Adding brightness to Brightwalton

 

The EEG racing into autumn action near Newbury

 

 

 

This was a weekend that pitched the psychic alongside the scientific.  It had something for everyone, right across the EEG spectrum - and with over 50 people turning up to an event yet again, we must be doing something right!  

 

Your friendly neighbourhood spirit-whisperer

 

Day 1 started with a talk by local radio presenter and experienced psychic, Paul Devlin.  Paul is someone who cringes at the antics of many in the media ghost-hunting fraternity.  Indeed, the very essence of his approach is the antithesis of the music hall mysterions - it is to be respectful of those he is contacting, and to be respectful of the forces at work that enable him to operate.  

 

Paul’s portfolio of practical experience and personal involvement, backed up by a series of remarkable home video sequences, showing members of his team in action, had the assembled dowsers enrapt.  His style as a raconteur may be understated, but he is quietly passionate practitioner.  He believes deeply in the worth of his work, and is dismissive of those who dabble in a field that requires both expertise and empathy.  Much of his demand, for which the only shop window is his radio slot, is generated by the use and misuse of the Ouija Board - and he is aghast that so many people regard communing with the spirit world as just a bit of fun on a Saturday night, after a few beers.  All too often, he is called in to pick up the pieces.  His analogy for anyone with a burning desire to enter the catacombs of consciousness is that you don’t just get in a car and drive off down the road.  You learn the basics first, and only when you get to a certain level of proficiency do you let yourself loose into the world of hard knocks and sharp edges.  So it should be, especially when dealing with the other side of the veil.  

 

Many of Paul’s case histories made fact seem stranger than fantasy.  His own introduction to the field - after talking to an old acquaintance on the bus for some time, only to find out subsequently that the person in question had passed over some years previously - was powerfully prescient of the journey he was about to undertake.

 

Paul is never short of work, to the extent that his wife tries to encourage him to spend an evening at home occasionally!  Yet, despite the evident demand, he regards his ability to make good the subtle, strange and deeply disturbing rifts in reality as a gift - and he chooses not to charge for his services.  He is strongly opposed to celebrity ghost-busters, who make a quick buck out of the torment of lost souls.   I didn’t think he would be the sort to make it as a merchant banker.

 

Much of his active time is spent moving spirits on - retuning them to their own time and space.  All too often, he finds that portals have been opened unwisely, allowing spirits to pass into the here and now - and he is often obliged to invest the hours of darkness persuading them to return to their own domain.  

 

Many of his experiences also relate to poltergeist activity, which is a phenomenon predominantly associated with the turbulent energy that can sometimes engulf teenaged girls.  Much of the spirit world, as experienced by many people in everyday situations, is populated by entities who have merely missed their opportunity to pass over.   However, Paul also has to come to terms with a smaller proportion of angry spirits - entities that are keen to wreak as much havoc as possible.  This is where he would really earn his corn.  As it is, he just accepts the quiet satisfaction of a job well done, and has another confidential anecdote to discuss on his radio programme.

 

This was a very well received presentation, delivered in an engaging, unpretentious, down-home style.  The flurry of questions afterwards, which had to be curtailed by AIW to keep the show on the road, showed that even those who already had a good grounding in the subject were clearly impressed.  For those of us who manage such issues at arms length, it was something of a revelation.  An excellent start to an eventful weekend.

 

Two Interludes bringing Tidings of Great Joy

 

Following Paul’s measured and necessarily intense material, we had two quick-fire cameo performances, which changed the mood completely in time for lunch. 

 

Nigel Twinn opened this part of the proceedings by describing his assisted biography of Billy Gawn, Beyond the Far Horizon.  He was obliged to summarise several decades of concentrated effort and dedicated discovery by the EEG’s esteemed founder in little more than ten minutes.   It was not a feat he will want to attempt too often!

 

He was followed by a similar verbal foreword from Gary Biltcliffe.  Gary had spent the previous umpteen years telling us that his long-awaited book, describing the Elen/Bellinus Line (a north-south equivalent of Hamish Miller’s Mary/Michael matrix) was almost complete.  Gary’s epic and elegant tome, The Spine of Albion, is indeed finally out in print - and well worth the wait.  I have the feeling that Mr Miller himself would have been proud of the finished product.

 

Betta Builda Sacred Space

 

The next presentation came from a very different, and very distant, region of the EEG’s cosmos.  Francis Lickerish (husband of EEG Committee member Helen), one time mid-ranking rocker with the band ‘The Enid’, lute player extraordinaire and professional addiction counsellor was called upon to talk about another of his specialist subjects - sacred space.  

