The Metaphor

My father was a Scottish paratrooper drill sergeant and my Mum a secret agent who worked for MI 5 during WWII. She was part of the enigma project – the project to decode German communications. The British army noticed she was good at spotting patterns in German code that helped decipher messages.

Growing up was interesting.

Having inherited my mum’s gift for perceiving patterns, reality for me is a fountain of information and communication hidden in patterns of coincidence - in the things that happen around me.

It’s a bit like communicating with a god.

Answers were found to some of humanity's deepest questions on this journey – not because I was particularly smart, just smart enough to realise that a god defined as all-loving would make the path to He/She/It/Whatever stupidly simple, so the simplest of us could find the way.

So, Occam's razor was whipped out to discover the most stupidly simple path I could think of to what we call The Almighty. The strange thing was ... whatever was out there answered me back. I don't define it or call it He or She often as whatever I encountered changed over time and became whatever it wanted to become.

This is a strange ride because it isn't a novel or a sci-fi adventure, although there are things that happened in my life that sound like science fiction. Yet the things I speak about happened ... not to some guy I heard about but to me. So, this is a first-person account of what happened.

The first thing I should mention is that nothing I am going to say is to be taken as the Truth in any absolute way. I don’t think it is possible to encompass the truth in words. Words are signposts we assign meanings to and are subject to an inordinate number of inaccuracies and misinterpretations. What I am going to say is to be taken as a metaphor - a literary device that encompasses the truth or, more accurately, points in the direction of the truth.

For those of you looking for facts, this may be a difficult journey. For one, the truth does not lie in the answers I found with to man’s deepest questions. You can take them with a grain of salt or not even believe them at all. In a way, the answers don’t really matter. They are conclusions I came to, based on experiences I had. You could come to different conclusions. The important thing is that I tell you what the experiences were, so you can draw your own conclusions. This is one occasion where the journey is vastly more important than the destination arrived at.

If I were to say, “The point of life is such and such”, you would probably say “Hmmm … very interesting.” and think nothing more of it. If I told you of all that I went through to arrive at that truth, the direct physical and metaphysical experiences, you might become aware of a process that exists in the universe which YOU can take advantage of to answer your own questions directly. Cut out the middleman, so to speak, and get it from the source.

This is my point in writing this book - not to tell you what Truth is or what is real or how we should conduct our lives, but to bear witness to what I have experienced to make you aware of a phenomenon I encountered that I believe is universal. The answers to man’s age-old questions are a side show and unimportant in comparison to this.

We live in a cynical age. Cancer Man from the X-files puts it best. "Man does not believe in God because He does not supply him with miracles to justify his faith." I see people all over the world making daily decisions based on this cynicism. Nobody really knows what we are doing here. All of us seem to be caught up in the daily minutia of life - lost in our thoughts, our jobs, our preconceptions - and now, the wars. If you asked someone, I don't think anybody could say they knew what the point of life is or even that life had a point at all.

Well, my life hasn't been like that.

I'm reminded of what Rutger Hauer, BladeRunner's Nexus 6 replicant, said just before he died in front of Harrison Ford. "If only you could see the things these eyes have seen - all those moments lost now, like tears in the rain". I don't think I am any different than anyone else, really. The only thing I can think of is that I can take things at face value. Being an artist, I have an inordinate ability to see what is in front of my face. I have also learned to step out of my own way.

One might at first think these simple tasks but, as it turns out, they are among the greatest challenges man must deal with here ... now.

My fear is that you will not believe me - that you think I am lying or that I am crazy. I have no defense against that. Personally, I think the closer you get to being crazy, without going overboard, the closer you are to the truth. The world is a wild, wild place - far wilder and stranger than most of us can imagine. We impose order on to this wildness attempting to understand it or control it because we fear its wildness but I’m not sure we really need to.

We ourselves are wild creatures well equipped to soar into the wildest of life’s mysteries.

I have witnesses for pretty much all the events that took place. I’ve lost touch with all but one, but I believe most are still alive. For those of you with an endless need for proof, evidence can be provided if it becomes important. Sooner or later, however, you are just going to have to face the fact that what one believes in is largely an act of faith - even if you are talking about the laws of physics.

Chapter 2 - The Bridge