2012 & ARNOS VALE CEMETERY

Photograph by Anna Binning

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Welcome. I wish everyone who reads this message a very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2012.

Sometime around 2006/2007 I was attending a series of lectures in Bristol that were focused around new ideas in quantum physics and their spiritual and philosophical implications. The lectures were called New Dimensions. Once a month on a Sunday there was a different speaker who would share ideas and experiences and then try and sell a book or two at the end.  I remember the lectures ranging from the captivating to the almost downright foolish as far as I was concerned . Depending on, of course, who the lecturer was each week. I attended most times with my old friend Annie Smith and we always seemed to agree with each other about who and who did not have something going on. So I suppose I'm trying to say that it wasn't just my prejudices at work here!


I was reflecting recently on one of these lectures and would like to share with you some thoughts on it as we move into this New Year of 2012. I'm sorry to say the name of this particular lecturer escapes me but maybe that's a good thing as will be revealed as you read on. What I do remember about this man was his dark green corduroy trousers, his shiny brown shoes and his matching rustic jumper with a paisley cravate poking out from underneath its crew neck. By my reckoning he was in his mid to late fifties with crumbling good looks and a full head of black and mildly dishevelled hair. He spoke with a clear, quiet and clipped upper class accent and was gifted with a not inconsiderable presence as he delivered his talk. As I recall the start of the lecture was the usual kind of stuff myself and Annie had heard before and that's probably why I can remember his appearance. However I started to listen a little more intently as he went on to describe that over recent years the faculty of clairvoyance had become more and more the means by which he understood and explored the world and that he'd been receiving 'messages' of an intuitive nature for some time. He claimed his 'messages' had proved to be sound and he gave us a number of fascinating examples of how his intuitions had furthered his research and his career and the synchronous events surrounding their manifestation. He cited other examples of leaps forward in science that had eminated from the intuitive faculty of other scientists throughout history. It was a slight departure from many of the other talks I had heard.  There was something of what he said that certainly rang true in me.  However he then went on to drop the bombshell that according to this very same intuitive guidance by the year 2012 the entire earth was going to be underwater apart from some parts of Greenland. He delivered this news with an astounding clarity and  certainty. Without any kind of hysteria and in the most reasonable manner you can imagine. I have to say that not for one moment was I persuaded by him but his talk did begin for me a reverie that has tumbled on ( well on and off) ever since.

His talk continued into questions from the audience and he was sticking to his revelation without compromise. It was quite incredible how the attendees probed him for more information and on receiving their replies how many people thanked him for his apocalyptic prophesies. He became visibly annoyed by even the mildest of challenges and the truth was nobody really challenged him anyway. By this point I had myself become quite irritated by the guy and his dark certainty in himself. I had something I wanted to say but didn't have the courage to stand up in the room of probably a hundred people (more about that later). Then the most astonishing episode of the whole encounter. At the end of the talk he said that he was putting together a cartel of people whose aim he suggested should be to sell their properties in England and pool their money to buy land in Greenland where they would be safe when the floods came. Where they would build accommodation and start a communal life together.  If anyone was interested would they please come and see him immediately afterwards. The people who had put on the talk then ended the afternoon and in thier summary were falling over themselves in their praise of his lecture. How honoured they were....how thankful. A queue of about twenty to thirty  formed to find out more about his plan and I was absolutely amazed to see this. There was a shocked but excited atmosphere in the room. As I left I saw the man taking phone numbers and addresses and a few weeks later, after asking a few questions, I was able to discover that he had a group of about forty people who were meeting regularly in Bristol in an attempt to further this plan.

That was five or six years ago now. Why am I telling this story. Well as we move into 2012 and there is no sign of a flood I wonder about this man and his group and where they are now. I don't really know if he had formed other groups in cities around England as my information about  him came from my friend Jenny who just happened to partly know a woman in his Bristol group........so what I found out about them wasn't altogether in depth...... However I do clearly recall the afternoon of the lecture and some of the thoughts it inspired within me. Why did so many people feel persuaded by what this man had to say .... to the point where they were seriously considering selling everything they owned to follow him. Eventually almost half the room of people who attended that day. I have wondered about that. He did have a certain amount of charisma and a BBC 1940's accent and I suppose to some people that may have given him a certain credulity and authority. He mixed in scientific fact with what he was saying and I have no doubt that he had experienced these intuitive messages he spoke about in such depth. He was one hundred percent convinced of his information and I suppose that gave his talk a measured quality that may have been quite intoxicating and persuasive in its own way.  Having said that I don't think all his qualities are in themselves a sufficient explanation. 2012 was still far enough away to be holding some kind of mystery then..... especially after all the 2012 hype that we've all probably heard of in one form or another over recent years and it was at its height back then but I don't think that alone is the reason either. I also think it would be too easy to say that the people who queued up were just stupid. My impressions were that the people who attended this lecture and many of the previous lectures were not stupid at all. However I do believe that perhaps they were a bit frightened by what had been said. But why ?

