I am now an adult in an adult world.

1959. I spent so long in intensive thought and study. Now, at the age of 31, I am newly converted to the Roman Catholic Church, ‘Master of Music’ at Westminster Cathedral, and a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

1969. This is my first full year as Assistant Director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. A year-and-a-half ago I was doing rather well as a professional musician with a practice centered around my teaching at the RAM and, as I told myself, I could easily go on doing the same sort of thing for the next 25 or 30 years. But that would be it. There were no obvious prospects for advancement. Then, in the March of 1968, there were those ads in the best of the Sunday newspapers. And here I am. We celebrated my 41st birthday on the ship coming over.

1979. December 31st. Afternoon. Tea time. I am sitting on a QANTAS plane waiting for take-off. This decade in Australia has radically changed my life in ways I could never have foreseen. Now my work here is ended. I am 52 years old. I am going back to England.

1989. November 9th. I am 61 years old. I am in Berlin. It is the Annual General Meeting and conference of our European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. I am here to present a paper at one of the formal sessions and to write up the proceedings for publication. Much more importantly, we are all joining the champagne and celebrations marking the opening of borders and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. This may even be the end of the Cold War.

1999. Oxford. As the year draws to its close I am safely past my 72nd birthday. I recall a particular Christmas at Nana Cameron’s when I was seven or eight years old. The elders were talking about their pasts and their futures and I sat and wondered whether I could possibly live long enough to see the 21st century. It seemed so incredibly far away. And by then I would have passed my allotted three score years and ten.

επί-λογος

I am not going to pretend that 1999 or 2009 were earth-shattering years for me. They were not. In 1996 I gave my ultimate organ recital ending with a thumpingly good magnificent performance of Franz Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue on BACH. Some weeks later, and for the last time, I played the organ for a Sunday evening service. I turned off the wind. Closed the console. Made farewells to the choir. Folded my tent .. and quietly went on my way. For the better part of sixty years my weekends had been devoted to providing music for the church :: Nonconformist. Spiritualist. Low Church Anglican. High Church Anglican. Roman Catholic High Mass - and  Solemn Vespers with Benediction. Now all that was ended. I was free. 

Free to spend weekends under canvas with friends of multivariant Pagan persuasions. Free to drive many a fruitful mile to speak at their moots, to feature in their annual conferences, to remind them of Helen Duncan, the Repeal of the 18th century Witchcraft Act, and of ‘Dafo’ - but for whom the Wicca might still be one of the arcane hidden mysteries.

I have meandered the rocky track from MS-DOS to Windows 8 (ugh!) and on to the glorious summit of Apple and the iMac. I have been part of the University’s teams teaching Word Perfect, dBase-II, MS Word, Excel, the C programming language, C++, Visual Basic, MS Access, and others now forgotten.

When I came back this time I chose my parents well. My mother and my father both were active accomplished Christian Spiritualists. My mother gave me my first piano lessons. Together in public concert, we played a 4-handed duet when I was 4 years old. My father inspired me, sang, and guided the circles. So has my Web of Wyrd been spun with twin strands striving for the ultimate in music and in religion.

As a good Sagittarian I have travelled far and wide. Physically. Intellectually. Spiritually. The path ahead has a far horizon. My revels now are - not yet - ended.

δαιμόνιον

Once again my book at bedtime is “A Discovery of Witches”.  Diana Bishop is aware of daemons wandering the Bodleian Library. For her, these are ‘creative, artistic creatures who walk a tightrope between madness and genius’. Yet I suspect they are tangible only to the sensitives. 

And then this morning, in my daily portion of NT Greek, is the episode of Jesus ‘casting out’ a daemónion. (I like the ‘casting out’ bit. The Greek ekbállo conjures up all sorts of weird and wonderful images. Chucking out is good. But hissing off the stage is better.) Yes. But. What about that daemónion? My old friends Liddell & Scott offer an overflow of suggestions ranging from the Divinity, with a capital D, to a minuscule inferior race of divine beings. And then, in the NT, to an evil spirit.

