Someone wrote to me last week asking how to spiritually cleanse secondhand clothes, but my email reply was returned as undeliverable. If you write to me and don’t get a reply, please check your junk folder! Computers are sometimes inscrutable in their decisions.

Meanwhile, if you buy some secondhand clothes, the way I would cleanse them is as follows: put them in a pile and stretch your hands over them. This is so that the angel or other being you have invoked can send their light through your body and into the clothes. You can say: “In the Name of the Christ, I ask the beloved angels to cleanse these clothes and remove all unwanted vibrations”. Stand there long enough to give them time to do it (a second or two). Then thank them. You don’t have to use this wording – it is what I was taught and I am comfortable with it. You can make up your own wording if you prefer. The important thing is to be respectful and sincere in your request.

    
In May this year a crop circle appeared within easy walking distance of my home.  Normally I would not have imagined it had any personal significance for me, but I have heard too many stories of crop circles which appear to refer to people’s conversations,  or comment on events, to doubt that the circle makers (or some of them) can be psychic when they choose.  These days I also think that things that happen in our immediate environment sometimes have a message to convey to us and are a reflection of our life.  On the day this crop circle appeared, two days before my birthday, I was visiting ancient stones in a remote part of these islands, including some standing stones said to be an inter-dimensional portal with a unicorn connection.

     I didn’t hear about my local crop circle until August, when crop circle expert Karen Alexander spoke about it in a very interesting talk at the Summer Lectures in Devizes.  In a deep sense I wasn’t there when it happened.   But when Karen said that it was a depiction of an advanced mathematical formula called Euler’s Identity a shiver went through my hidden depths.  As a child in school I approached maths lessons with fear and loathing.  To me maths was a cold, evil thing bent on destroying all that was imaginative and beautiful.   Whereas some people are dyslexic, I am dysmathsic, and incapable of making anything which requires exact measurements.  I seem to understand some things at the time they are explained but then they vanish as if I had never heard of them.  Whether it’s sacred geometry or Schrodinger’s cat, I have read about it many times and forgotten it every time.  Let’s be honest, I don’t have the brains for maths.

     As I grew older, I began to realise just what I had missed in rejecting maths.  When I came across Pythagoras, Plato and other ancient thinkers and heard about the golden ratio I began to see that it was possible to understand the universe through maths, and at the same time that it was too late for me.  So now I am like Oliver Twist, asking for more, but no more is forthcoming.

     So what was Euler’s Identity, said to be the most profound and beautiful theorem in all mathematics, doing on my patch?  Had it come to say hello?  It seems that in that crop circle there is a small anomaly, a sort of mathematical joke, in which it appears to say hi.  But why me, of all people?  I was reminded of that big cheese in the Bible who once said to an unworthy person:  “What have I to do with thee?”

     Karen had said that Euler’s Identity combines different kinds of maths into a meaning.  Since it came into my life I have been haunted by the idea of meaning in maths – and am well aware that any mathematicians (except for Margaret of course) who may chance to come across what follows (most unlikely) will be either infuriated or amused by what they will regard as my inane witterings.  And now at last here’s my chance to use one of my very favourite quotes:  Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

     Long ago, mystical philosophers of both East and West worked out that all the numbers have meanings, and were basically in agreement as to what those meanings were.  But the ancients didn’t have zero.  If they had had the courage to look zero in the eye, later generations would have had a much easier time.

     I believe that zero is the true companion of 1, not number 2 as has been supposed.  With 1 and 0 we are in the supernatural realms.  Historically the number 2 has been seen as the counterpart of 1, as for instance in the I Ching, which begins with the Creative and Receptive as 1 and 2, male and female, our parents.    The problem is that 1 is on a different level than 2, and this has led historically to women being regarded as evil and inferior, with terrible consequences.  Another problem is that because 2 has been considered close enough to 1 to be its partner, evil in our world has been elevated and given power.  So Satan (shorthand for evil) is regarded as a threat to God when in fact evil operates under licence because our free will has to be preserved.  So the misguided concept of dualism arose.  This is too big a subject to go further into here, except to give part of the Oxford English Dictionary definition of it:   “the doctrine that there are two conflicting powers, good and evil, in the universe.”

     With 2 we become separated from the Divine Unity of 1 and plunge into the abyss.  It signifies the descent into matter and all that is meant by duality.  The conflict inherent in 2 can only be resolved by 3, in which an outside force introduces balance.  Gurdjieff and his pupils wrote extensively about the numbers 3 and 7  and showed that the uneven numbers were exit points from the material universe.  The even numbers all have to do with matter. 

     Someone – it may have been Pythagoras – saw the numbers as great Spiritual Beings.  I think he was right, although of course the idea that some numbers are better than others is absurd, a philosophical prejudice on our part.  But do they all have meanings, or only some of them?  The I Ching finds meanings in numbers up to 64 – Before Completion – and there is no reason why meanings should not go on to infinity, as numbers seem to do, with greater and greater interactions as they increase in size. 