 

In EEG circles, one of the hottest topics is the way in which dowsing enables the seriously non-physical - and often barely describable - to be manifest, with just a little assistance from the practitioner, into the everyday world.  Both Billy Gawn and Hamish Miller have shown how features and templates at the very edge of awareness can be brought into a reality you can hit with a paintbrush, through the application of dowsing.   Following an excellent introduction by Francis, laced with endearing good humour, we were persuade to do much the same - albeit with carefully erected constructions in bamboo.

 

Francis’s line of reasoning is that we are all subtly affected by the proportionality of the objects and buildings that surround us.  Throughout history, people have used everything from alchemy to mathematics, ritual dancing to gothic architecture to attempt to describe and to capture the powerful entanglement of ratios, relationships and reality.  Francis was able to explain that we are all aware of this interplay, and that we use it all the time to make sense of the workaday world we inhabit. 

 

Sacred geometry can be both complex and profound, but it can also be highly accessible and great fun - if it is approached the right way.  The afternoon’s task, organised by AIW, was to create physical shapes, incorporating certain inherent numerical and meta-numerical features.  In other words, we were going to build pyramids, cubes and oblongs out of beanpoles and gaffer tape. 

 

Any passing alien might have been forgiven for mistaking our efforts to be a hideous hybrid of Blue Peter meets Bob the Builder - but it worked.  By the end of the day we had a series of geometrically derived cane structures.  The consensus was that the space inside each of them felt different, one from another.  We had taken something that could only be described in formulae containing numbers that refuse to be whole, and converted it into temporary physical spaces that captured an essence of perceived reality.  Alchemy or what?

 

We had created shapes that were archetypes of their kind.  Now, I’m sure that those that were built more accurately, and more precisely incorporated the required proportions, worked better than some of those that were rougher and readier, but most participants felt that each of the skeletal spaces had a sense of something significant.  Job done.

 

Sunday’s Boy is full of - er - Labyrinths

 

Carrying on the theme of creating places and spaces that affect us all subtly, Bill Holding had two thirds of Day 2 to show us that a two-dimensional representation of an essentially circular shape can create a sensible sensation - and one that was just as tangible in the open air, as our indoor wickerwork wonders had been the day before.

 

Labyrinths have been used throughout history, and probably well before it, to create space that can be used to heal, to meditate and to resolve personal and corporate concerns.  Labyrinths have turned up at Sumerian sites, Egyptian excavations and mediaeval manor gardens - and they are very much back in fashion in the 21st century.  The Cathedral at Chartres has one.  There was one in Babylon, which was regarded as one of the wonders of the known world in its day - and of course there was the one in Crete that was the lair of the mythical Minotaur.  Whether civilizations in times gone by knocked a few up on a Sunday afternoon along the boundary of the local cricket pitch is not recorded - but it is now.

 

Bill started with an explanation of the constituent features of a true labyrinth, and he talked us through the creation of a shape - at least on paper - which would enable the centre (the goal) to have the desired quality of energy.  Labyrinths come in various complexities and all sizes, from the 11-circuit giants that have the best part of a mile of walkway, to the pocket sized finger-labyrinth that you can have on a folded bit of paper, or even as a phone app.

 

Working out how to move from the seed of a design to the fully developed pattern took a little concentration but, with a little help from those who had constructed one before, most of us managed it.  What was new to me was that in addition to the classic three, seven and eleven ring formats, there are now new seed patterns with planetary and cosmic names.  These produce enhanced swirling shapes, the goals of which feel - well - different.

 

Out in the Berkshire countryside, and just beyond the mown outfield of Brightwalton CC, we constructed seven assorted labyrinths, each seemingly with its own ambience and its own ‘personality’.  Again, those shapes that were laid out more accurately doubtless had a stronger energetic effect, but the presence in many of Sunday’s al fresco offerings was all-but touchable, and each was certainly quite distinct.

 

On the evidence of this weekend, it appears to be perfectly possible - given a soupcon of preparation and a modicum of concentration - to create inter-active shapes using household materials that can beneficially affect the awareness of a person using them with intent.   How close is that to realising the virtual bridge between the parallel worlds of the seen and the unseen?

 

Many thanks, as ever, to Mr & Mrs AIW for arranging this most enjoyable event, to Trish and Clive Essery for a much-needed and much-appreciated supper and to David Gardner for essential liaison with the local community.

 

As a former local lad myself, I felt we had helped to put a bit of the New back in Newbury.

 

Nigel Twinn

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