And I begin to understand. To comprehend. To take it in. We are in Jewish Monotheistic Territory overlain with the inheritance of Alexander the Great and now occupied by the Romans with their own pantheon of gods, goddesses, and lesser spirits. The Jews, like so many of their contemporaries, engage in an us-and-them culture. Insiders and Outsiders. Greeks and Barbarians. Jew and Gentile. The frum, the goy and goyim. There is but One God. The God of our fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Ergo, it follows that all other extra-physical manifestations are - cannot be else but - demoniac. Evil spirits. quod erat demonstrandum. dun’n’dusted!

nota bene, per piacere : the presence of these extra-physical manifestations is not denied. More to the point, their presence is affirmed. The proponents of the Church of the One Right Answer first change the names and then besmirch the image.

Hmm ..  sometimes, when Empire building, the reverse takes place. I see the image of Isis suckling the infant Horus. And, on a distant eikonostasis,The Blessed Mother with the Infant at her breast.

We’ve wandered a bit this morning. Haven’t we? It’s been good to step away from the strait and narrow.

early memories

My earliest memories are of home and school. Home was 23 Harcourt Street, London W.1. School was a short walk along York Street. School was St Mary’s (Church of England) Infants. It was a comfortable small world. 

My world grew larger in 1935. I was 7 years old. We stood in Hyde Park to cheer the Silver Jubilee procession of King George V and Queen Mary. School was now St Mary’s (Church of England) Elementary. In Miss Carpenter’s class we sang “What is the meaning of Empire Day? Why do the cannons roar? Why does the cry ‘God Save the King’ echo from shore to shore?” And Major Collins unfurled the great wall map of Africa and thrilled us with the story of Cecil Rhodes whose ambition it was to paint the map of Africa ‘red from the Cape to Cairo’. Red was the colour of Great Britain and the British Empire on the political maps in our atlases. The geat British Empire ‘on which the sun never set’.

It was the beginning of our mesmerisation into a world that existed only in the fireside dreams of our elders - who ought to have known better. 

Early in January 1938, just a few weeks after my 10th birthday, I moved to the Mercers’ School, a medieval foundation in the City of London. And once again our elders - who apparently did not know any better - filled our heads with ideas and ambitions which might, just ‘might’, have been valid in the confident glory days of Edward VII but which had been trampled underfoot in the mud of the Western Front in the Great War that began in 1914.

And so it came about that when, in the wartorn London of the early 1940s, I read John Gunter’s ‘Inside Europe’ I could hardly give credit to his findings. They were too different from our schoolbooks.

I had passed my 40th birthday and living briefly among Melanesians on a small island in the South Pacific when the moment of truth arrived. My schooldays had led me astray. The ethos they implanted carelessly ignored realities too harsh to be contemplated. 

I look around me and remember the Shelley I discovered at Univ. 

A traveller regards the shattered remnants of a vast statue part buried in the desert sand and there on the pedestal “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

two new books

I have two new books on the go.  

On Friday I bought Peter Frankopan : The Silk Roads, a new history of the world.  And yesterday I bought Tim Marshall : Prisoners of Geography, ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics. They are both ‘big picture’ demonstrations. They complement each other. 

The implications of the Silk Road captured my attention when I bought Christopher Beckwith’s Empires of the Silk Road some five years ago. This told me so much I did not already know about the great forces that came and went along the main routes linking east and west across Central Eurasia. 

Peter Frankopan begins with the Creation of the Silk Road and adds two dozen more roads including The Road of Cold Warfare, and The American Silk Road. I find myself so much drawn into those chapters which cover the decades I have lived through. Inevitably I find myself most affected by what we were not told at the time and how much my own world view has changed since then.

Tim Marshall’s title tells us exactly what the book is about : how the possibilities and the restrictions of land and sea have affected and will go on affecting the dreams and desires of warlords, traders, and others of that ilk in the past, the present and the future. For the first time I feel I have been informed about the full horror of Sykes-Picot and the almost remoteness of the built-in attitudes which were responsible. I wish I could say :  now we know better. But I can’t. I look back over what to me has been the recent past and recognise that it takes only one or two exercisers of power to make catastrophic decisions based on their having only one very limited view of reality. 

