The Rabbit on the Roof: HUMANITY'S SPIRITUAL LIFE

By Norman Ivory

Lucretius, the Roman philosopher and poet, expounded in his writings on the idea that the by-product of religion is fear of all that is mysterious in life and philosophy. In The Rabbit on the Roof, author Norman Ivory shows that nearly all of what is considered to be mystical or inexplicable in the areas of the mind and psychic phe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781947355033

Norman Ivory

My name is Norman Ivory. I was born in England in a small village near to the town of Hemel Hempstead in 1940 during the second world war... When I was very young my father was in North Africa in the Army. Times were tough and my young mother had barely enough to provide food for my younger sister and me. When my Dad returned from the end of the war he could not get a 'good' job so things continued difficult. Later he worked at a paper mill as a beater man, a shift work job but reasonably well paid so life gradually because easier. My parents were heavily involved in the local Baptist Church and I spent much time every week at Christian Church functions. Much was made and taught from the Bible which I came to know fairly well. I took County wide scripture exams each year. All of this lead me to learn a lot about religion but to gradually reject Christianity as illogical, cruel, and dogmatically irrelevant. At eleven having received a scholarship. I went to the Grammar School in Hemel Hempstead and did only moderately well. At sixteen I left school and worked in an office of a large local firm of paper converters. I learned a great deal in the work but it was a very slow promotion pathway. I met my first wife at the company and we had two children. In 1969 I became interested in Spiritualism/ Here was a belief system based on the facts revealed through medium-ship. This I could investigate and find something solid to accept.as, at least relevant to truth. I attended a home circle and began quickly to develop as a medium... In 1972 I and my family emigrated to go to a job for the same company in Sydney Australia. We re-established in Sydney and later to the west in Penrith NSW...My work progressed and I was soon Production Manager. My marriage deteriorated and divorce followed in 1980. A year later I met and later married Lynette my present wife of 38 years. My work progressed through a number of management posts at different companies and Lynette and I both retired in 2010. In 1979 I again took up the development of my spiritual activities and as a medium was involved in the organizing and leadership of Spiritualist Church. Lynette and I both acting as mediums took spiritualist services in churches all over Sydney and also NSW. We conducted many classes in the development of psychic abilities and spirit healing.at Black Town and Seven Hills to the west of Sydney. Later in 1999 we moved to Canberra and soon became once more involved in the spiritualist church. Altogether the work in spiritualism has covered 50 years. I have acted as Minister for the churches both in Sydney and Canberra and have done thousands of spiritual and psychic readings for many. During the whole of the spiritual work I have experienced, I read about and learned about numerous facets of spirituality and my book The Rabbit on the Roof endeavors to bring some of that knowledge to the readers. I have tried to approach the psychic and spiritual in solid understandable ways and endeavored to leave out orthodox dogma and the mysterious which are mostly untrue. Through my industrial work and my spiritual pathway I have met a great many people. I have helped many people and learned from them much about life and spiritual progress. I believe in Humanity and the destiny of all people to eventually progress spiritually and in due course gain mastery and enlightenment both as individual spirits and as the race of Humanity and all sentient beings.