This man had touched a vague feeling already present within them. This predominately middle class, middle aged audience. He had touched an intuitive feeling within many of them that something was wrong in this world, that something was wrong in their lives, that something needed to change and that something was maybe even coming to take away everything they knew because it couldn't go on like this. This intuition within them had been aroused and brought to the surface by his message. An intuitive feeling within them that hitherto finding no real focus or expression had finally found some outlet through this man and he was surfing on the waves of the emotion he had tapped into with his prophesy. The shared experience of that feeling manifesting in a group of like minded individuals and the intensity it generated within the room as he spoke was indeed tangible. There is a quiet desperation in so many of the lives of people I know. Something that has to be set aside each day as we get on with all the practical preoccupations that make up our days. We all know we need to be 'in the moment' and we can all do a good talk on advising each other...but knowing that and preaching it doesn't really seem to sort out the ominous feeling completely. I'm not trying to say that everyone has these feelings. I also know people who say they are quite happy with the way everything is... and that they don't really experience an enigmatic uneasiness that moves in and out of their lives.... but if you are like me you'll know what I'm talking about. This man had spoken to that deeper feeling in us and given it  a simplistic as well as befittingly catastrophic explanation.... and a course of positive action to sort it out. So I think I know in part why they went for it even though his words did not resonate with me.

I know for sure that I'm in no position to judge those people who were willing to give up their lives as they knew them to follow some posh guy to a cold land. I understand, I believe, what they were feeling and why they joined that long line to Greenland. How his vaguely old testament prophesies in new clothes held such power that day. I can think of all sorts of reasons why it is uncomfortable to lead the lives we are leading today. We all know what they are ! Living with this unease and the plain injustices of our world and the sense of powerlessness it engenders has left many of us vulnerable to all sorts of explanations from all sorts of people who claim to possess simplistic answers to why we feel this way and what we need to do about it. If I could say something myself to the people in that queue ( and in many ways I am part of that line myself)  it would be this... that I commiserate in your sense that something needs to change...but how ?... and I support you in that...and I sympathise with the fear that deep down most of us know much of what we have invested in throughout our lives that has come through the programming of our society is dust and will be swept away.... and with it a large part of what we know as ourselves.....and I can sympathise with a yearning for some other way of living that has always made its presence known to me and yet has not spoken clearly enough to me about what to actually do......and I also feel that unease that there is something kind of fraudulent in the way we live today......... but I would also say this..... that I believe to understand ourselves more clearly we must seek our authority from within ourselves....that we must not turn away from the difficult work of unraveling our own intuitions by handing over these difficulties to any so called (in this case) Lecturer.... offering simple explanations that feel that they might be right just because we hold some truth within us that is not 'catered for' by the rest of the world as we know it today. We must nurture, develop and understand our own intuitions however difficult that might be. We must not allow simplistic explanations to replace our own inner work.... however comforting the sense of the communities they are able to bring about....  and their promise of release from the sense of our isolation ...even though it might be easier to follow others because it relieves the sometimes difficult and unchartered work of bringing into consciousness our own road forward....... I believe we must think about setting such comforts aside as they arise and probably proliferate in the coming years....In favour of sticking to the more difficult task of understanding out true selves through our own individual potentials....It is in this way we will come together as unique individuals who are true to themselves....

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Noah and The Flood

I would also like to share some thoughts with you about the nature of this man's so called intuition and his prophesy. Ever since I was a child all sorts of people have been telling me ' You're living in a dream world Patrick'. Teachers, pupils, friends and acquaintances even my own family. I suppose I'll just have to take their word for it. It doesn't feel like a dream to me. Even up to this present day Stew Jackson who produced The Mad Straight Road said to me....... in a very good natured way after we got to know each other,  "I've seen you over the years walking through Bristol. You are either wearing headphones or you're not... but in either case you are walking through a totally different world that anyone else. You're living in your own separate universe man. " .... and then he started laughing. To be honest I quite liked it when I heard him saying that because I thought it sounded quite cool, but it also got me thinking.