Where and in what kind of a world might I enjoy a future life?

Reviewing 1964

I don't tune in to the BBC's Parliamentary Channel very often but now and again there's something quite interesting going on there. Last night I watched part of an extended programme re-running the BBC's coverage of the 1964 election results. I remember some of the events leading up to it. The rules of the game had been changed. Members of the House of Lords could no longer be Prime Minister. So the Earl of Hume (Conservative) renounced his peerage, became officially a commoner, and Prime Minister. I still think of him as one of our least effective holders of that office. His time ran out. He delayed calling an election until the rules of the game forced him to do just that. On the Labour side he was opposed by Harold Wilson.

The election was going to be a close run thing. Alec Douglas-Hume (Con.) went down to Harold Wilson (Lab.). By a small margin.

I was fascinated by the BBC's coverage. It was still the days of black and white monochrome. Richard Dimbleby (father of David and Jonathan) was the anchor man. Others in his team included Robin Day and Cliff Michelmore. Bernard Levin was among those interviewed.

How different were the conventions of those days. More than a certain degree of correctness. The cultivated speech of the 'upper classes'. The general good manners. Speakers did not shout. Nor did they speak across each other. It was all very gentlemanly. Very urbane. It was the men of influence sharing news and opinions.

I lived in that ethos. I read The Times each day - because 'top people read The Times'. It was the best, the most informative, in those days. My speech patterns shared the same idiolect. My three-piece suits were made for me by a bespoke tailor in the City of London.

These were the years when I began to be disenchanted with our politicians. One of reasons for my move to Sydney, Australia, before the ending of the decade.

There, towards the mid 1970s, I experienced an epiphany. The scales fell from my eyes. And I began recognise the great illusions underlaying my schooling and its surrounding culture. There were tiny hints of change in the Swinging London of the later 1960s, but they were nothing like the changes I experienced in the South Pacific world on the other side the globe. When I came back to England on the first day of 1980, I was a very different person. And England had changed perceptibly while I was away.

being there in berlin

They tell me it's 25 years ago. 25 years since the Berlin Wall started to come down. I  find it hard to believe it was so long ago. Yet most of the young men and women who came up to Oxford this term were not even born then.

By one of those strange twists of intention we were in Berlin on the day Germany was reunited. By 'we' I mean our European Seminar in Ethnomusicology. Our proceedings on that day were enhanced by liberal quafftings of champagne. So I remember rather more about our surroundings than about the actual themes from our various contributors.

Going sightseeing. Checkpoint Charlie. The Brandenburg Gate. Little East German cars putt-putting around West Berlin. Picking up a fragment of Wall left over from the demolition .. ..

Who remembers Checkpoint Charlie now?

we have been here before

I dedicate this to the precious memory of Doris Emmeline Rose Cameron (née Hunt)

born 1903, obit 23 november 1997

MY PREVIOUS LIVES

A general understanding

We are not confined to one life on the Earth plane. We have a series of lives here. Our Soul, our real self, lives on from one incarnation to the next until we arrive at that state of progression where Soul gives way to pure Spirit and we are that ideal stage nearer to ultimate and complete reunion with the Divinity. 

Between these earthly lives we continue to live on whatever plane of consciousness we have earned the right to enjoy. These  planes of consciousness range from those nearest to physical conditions on the Earth to those nearest to the Spirit. We may progress to conceptually higher planes (i.e. those nearer to Spirit) or fall back to lower ones (those nearer to the physical).

When our earthly body dies, our soul passes through the Waters of Forgetfulness, and the same applies to the process of being born into our next incarnation. This is why memories of past lives and of living on other planes of consciousness are so frequently washed away. It takes practice to retain memories during the transition from one state to the next. And even then there may be gaps in the sequence or a complete absence of recall of living on other worlds, other planes.