Book preview

Contents 

Acknowledgement

Preface

Introduction

PART 1   The Physical Life Of Man

1   Humanity’s Multilevel Existence

•    The Spirit

•    The Soul

•    The Mind

•    The Causal Body

•    The Astral Body

•    The Etheric Body

•    The Silver Cord

•    The Physical Body

2   Physical Experience

•    Death of the Physical Body

•    Reincarnation

•    Relationships and Karma

•    Sleep

•    Fatigue

•    Autism

•    Physical Illnesses

•    Down’s Syndrome

•    Brain Damage

•    Genius

3   The Mind

• The Higher Mind or Superconscious

• The Subconscious or Unconscious Mind

•    The Conscious Mind

•    The Animal Mind or Ego

4   Mental Experience

•    Telepathy

•    Communication

•    Dreams

•   Body Language

•   Observation of and Communication with Nature and Animals

•    Grief

•    Problems with the young—Anorexia

•    National Programming

5   Harmony Of The Mind

•    Depression

•    Bipolar Disorder

•    Panic Attacks and Anxiety

•    Schizophrenia

•    Paranoia

•    Self-Aggrandisement

•    Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

•    Phobias

•    Antisocial Personality—the Psychopath

•    Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome

•    Multiple Personality Disorder

•    Narcissistic Personality Disorder

•    Happiness and Misery

•    Fear

•    Peace

•    Love

PART 2   The World Beyond

1   The Psychic Experience

•    Psychic Abilities

•    Astrology

•    Mediumship and Clairvoyance

•    Physical Phenomena

•    Psychic Energies

•    Spirit Healing

•    Self-Healing

•    House Cleansing

•    Rescue

•    Astral Travel

•    Near-Death Experience

•    Angels

2   Spirit Possession

•    Night Terrors

•    Sleeping Convulsions

•    Sleep Eating and Drinking

•    Sleepwalking

•    Tics

•    Shared Addiction

•    Schizophrenia

•    Multiple Personality Disorder

•    Vampirism

•    Trance

•    Hypnosis

3   Angels

•    Nature Spirits

•    Fairies

•    Angels

•    Rituals and Summoning

4   The Source Or Supreme Being

PART 3    Yesterday, Today, And Tomorrow

1   Yesterday: The Missing Link

•    Invasion

•    Intervention

2   Today: Science

•    Quantum Physics

•    Dark Energy and Matter

•    Black Holes

3   The Future

•    Free Will

•    Medicine

•    Interstellar Travel

•    Meditation and Transcendence

•    Why Spiritualism?

•    Spiritual Destiny

Endnotes

Glossary

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 

I would like to thank Lynette, my wonderful wife, for all the help, love, and encouragement she has given me in writing this book. Her support has been invaluable. 

I would also like to acknowledge Albert Stone, the medium who helped me start off my life of spiritual progress. I might never have become a medium without his time and patience. 

The last person I acknowledge is my long-time guide from spirit—Sun Tsen. How the people in spirit can put up with the erratic emotionality of people in the physical like me is a marvel. 

PREFACE 

In this book, I have set out to describe life, the mind, and the higher senses. In the process, I will share some of my own life events and experiences. 

Lucretius, the Roman philosopher and poet, expounded in his writings on the idea that the byproduct of religion is fear of all that is mysterious in life and philosophy. I will endeavour to show that nearly all of what is considered to be mystical or inexplicable in the areas of the mind and psychic phenomena is in fact ordinary, understandable, and actually quite transparent and accessible. The problem is that we tend to view everything from the point of view of the physical when true reality should be viewed from the spiritual aspect. The physical material world is only one level of existence, and we in fact live in a world and universe consisting of multiple energies and levels of reality. The higher spiritual levels prove to be more real, while the solidity of the material world is an illusion. Even physics teaches us that solid objects are made up of energy. 

Much of life seems to be mysterious and without coherent meaning or logic. Much happens that is unfortunate and seemingly cruel. Sometimes it seems that the race of men is guided and ruled over by a capricious prankster God who dictates our lives in perverse humour for his own dark entertainment, laughing at our woes and unfeeling of our destiny. However, these concepts are misguided. I believe any perceptions like that are bred from our misunderstanding of how to read our lives and adventures. 

There are still a very great number of people living in fear through superstitious awe of negative spirits—demons. In addition, a large percentage of the world’s people live in the shadow of orthodox religion’s use of repressive fear and the threat of deific punishment to keep control of them. These fears must be removed. 

When people have attempted to understand life, religion, and philosophy in the past, they have hit brick walls, with no conceivable answers. The result has been that a great many have just given it all up as a bad job and stopped thinking anything about the essential spiritual aspects of life. For many people to progress in spiritual understanding and life, the obstacles must be removed. Greater understanding of these hidden philosophical truths will open up for large numbers of confused and disappointed people a vista of thought based on spiritual insight and knowledge. Spiritual enlightenment and new heightened experiences in spiritual progress and development will follow. 

I have heard it said that the mind is a function of, and the operation of, our physical brains alone. Here I try to demonstrate that the real world stretches way beyond the physical, and the mind is in fact a multilevel organ existing separate to, but in contact with and operating through, the physical brain. In fact, the physical world is only a small part of existence. People usually deny the larger part of existence because they aren’t able to use their physical senses to detect what is beyond the physical realm. 

