SYLVAN'S STORY...

Many years later, in primary school, the schoolboys were taken to a place the teacher called the catacombs while the girls enjoyed a school picnic. It was full of bones and skulls that used to be people. Some were on stone stands or set in niches in the wall. It was one of those skulls on a stone shelf that caught my eye. I felt that I needed a closer look, and the rest of the group had gone on ahead, so I ducked under the rope beside the path and stared into the skull's eyes. My forehead felt warm, but not like before, I started to see things in my mind like dreaming, but not dreaming. I saw a frightened young boy, surrounded by older men. he was wearing a robe that looked a bit like a sack tied at the waist. A man tied a woven wood basket-like holder with a wooden handle on the bottom to the boy's hand and lashed it into a place so it couldn't be dropped. Then a small oil-soaked bundle of grass and twigs was placed in the basket and lit. The men all cheered and yelled for the boy to start running out across a field. The fierce flames dripped burning oil onto the boy's arm, and he screamed as he ran onward across that field in the direction of a group of round, grass-roofed huts. Standing in front of the huts was a group of women, cheering and beckoning him on, yet not one ventured out to help the boy. His arm was soon engulfed in flames, the blackened bones of his fingers now indistinguishable from that of the basket. Then he reached the women who, with great reverence, embraced him wrapping him in a hide blanket. The last thing I recall was hearing the calls and cheers of the men in the distance as everything went black. My teacher was asking "is everything ok?" I nodded without speaking. Apparently, my teacher heard me call out and found me having a seizure of some sort on the stone floor. I had never had a seizure in my life before, nor since, but a bizarre realisation hit me like a ton of bricks … I remember that moment! I was looking at my own skull from long, long ago … I saw ME running, desperately, urgently needing to reach the other side of the field. Why? I didn't know. I also never called out to my teacher!

I missed the old ways and 'magic' of England when my family moved to Australia. I even ran away as a troubled adolescent in some vain attempt to try and get back to my 'homeland' again. When I got older and increasingly troublesome from my parent's perspective, I was pressured into joining the army. I knew I was never meant to be a soldier and soon left again. I had 'shamed' my family by walking out of the army (a.w.o.l.), I could never tell my parents the real reason why I left, and, likewise, was unable to ask my family for help when in my deepest need; a need to simply be held like that burning boy was. My family wasn't that sort of family, so I just bottled myself up instead. I stopped using the family name as it no longer seemed to apply to me, and became FREEDOM, the hippy wanderer. I spent many years not settling anywhere, trying to escape the tragic depths of despair of my untold past experiences. But in amongst those tragedies, were a few profound moments of connection to my true self. Those moments included spending over a month naked, alone in a rainforest, thinking that I was there to surrender my life to the Great Mother. But instead, she helped me to realise that I was NOT there to die. That had already happened years earlier. The young man who entered the forest was simply there to learn how to live again! Similarly, in the mid-1990's, I was lying in a hospital bed dying of advanced non-Hodgkins's lymphoma. But again, I knew I wasn't there to 'die', and quite enjoyed the hospital attention and regular meals. But then I actually DID die in the hospital (twice) but chose not to stay that way. However, it was during the first of the 'NDE's' that I left my body and travelled to another place, another mist-filled forest that revealed my path to One-Self (my Godself), and what I needed to do to enter and follow my path.

I initially believed myself to have finally slipped over into the realm of madness, but then looked back at those experiences and, firstly, came to the realisation that I/we don't actually NEED physical bodies in order to see, hear, and feel things. I still had those abilities despite being separate from my body and sensory organs. Then I also saw the repeating pattern of spiritual experiences I had been having for over 40 years; the forest, the Great Mother, the stories and visions that lingered in my head from sources not of my own. When I lived in the rainforest for a month or so, language became unimportant, and even my thoughts were no longer an endless stream of babbling words and sentences in my brain. Thinking as a language-based process is both overrated and NOT our natural mode of thought at all! What we now call our 'subconscious mind' is actually the TRUE mind of dreams, visions, and insight. As such, from that moment on, I began to practice lucid dreaming and meditation as a means of direct communion with both 'One-self' and that which exists beyond the lies inherent to the falsities of a worldly existence.

It has taken me many more years to integrate my spiritual experiences, with the aid and support of my devoted wife Angela, who has also chosen to leave her worldly-self behind in order to return to God when called. But it is only through our shared experiences together that I have now found myself able to finally release my own ego/wordly-self, and be-come the true ONE-SELF that I was intended to be. To be-come SYLVAN of the Wood, and one with the hidden MYST-stories of the forest Mother. I AM SYLVAN MYST!

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Sylvan