The realisation of our present condition and the knowledge of our need to return to the Ultimate One will come to us in one form or another, when we are ready, either on the Earth plane or from those who teach us on other planes of consciousness. At this point the striving towards the Ultimate begins and the contents and circumstances of past lives are revealed in whole or in part to help us in our progression. Then future passages through the Waters of Forgetfulness are less are less severe in their erasures.

Within certain parameters, the parameters we have earned, we have a choice of parents for each incarnation that is about to begin. A birth chart drawn up by a perceptive astrologer may help us to elucidate the future we planned for ourselves and the reasons for our being born into each individual set of earthly conditions, the tasks we have accepted, the experiences we are prepared to undergo, the knowledge and skills we carry with us. In sum these will encapsulate the stage of progress at the terminal point of our previous incarnation and the use we have made of facilities on other planes before we returned in our new physical transmigration.

* * * * * * *

This is the order and the circumstances in which the past lives I am presently aware of have been revealed.

19th century Europe

At certain times while I was a student at the Royal Academy of Music (January 1945 to July 1947) I gradually became aware that some of the piano pieces I was learning were compositions I had written in a previous life. During the 19th century I had lived in part of the land now known as Germany. German was my native tongue. I was ambitious to be a concert pianist. There was an accident which meant I could never achieve my objective. As compensation I turned to composing music of my own and writing many articles for the musical press. Towards the end of my life, so I have been given to understand, I became interested in Spiritualism which was then in its early years. So far as I am presently aware this was my penultimate earthly incarnation and the work I did - or did not do - then is relevant to some of the conditions and potential into which I was born to a London family in 1927. Of this, more shall follow in due course.

Franciscan of unspecified time and place

At one of my mother's trance seances, one of her guides told me I had been a Franciscan friar in a previous life. I recall little of this save for some fleeting glimpses of being in a sunny clime, which may have been in Italy, but no more save for a vague impression of myself wearing the rough brown habit and of being generally barefoot walking through open country.

13th century Northern Europe

The year is probably 1985, the place Oxford. Jonathan's coven suddenly increased in size. One of the recently initiated men had connections with a group of friends who shared a house. They in turn had other friends who were keen to advance in the Craft. So it was that one summer's night we assembled in woodland, in a place that might have been deliberately made for private celebrations out of the public eye. It was an entrancing little dell in part of the woodland lying fallow. Some of the young men had discovered it when they went in search of a maypole for setting up on Port Meadow for the festival of Beltane.

On the night in question there were more than twenty of us altogether and among them were three to be initiated to full membership of the coven. We left the main path through the forest, turned onto a tiny track through the trees, went down a sharp but shallow bank and walked alongside a shallow stream until we passed through the candle-lit archway to the dell. Soon we were ready to begin, everyone skyclad under the light of a full moon. It was my duty to introduce each of the candidates to the Initiator and so to the full company. The first initiation passed according to the normal ritual. We danced round her, welcoming her to the coven, welcoming her to the Craft. The second initiation was that of a young man. Arachne presided as High Priestess. People, and there were many there at a Craft gathering for the very first time, soon left the strict bounds of the circle and stood where they could best see what was happening. I found myself a little to one side and became aware of a small band of medieval knights grouped quite near, carrying swords and shields and wearing plain, shining, cylindrical helmets. They were supporters of the young man who had been their leader in a former life. They applauded with the rest as the initiation was completed. The young man in his turn then assumed the role of initiator for his lady companion. As she knelt naked before him to make her declarations I found myself no longer in the woodland glade. I was there and she was there in the round tower chapel of a northern European castle 700 years ago. She knelt before the High Priest of a magical order. I stood to one side as an observer, not a full participant. When she removed her cloak for the most solemn part of the ritual, she was identical with the young woman among the 20th century trees. She was my ward, not a relative but entrusted to my care as I was a man of some authority in those parts. I too was a member of that same secret magical order. It was for us both a moment of great satisfaction and rejoicing. 