On another level, the true reality of our lives in fact takes place in the spiritual realm, and understanding this is the only true purpose of our lives, our higher learning, and our spiritual destiny. The purpose of physical life and experiences must surely be to gain higher spiritual learning to understand this. Once we alter our focus, we can see that our physical existence is only a method we use for spiritual learning about a higher spiritual life and progress. So often, when thinking of problems in life and philosophy, we encounter impassable blockages to logic. If we see these mysteries from a spiritual instead of a physical point of view, logical answers just appear. We experience the physical world for the purpose of learning the lessons of our higher spiritual life and progress. As we learn, we recognise the impermanence of physical life and the immortal nature of the soul. In this way, much that is hidden and mysterious becomes clear. 

We do not realise that the conscious mind to which we attribute so much is but a small tool when compared with the subconscious or unconscious mind. This multilevel mind truly guides and rules our lives, and is in turn guided by the superconscious and the soul. In some respects, my book is a review of different aspects of life, but I feel that an awareness of all these things is required to more fully understand what our lives are about. 

It seems to me that religion is often just a convenient place to shuffle off things that are mysterious and not understood so that they can be ignored and not worried about. The theme of my book is that these mysteries do not need to be set aside or discarded. They’re also not nearly as mysterious as religions have tried to make them. 

Introduction 

It is dark, very dark. It is wet, soaking wet. It is cold and miserable. But I am dry and quite warm. My yellow sou’wester, my cape, and my leggings keep the rain out and the warmth in. I don’t need to see well, because I know the way, having ridden this route every morning for many months. It is seven o’clock in the morning, and I am riding my bike to deliver newspapers. While I ride along, I think about the world, life—God, even. How did it all come to be and why? I am twelve years old, and so I am very wise and sure I can solve many puzzles just by thinking about them long enough. 

When I was young, I was the paperboy for Pimlico Row (usually just known as Pimlico), a small village between the then large town of Watford and the village of Leverstock Green in Hertfordshire, England. This meant getting up at six in the morning; going to the general store in Leverstock Green; getting my bag full of newspapers for delivery; and then cycling out the nearly three miles to the other side of Pimlico along Watford Road to start delivering papers. 

At that time in England, and I believe it is still so, nearly all front doors had a letterbox—an opening with a spring-loaded lid cover. The newspaper to be delivered had to be folded up and pushed through this slot. This meant that I had to stop at each house, go up the front path, and push the newspaper through the letterbox in the front door. If there were a lot of newspapers and magazines, as happened often on the weekend, this took some time for each house or cottage. 

Leverstock Green is now a totally built-up suburban area, but then it was a smallish country village surrounded in all directions by farms, fields, and country lanes. The nearest towns were country towns.¹ These towns seemed very big to me then, but they were in fact quite modest in size. 

I cycled to and from Pimlico on the paper round every morning except for Sunday. The round and the journey to and from it took about an hour and a quarter, and for this I received the princely sum of six shillings per week—in today’s UK money about 30p. On the round, I was of course by myself, and I spent most of the time thinking—always, even when making deliveries. It was rather like a continuous meditation for that hour and a quarter. I did not then of course realise that meditating was what I was doing. 

During these early years, perhaps because of extreme shyness but just as likely preference, I was happiest when by myself. I spent many, many hours not only on my paper round but also wandering over fields and lanes alone, being in the world of nature, the winds and songbirds my only companions. For much of this time, I pondered the events of life, the evolution of man, and the relationship that God had to all of this. I tried, by continually going over them, to clarify in my mind something of the truth about these philosophical but entirely relevant ideas to the nature of life. It seemed to me that things so important should have accepted, easy answers, but everyone seemed to disagree, especially about religion, and no one had any explanations that made real sense overall. 

It seems to me now that in most countries this confusion is worse than when I was young. People are rejecting orthodox ideas of any sort. This leaves them hungry for life’s meaning and swimming in a sea of uncertainty, insecure and lost. 

My parents and family were quite strongly religious, and I was therefore required to spend a lot of time every weekend, except when we had a week’s annual holiday, at the local Baptist chapel in Leverstock Green.² I remember going to the chapel on Sunday evenings when the whole church was full and people were sitting in extra chairs down the aisles. This meant there were about 130 to 150 people in attendance. It was at the end of and after the end of the war—the Second World War. My mother played the organ for the singing of hymns, and so I sat with my grandfather in his pew. 

During the service, I used to look through his Bible, which had coloured pictures in it and the words of Jesus highlighted in red. The feeling in the congregation was amazing, and although there was anxiety about the war and the husbands and relations away in the conflict, I still remember the warmth and love. That and the bright lights are among my most treasured memories. Gradually over the years, the number of people at the services dropped off. This decline continued until by the 1960s most of the pews at the services were empty. 