Ir's true to say I'm probably closer to the world of the imagination than I am to the world of practical considerations and although that's good for songwriting it can also be quite troublesome.  I easily drift away from the world and its demands.... and that has got me in a lot of trouble as anyone who knows me well can tell you. However one advantage of this state I naturally inhabit is that it allows me to talk, I feel, with some authority about the world of intuition.Throughout my life I have been receiving messages, similar in some ways, to the ones this lecturer was talking about. For example these days when I sit to practice meditation ( which I try to do each day and have done for years) from time to time I will see in my minds eye fantastically clear visions. I always know when these visions are coming as the whole atmosphere in the room changes and often there is a tingling throughout my body that cannot be mistaken.. These visions usually follow some kind of a narrative form and I believe they somehow change me or that they are the expression of some inner change within me... They are a special kind of poetry... I have seen so many archetypal images and otherwise flash through my consciousness and I have been awed and delighted in watching them play out before my eyes. Seeing the relationships between them change and develop. I truly consider them to be one of the most important enduring experiences of my life. I have seen many, many of these visions throughout the years. For the last ten years or so I have been writing them down and they are very precious to me.  For the sake of argument lets just say that one of these visions was of seeing the whole world flooded underwater and seeing the cities being destroyed.....and being shown that there was a small part of Greenland that was left safe. (This would be a very simple vision...To be honest the sort I saw as a child...the plain truth is the visions I see these days are far, far more complex than this..) Anyway when you are experiencing a vision like this..... whether it is complex or not.... it feels like it is really happening.. It is an incredible experience.....There is an inner knowing about its truth that is unshakeable. When the vision subsides  I am left with the memory of the vision to ponder its meaning.... However its meaning is poetic...It is a metaphor for me to contemplate ....It is not really telling me that the earth is going to be flooded....It is showing me something about myself and my relation to the world.. to people...to myself...to the universe and to the spirit of the universe ....a deeper truth.... This is what I believe happened to this lecturer. He saw his vision he witnessed the intensity of the experience but through lack of understanding he thought of it as prose rather than poetry, He had that public school confidence in himself and he set out to preach that his vision was a prophesy to save the world. The ego loves that kind of thing........ This is what I wanted to get up in that lecture hall and say that day. I realised most clearly upon that day the man before me may well have been a credible scientist, but he was totally inexperienced in the ways of the spirit. The spirit is a poet not a scientist and he had completely misunderstood that. He spoke about clairvoyance but knew nothing of its ways. How often has that happened. The spirit speaks in poetry through somebody in the form of a vision and then it is proved by others to not really be true. ( The metaphor is of course real but it is there to be contemplated..it points to a deeper truth ) This man was a strange combination of the two. He had just encountered his own gift of poetic intuition but he was trying to prove its imagery to be 'scientifically' real in the sense of the world we all inhabit together....not just the world as it exists inside him... He was trying to drag others into his own metaphor and succeeding. Maybe getting everyone to go along with him would make him feel like his vision was more real...or that he was more important himself as a person in the world......So much misunderstanding seems to come about from this kind of confusion as far as I can see. Perhaps more and more people will develop these kinds of gifts as time goes on ... perhaps there are many already who've been experiencing them for years and just quietly contemplating them on their own. We only use a small part of our brain right now and these qualities perhaps reside in these as yet unused parts.... But I've noticed more and more of these so called claivoyant people these days trying to drag others into their own metaphors.... selling their books and offering to the rest of us advice from their guides.. these people often strike me as inexperienced like our friend the lecturer...they have a naive self confidence and often very simple explanations of the world... Obviously I would be happy to see a world drawn towards a more spiritual or visionary way of living ..... but there seems to be a lot of people out there who are advocating that who don't know what they are really talking about...... and are kind of giving the rest of us a bad name....and by a kind of association of us being in the same general philosophical area....  making us look a bit uncool :-)

Id like to finish this particular piece of writing by inviting all of you who can make it to a concert I am performing on Saturday 4th February in the chapel at Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol. Doors to the facilities open at 7.30- p.m. where you can get a drink and also find out more about Arnos Vale in the museum below the bar which is free entry. At around 8 O'Clock I will be ringing the bell that hangs high in the bell tower to welcome everyone into the chapel where the performance will begin shortly afterwards.

This will be my first concert of the year. I feel very blessed to have been allowed the chance to play in Arnos Vale chapel. It is a listed building and an extremely inspiring place with a beautiful atmosphere. I'm really excited to be able to play music in such unique surroundings......  A lot of work has gone on in recent years to renovate Arnos Vale and turn it back into the sacred place it once was before it became abandoned and very overgrown not so long ago....

Thankfully it is going to be very warm in the chapel as they have recently installed great central heating. I've been there to check it out.

There are 86 seats available for this special concert. The promoter of the concert is selling the tickets through The Bristol Ticket Office. So I will give you a link to the site where you can buy your seats..


http://bristolticketshop.co.uk/


I will be playing solo on the night. Some new songs never before performed in this country as well as songs from throughout my 20 year career. Also for the first time in my life I will be playing some of the songs on the piano ..That is a big thing for me so I'd better get practicing. I've always been too nervous to do this before as I am self taught on the piano ..... I'm so happy I finally got it together to do this before I end up in Arnos Vale or somewhere like it myself one day :-).....

I really hope you can come..I'm hoping every seat will go so please order quickly if you want to join in.

With Love to You all

Patrick xxx