As I watched the scene changed. We were no longer in the round tower of the castle chapel but in a great hall. She had been charged with witchcraft. I was with others of similar authority sitting in judgement seats on a raised dais. At the end of the trial I was the last to announce my verdict. The end might have been foreseen. For political reasons, though my heart was against it, I was bound to find her guilty. She was taken away to a dungeon. Days later I saw her there, stripped of her fine robes, wearing only a dirty tattered shift and already suffering from the harsh conditions. I saw her then led through the throng of people crowded in the market place. She went up the steps onto the raised gibbet. She was to be executed. I could no longer bear to look. She had been very dear to me and I had failed to protect her when she most needed protection. I returned from the past to the present resolved to do all I could to help her whenever she needed assistance and to do my best to mitigate the grievous wrong I had wrought in our previous lives together. 

The woodland initiations moved to their festive close. We ate and drank and made merry. I drew the girl and her boy friend to one side and told them in turn what I had seen. At this the youth became very excited. 'Yes,' he said. 'I saw all that in one of my dreams. They hanged her. They broke her legs. She took two days to die.'

South-East Asia and the Siege of Troy

A year or two later a young woman came by invitation to one of our regular meetings when Amber was High Priestess. The young woman was probably in her late twenties or early thirties. Two of the regular men had met her recently and recommended she be admitted to a Full Moon esbat. I felt instant rapport with her. It was reciprocal. As we were preparing to leave late that night the two of us surreptitiously  agreed to meet soon and privately. She gave me her address and, as arranged, I went to see her a few days later. We went into an altered state of consciousness together and a series of shared south-east Asian incarnations pictured themselves. First we were two brothers, brown skinned, out hunting, standing in the fringe of the trees, sighting our prey. We were both quite naked. I remember that both our penes were long, thick and fully erect in the excitement of the chase and anticipation of the kill. At another time we were husband and wife. I was the wife. At yet another time we were brother and sister - I was the brother - ritual dancers at the royal court. On some evenings, the last dances in our programme were a naked duet. On some of these evenings the last dance ended with our making love. It was beautiful and natural. That makes four shared incarnations. There may possibly have been a fifth in this environment but I have no present recall of this.

Even more interesting is our mission to the battlefield at Troy. We are longer part of the brown skinned, south-east Asian scene. This time we are not even related. We belong to different races. She is a tremendously powerful adept, a Greek Priestess sent on assignment to Troy to affect the course of a particular episode during the siege. I was a high-ranking military officer, not Greek, possibly of Persian connections. I remember the head dress I wore. My task was to ensure her success and her safety. In effect I was both her aide-de-camp and protector. I am not aware there were any others in our entourage. We stood on a low hill overlooking the plain of Troy. She worked her magic. The result was as expected.

At a later time, though not so far distant in the same incarnation, we attempted to visit the training school where she had been a novice. I have memories of going there in a small open boat on the sea and into the mouth of a cave, then going on foot to the school. We had just reached the point of beginning to observe some of the young trainee priestesses when the Mistress of the Novices appeared. A gaunt, fierce, peremptory woman. Very angry at the invasion of a man into her sacred domain. I was ignominiously forced to leave immediately while my companion, in spite of her high status, was severely reprimanded in front of the young novices and compelled to remain behind. This act brought our altered state to an unexpectedly abrupt end. I was considerably chastened.

Buddhist China

In 1987 or thereabouts we were in China for the weekend. My youngest  daughter and her husband were living and working in Hong Kong at the time and this was one of the visits they specially arranged for us. In Guangdong (Canton) on the Pearl River, we took a taxi to a Buddhist temple. It reeked of history and tradition. I wandered off by myself and began to climb the lower levels of the pagoda. The building embraced me with memories of the past. I had been but a small boy when I was presented there. I remained for the rest of my life. Early on, it was one of my tasks to take food and drink to the meditating monks at the top of the tower. They each took seven days to ascend to the summit, stopping for prayer and meditation exercises at each storey on the way. I did not take so long to climb up with their sustenance. 