Unlike my family, I could never accept Christianity. By the time I was fourteen years of age, I had rejected it completely because of the total illogicality and confusion of the controlling dogmas. The church being Baptist, much in the observances was made of the Bible. At Sunday school, I studied many parts of the Bible, including both the New and Old Testament. I sat for the Sunday school exams, which were conducted in churches countrywide. I did very well in those exams, and once came first in a Hertfordshire teacher’s exam. However, this did not alter the fact that I saw many things in the Bible which were not only illogical and unbelievable but also cruel and sometimes barbarous. Stories of a primitive people and the battles they fought against other primitive peoples did not seem to me to advance philosophical or theological understanding. 

The idea that all of this was the complete unalterable word and will of God, the Supreme Being, was unacceptable and frankly quite ridiculous. It seemed to me untrue first and foremost because it had to have been recorded and written down by a person and not God, and secondly because it was so illogical and contradictory. For example, stating as unalterable truth and wisdom four variable and sometimes quite different stories of unlikely reliability in the four gospels—and placing these at the very centre of all that is worthy—seemed to me just plainly silly. To accept that the central character in the stories was the one and only son of God was not only biologically unlikely in the extreme but also totally philosophically unnecessary. Why would a supreme being need to create this farce? What baffled me most, perhaps, was that many seemingly intelligent people I respected greatly, including my parents, accepted it all and seemed to gain comfort and strength in life from it. 

When I was about thirteen, I went by rail one weekend with a group of young church people to a Billy Graham Religious Crusade in Manchester, the longest journey I had ever made at that point. It was held at the Manchester City football ground, which was full to capacity, including some of the sporting arena—which apparently meant that more than one hundred thousand people were in attendance. The presentation was made from a raised platform in the centre of the ground, and this was illuminated with bright lights. 

After the dramatic music and charismatic presentation ended, Billy Graham asked for a call to faith. People who felt called were asked to go down into the centre of the arena, meet helpers, and join in a communion of prayer there. I must say I did feel strongly emotionally drawn. I was amazed at how many people took part in this demonstration. People, including some from my party, were popping up everywhere and walking down, and soon the centre of the ground was very crowded. I stayed where I was. Yes, it was very emotionally moving, but that did not make it any more valid or true. 

After all of this, I did logically accept that there had to be a creator source for all things and that it seemed most probable that there was a God or supreme being or whatever else people wanted to call it. Years later, I came to think of myself as an agnostic, with a belief in God but no knowledge of it. 

From a very young age, I was fascinated by scientific ideas about the evolution of species and man. I imagined a soup of chemicals in the seas of early earth changed, perhaps by the action of lightning strikes, to eventually cause molecular formations giving rise to primitive life. I understood that those life forms would evolve from the simplest organisms to the most advanced and complex mammals by natural selection and survival of the fittest over immense periods of time. I also understood that all the chemical elements in physical materials, from gases to metals and rocks, were originally created by nuclear reactions within stars from the base material, which was the element hydrogen. Later still, I learned that there was a possibility that organic chemical substances developed elsewhere may have been ejected into space, by volcanic activity perhaps. These ejections could have been swept up by the gravitational field of Earth from space, which might mean that life in fact could have come from other worlds. 

But where did the original hydrogen come from? It seemed to me that this was where God must come in. It seemed logical to me that God must have created hydrogen. Since nothing else existed at the time, God must have created hydrogen from itself, from its own body, whatever that was. Also, I figured that where intellect was concerned, the human brain must be the source of all thought and direction within the individual, as nothing else was there to do this. The mind was just another name for the activity of the brain. I guess there are a lot of people and scientists who would agree with that. 

During these early years, as my scientific knowledge and understanding developed, I was also regularly experiencing strange things. For me to see large eyes in my bedroom, hovering over my bed, and to feel people sitting on my bed at night when no one was actually there was a regular occurrence and very frightening. I spent my early years sleeping with the covers pulled up over my head, afraid of these things and of the dark. My mother did not understand. These things did not seem to be experienced by other people. 