China did strange things to me - and this is nothing to do with previous incarnations. In one of the public parks, walking through and admiring the beds of cultivated plants, I found myself literally transfixed. The earth's magnetism at that point was so intense it was several long seconds before I was able to move on and catch up with the others.

European courtesan

It may have been in France at one of the royal and aristocratic establishments. It certainly feels in retrospect like being in classical French surroundings with fine clothing, high dressed white wigs for the women, the stink of unwashed bodies contrasting with the sparkle of delectable jewellery and the luxurious furnishings. I was a belle de luxe, a high class, very expensive courtesan, available only to the highest bidder or the highest in rank and even so very much in demand. I cannot place the century or the possible location, but that life is recent enough for me still, when I drift back, to feel once again, how exquisite can be the sensation for the woman of deep penetration by the male organ during sexual intercourse. 

Was this my antepenultimate incarnation in this series? No, I think not. There is a niggling feeling of something as yet unrecalled in between.

Europe in the Great War which began in 1914

Only as I approached my seventieth birthday with thoughts of preparing for my next incarnation did I have this recollection of what was my last life before the present one. 

Many of the details remain unclear. The nature of my death decided that. I was killed in the fighting on the Western Front. Even now I am not completely certain which side I was on, but as I meditate on the circumstances it feels more and more likely that I was a Prussian officer of aristocratic family. A short life. Part of the terrible waste of the future that occurred in those years of mostly unproductive trench warfare.

There is just an inkling that my hobby had been photography. And that, too, connects with part of my present life. So now is the place to give some account of how the system can work. My own experience.

London 1927 and onwards

I chose my parents well from those families able to provide the background into which I should be born early in the last month of the year. My birth chart with the Sun in Sagittarius associates long distance travel on both the physical and mental planes. Both have been amply fulfilled thanks to the devoted care of both my mother and father, their mothers, and various of their brothers, sisters and cousins - as well as some outstanding teachers whom I can never sufficiently acknowledge.

Although we went Sunday by Sunday to the Congregationalist chapel at the end of the street, my parents were also Spiritualists, a belief and a practice into which I was introduced while still at school. There were remarkable instances of physical phenomena and more than one series of transcendent trance addresses given by guides through the voice of my mother in deep trance. This gave me the opportunity of continuing the involvement with Spiritualism which had begun in the 19th century life I have already mentioned.

And I had a another chance to fulfil my dreams of becoming a concert pianist.

My mother had been trained for opera. Her teacher had recommended, as was fashionable at the time, the removal of her tonsils. The result of this was a voice quite unsuited for opera but one of a singing quality able to take good part in the many family gatherings round a piano where nearly all the relatives sang while I played their accompaniments. One of my earliest memories is of sitting at Auntie Lilla's piano in Caerphilly, blissfully playing away and enjoying the sounds I enticed from the instrument. I do not claim I made music in the accepted sense of the term but, as I sat on the music stool (I was wearing hand knitted brown knickerbockers as I remember) it felt the most natural thing in the world for me to play. Another link with the 19th century German life.

I began to have regular lessons soon after that. My mother was my first teacher. When I was four years old we both played a piano duet at the command of Her Royal Highness The Princess Louise at a meeting of the Gordon League in the basement hall of the WhitfieldTabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road. When the Princess came again a year later (she was the Patron of the organisation) she commended me to play again. This time I played a short solo piece by Mozart and sat there on the platform for a while talking to this grand lady.

On my mother's side, there was Jewish blood from her grandmother who had 'married out' and so been disinherited. The names of Rothschild and Von Joel were often mentioned by my maternal grandmother, who lived in the next house to us. This was the distant family connection we had moved away from. Is it too fanciful to feel that this German element was also something to do with my musical life in Germany? A few Jewish or Yiddish words were an everyday part of our family vocabulary. They came in useful years later when I taught in a Grammar School where half the boys were Jewish and one of those in the first form swore at me with a word I recognised - much to his surprise and subsequent discomfiture.

One of my grandmother's sisters served two terms of three months imprisonment in Holloway Gaol for 'reading the cards'. How daintily are these fine webs spun.

And the hobby of photography? Yes, it is there too. When I was still an Elementary School pupil I asked for and received a Kodak Hawkeye 620 Major box camera for an annual prize. Some prints from a day trip to Weston-Super-Mare were later displayed in a glass frame on the wall of the upper corridor. Since then I have climbed the Leica ladder and worked for a short while as a professional photo journalist.

One final link. This one, speculatively, with my penultimate incarnation. I was one of those called up for peacetime National Service once I had passed the examinations for my Associate Diploma at the Royal College of Organists. It felt no more than I expected, and I write this with no false pride or modesty, when I was selected for officer training and subsequently received the royal commission. When I last heard of it I was still a Class Z reservist, though I doubt it now has any positive relevance.

There is a codicil to this. On the day I was demobilised I examined my prospects for the future. If I aimed to be a first-class pianist, I would need to practice for four hours a day. Then I thought again. There were hundreds of first-class pianists. Was I content to be one of them? Certainly not. Well then, to be better than a first-class pianist I would need to practise for six hours a day. Did I see myself practising the piano for six hours a day? No, I did not. It was time to take another decision. I went up to Oxford where I was awarded a College Organ Scholarship. To my practical work I added a certain expertise in what would now be called musicology. In later years, when I was based in Australia, I had the good fortune to branch out into ethnomusicology without, be it said, losing any of my performing or general musicological abilities. 

To sum up then .. ..

The revelation of episodes in a former life 700 years ago on the mainland of Europe was an instant process where I was moved back in time and space during a fairly short part of one evening. Moreover, there was instant confirmation of the execution from an independent source.

The episode in the Chinese pagoda is similar in that this was another instant revelation, a real experience of déja-vue. I had lived in this place before, but the time scale was absent.

The collective recall of a sequence of incarnations with the person concerned is the only instance I have experienced of deliberately seeking knowledge of former lives during the course of a 'working' for that purpose. The South-East Asian vignettes gave an approximate idea of the place, though I am not able to be more precise. Again the time scale is completely lacking except that I have usually assumed they preceded the visit to the Siege of Troy and its aftermath in the novices' school. This is not necessarily so.

Information about my life as a Franciscan friar was channelled. There is a historical terminus antequem non but no more than that while only the quality of the light leads me to conclude that I was in Italy at the time.

So we come to the European courtesan, which relies on a visual impression with colour but no sound, and the Time before Last which became apparent in parallel with my thoughts about the final years to come of this incarnation and the preparations I should make for the next.

Here then is a possible sequence of past lives - those I am aware of. There are certainly others as yet unexplored.

South-East Asia (in company with a 20th century acquaintance)

the Siege of Troy (including my South-East Asian relative)

Buddhist China (could this have been before Troy?)

13th century in Northern Europe (also including a 20th century friend)

Franciscan (in Italy?)

European courtesan

music in 19th century Europe

Europe in the Great War which began in 1914

London 1927 onwards

As for next time - I think I may be going back to China again. There was once in the past a future projection of myself as a medical doctor but this has been supplanted by a very different scenario. I am now looking well into the future, probably involving a long stay on another plane of consciousness to prepare me for the work that must be done. I shall not have yet another chance of turning into a concert pianist. I consciously abandoned that desire at the end of my military service. Instead I may carry with me skills I have learned in communication - a handful of European languages and no small ability in computing as well as writing, teaching and public speaking. I expect to be used at a high level in something to do with World Government. I hope that at the time of transition through the Waters I am able to carry with me the knowledge of the past and of the lessons of the life which began here more than seventy years ago.

word total 3904

first version 9 & 10 december 1999

postscript :: not long after writing the above I became aware of another incarnation, one that fits very snugly between the end of the 19th century German venture and the beginning of the Great War episode. It involves participation in one of the magical orders and I’m not free to say any more than that at the present time.

francis, oxford, october 2014