I remember occasions when, on my way to bed, I would walk out of the kitchen and down the hall to go up the stairs, switching on the hall light and walking along the hall, only to have to come back because the light turned itself off. Sometimes after turning on the light and having it go back off again several times, I would return to the kitchen and ask my mother to turn the light on so that it would stay on, a frightening experience. 

As a child, when playing with other children at ball games, if the ball was lost—by being hit into bushes, for example—I could always find it when the others could not. I thought then that my eyes must have been quicker and better, but looking back, I see that I just knew where it was. I now realise, although I certainly did not then, that I experienced psychic phenomena and exhibited psychic abilities from my early years. 

I vividly remember strange things happening in the house. I suppose I was about three or four when I got up in the morning before anyone else, as young children often do, and came down the stairs to see the front door wide open in front of me. Dad was off at the war in North Africa, and Mother, being on her own with only my sister and me, was ultra careful about locking up and bolting all the doors when she went to bed. For me, up first, to find the door wide open was something to awaken her and tell her about straight away. At first she did not believe it, but when she found it was true, she was startled and very frightened. Of course, she searched through the house and checked everything, but there nothing out of place except the door. I do not claim this was all from my psychic energy, for it is not uncommon for phenomena to occur in a house where there is a young woman and young children. However, looking back, it wouldn’t surprise me either to discover that I was generating much of the energy for the phenomena that occurred. 

When I was about ten, an unfortunate and embarrassing event occurred. I went with my mother every week to the chapel and Sunday school. On Sunday afternoons, we separated into classes, and each small class had a teacher. On this particular Sunday, the teacher had been droning on about some New Testament story about Jesus, I guess, and I drifted off into some sort of reverie, neither listening nor not listening. All of a sudden, I exclaimed, Oh, bollocks! To say something like that in a Sunday school class was unheard of; to say it in front of adults was dreadful, and to me shocking and terribly embarrassing. 

I felt like sinking into the floor. I could not guess what the teacher would say. After a pause, he said, Well, that’s not a very nice thing to say. He then continued with the class. 

I was very frightened that he would tell my mum, who was teaching another class at the time. It was so unlike me, and I could not understand why I had said it. I never forgot this. It was not until approximately forty years later that I realised there must have been someone in spirit within me, a man listening through me, and he thought what the teacher was saying was nonsense. His thought translated through me, and the expletive was the result. 

At sixteen years old, I went to work at John Dickinson and Co. paper converters at Apsley Mills near Hemel Hempstead, in the large office of one of the envelope production departments. Psychic experiences continued. I remember one event when I was about nineteen years old. Next to the office in which I worked, there was a large room with about 204 drawer filing cabinets where masses of sales correspondence and job-related documents were stored—no computers then. The correspondence for a large and valuable order had been mislaid and probably misfiled. My manager had become involved and had initiated with others a widespread search. He seemed about to give it up as a bad job. It was nothing to do with me, but I thought I would check it out. So I looked within and was able to go straight to a cabinet, drawer, and file. This location was at a distance from where the correspondence should have been filed, but there it was. My manager was, to say the least, bemused. He could not understand how I had found it—and so quickly. 

These experiences followed me into adulthood. While working at the company, I asked a girl from the invoicing department out on a date. Our relationship developed, and when I was twenty-two years old, we were married at the St Lawrence Anglican Church in Bovingdon, a village not too far from where I had lived before. My new wife and I lived with her father in his house in Bovingdon. Time passed and we had two lovely children—a boy in 1963 and a girl in 1966. During all of this time, we continued working at John Dickinson and Co. My wife, of course, left work for a time to have and raise our children. 

In 1968, when I was twenty-eight years old, we moved to a rented house of our own and strange things started to happen, especially around my wife. She worked part-time, and in the winter went home early. One of the first things she did when she got home was light the coal fire. In a confused state, she told me one night that as she was laying the wood for the fire, she felt and saw other hands by the side of her, helping her start the fire. Her mother had passed some years before, and she felt it was her mother who was there. 

By autumn 1968, enough strange events were happening in our home in Bovingdon that after some research, I decided to phone the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain (SAGB) for guidance. The person on the phone advised that we go to a local Spiritualist church for help, and we chose one in Chesham, Buckinghamshire. We left the children with my father-in-law, telling him that we were going to church, but not which one. We found the church, a largish single-story wooden building in a side street off the main street, and went through a door at the end of the building into an area divided off by a blue curtain. From there, we proceeded into the church. 

The church area was furnished with wooden chairs, with a dais at the front. The place was crowded by at least eighty people, and we found chairs halfway back, next to the central aisle. The platform at the front had a table and two chairs. Soon, a tall old man and a young girl of about twenty-five perhaps came in from a side door and took those chairs. The man led the congregation in prayers and hymns, and then the young woman gave a spiritual talk that I have now forgotten but found interesting at the time. I noted she did this without any written notes, which was different from my previous experience with church sermons. 

The young woman, who was a medium, was to give readings to the people in the congregation. As the man announced this, I became conscious that she would come to me first. I was confused because I did not know how or why I felt this, but just in case, I slid down in my chair to be less obvious. Of course, she did come to me first and said, I have a gentleman with you who tells me that he is your grandfather, and his name is Percy. She went on to describe my grandfather in terms that I clearly recognised. Perhaps I should mention here that my wife and I told no one where we were going, and that I had never been to the church or indeed the town of Chesham before that day. Certainly I had never seen the medium before and had no prior knowledge of her whatsoever. 

The medium went on to tell me many things about my father’s father and that he said I should keep my head down at work the same as he did in the war, when he wore his tin hat. I was unfamiliar with the tin hat she referenced and thought she was wrong because my grandfather was not in the Second World War; he was too old to go. The following week, when I investigated it further, I found out from my grandmother that this wearing of a tin hat was correct. He wore an air-raid warden’s tin hat in the war when patrolling streets at night to ensure that people observed the blackout.³ One of the duties of these wardens was to go into bombed houses and find and help wounded people. My grandmother went up into the attic, found his hat, and gave it to me. The children played with it for some years afterwards. 

The messages given to me from my grandfather through this young medium proved to me that communication could exist between people who were, as I understood them, dead, and people who were still alive. I felt the medium just knowing my grandfather’s name of Percy was evidential because even when I was young, Percy was a rare name. How could she have guessed it? The reading told me things that I categorically did not know and so could not have been extracted by the medium from my mind by so-called telepathy. These were things which by research I was able later to prove were true. 

All of this turned my thinking rather upside down. Suddenly, I understood without doubt that some sort of spiritual world must exist, and there was obviously more to existence than just physical matter. Also, people did not appear to die at death but lived on in that spirit world. Furthermore, there were people called mediums who could communicate with so-called dead people. 

I very quickly found it difficult to understand why most people thought this Spiritualism was dangerous nonsense, given the proof demonstrated and the logical common sense taught. Why this fear and hesitancy to accept Spiritualism when orthodox religion, with all its illogicality and bigotry and no verifiable demonstration of proof, was accepted without question by so many otherwise very clever people? I found it difficult to understand why the people who condemned Spiritualism the most actually knew very little or nothing about it. Later, I was also surprised that some people thought they could be Spiritualists and Christians simultaneously, which made no sense to me whatsoever. I did not then realise that many, if not most people who call themselves Christian have no real knowledge of Christianity. 

There seems to be a great confusion in people’s minds as to what Christianity is about. Much is attached to the Bible—and of course, the Bible is only partially related to Christianity. It seems that most supposed Christians in England have never heard of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion followed by the Anglo Catholic or Episcopalian Church—or if they have, they do not have any knowledge of what they are about. These articles of faith, based on the creeds, outline the required beliefs of the church. 

At this time in my life, I still saw the evolution from primitive life forms to mammalian life and humankind as appropriate and logical, but physical matter being the only form and level of existence was now not so. I soon decided that to base understanding, research, and established facts on limited physical existence alone was a basic and very critical error that modern science had fallen into and now, regrettably, was stubbornly sticking to at all costs. It seemed to me that in rejecting all religious concepts totally, the scientists had, as it is said, thrown the baby out with the bathwater. 

I discovered the much more complex but eminently more logical structure of life to include other existence besides just the physical, and the existence of each human being to include other bodies at different levels of existence. Indeed, instead of the physical body being the prime and most important, it is in fact in some respects the least significant. From taking the brain to be the be-all and end-all of mind and thought, I gradually came to see it as a tool—albeit an enormously complex one—used by the composite mind and existing at a totally different level of existence. The brain seems to me to be a contact unit used to communicate thoughts, instructions, and information from mental levels of energy to the slower energy level of the physical material world. 

The brain is a wonderfully complex organ with a multitude of automatic and reactive functions. The complexity of it is