     When I think about the infinity of numbers I get goose bumps.  There are numbers so vast, like Graham’s number, that they are bigger than all the atoms in the universe.  To speak this number you would have had to start at the time of the big bang and would not yet be finished.  In primary school we were taught to knit small squares, purl one, plain one, until the teacher told us to stop, and then the end of the wool would be snipped off and tied.    Thinking about these enormous numbers I was reminded of these knitted squares, and saw them tightly packed with each digit or stitch gleaming like a jewel according to the colour of its number:  green, purple, crimson and many others.  Perhaps they fold in on themselves like boxes.  Or perhaps they take on different shapes.  If numbers have colours, meanings and intelligence, and they are bound together on an unimaginable scale, then they presumably move in unimaginably glorious, unimaginably vast worlds which they help to create. 

     As a Spiritual Being a number could appear to a human as a hooded sage, or a brilliantly coloured box, or in whatever guise it chose.  I wonder how they move in sequence, as they presumably do.  In nature, rivers flow in a branching manner, not in a straight line.  Or things may move in spirals.  This seems more likely with numbers.  In our finite world, everything grows, comes to an end, shrinks back and starts again.  Maybe this also happens with numbers.  People seem to assume that because we can’t see an end to numbers – because there is always one more – they must necessarily be infinite.  But we don’t know.  It’s an assumption that they are infinite.  Maybe a point comes in the spiralling of numbers when they begin to shrink back, and go back to One.  Mystics throughout  the ages have taught that All is One and everything goes back to One.  One day we’ll know for sure what is going on out there. 

      Even Graham’s number would boil down eventually to a single digit through a process of numerology.  It would take billions of years to calculate and its starting digit is not known, although we know it ends in 7.  But then again, there is no time and therefore the boiled-down version already exists and does not need to be calculated.  In all its majestic, unimaginable immensity, Graham’s number will have as its innermost soul one of the first 9 numbers.

     It’s not just me.  Anyone who understood that the Euler’s Identity  crop circle was saying hi was right, and it would have carried different messages for who knows how many people who were attuned to it.  Whether people got their message was up to them.  If you think you could have received a message, but didn’t, it’s not too late.  Just tell the universe at large that you would like the message, and give yourself however long it takes to come through.  Don’t be too attached to getting a result, but think about it, or meditate on it, from time to time with a respectful attitude.  I can’t guarantee results, but this method is tried and tested.  Most probably you will have already received the message as soon as you asked yourself what it was.

     What I learned from Euler’s Identity was that from now on maths will become easier for me, now that my attitude has improved.  While I can’t expect to progress very far in this finite life, it’s not my last chance.  There is always  next time.  We all have a finite and an infinite side.  And in the infinity of my being I am, like you, probably living vast numbers of lives – perhaps infinite numbers of lives -  in the past, present and future of countless universes all happening now as there is neither time nor space.  And somewhere in that infinity of my being at least one of my other selves is right this very moment enjoying the use of a mathematical brain.

                                                                                                     September 2010

     Are you for any reason facing the winter without fuel?  If so, this extract from a WWII memoir may interest you:

     “Without the assistance of a certain Corporal Wagenschwanz who was billeted close by, my family would have come through that dreadful last winter of  the war with much more difficulty and hardship than we actually experienced … In the state of siege that developed in Guernsey  after the Allies had landed in France in 1944 anyone could see that the war was not yet coming to an end and that the winter was going to be very difficult indeed.  The worst yet.  There was going to be no electricity, no gas, no coal or wood and only starvation levels of food.  Nothing could be done about this by most people but Wagenschwanz was an exception…  He realised, as did we all, that a modern house with its decorative rather than functional fireplaces is no place to spend a winter when all normal fuel supplies fail.  What is needed is an alternative DIY method of heating and cooking and this is what Wagenschwanz undertook to supply us with.  In exchange for a rabbit, he told me in the November, he would make us a stove that would burn anything – - any kind of combustible rubbish, twigs, garden weeds, grass, simply anything at all.  It would keep one room warm and we could cook on it.  Moreover, he would instal it in the house without doing any damage.  Well, if there was ever an offer which couldn’t be refused this was it.  Wagenschwanz got his rabbit and we got our stove.

The stove which Wagenschwanz constructed from scrap materials was a very lo-tech contraption but it was wonderfully efficient.  It was simply a couple of feet or so of rusty steel pipe, about 12 inches in diameter and made of steel about a quarter of an inch thick.  It was fitted with fire-bars, an adjustable flue at the bottom and a lid on top and it was placed vertically on the tiled hearth in front of the blanked-off fireplace into which the smoke was carried by a short outlet pipe.  It was not very elegant but it worked beautifully.  As we became accustomed to its idiosyncrasies we found that it really did burn anything combustible:  that it really did warm the room and that yes we could cook on it too, either with a pan standing on the lid, or, for quicker results, with a pan of appropriate size standing  on the open stove with the lid removed.  Of course  our hot meals had to be what the Germans called “Eintopfgerichte” — meals cooked in one pan.  But with the edibles we then had that is what they would have been anyway.”                      from  www.johncrossleyhayes.co.uk

What if we could drop dangerous nuclear waste into one of earth’s subduction zones so the earth could dispose of it for us ? Or, drop it into an active but not currently erupting volcano? It could be lowered into a pool of gently bubbling lava so as to avoid the risk of it getting loose and spewing out all over the place.

Before trying anything along these lines it would be a good idea to enlist the help and advice of well-respected shamans who work with the fiery nature spirits.

If it is felt to be unsafe to dispose of nuclear waste in this way, what about plastic waste? Something needs to be done about that and maybe Mother Nature would help us out.

      On Zoo Vet at Large, an enjoyable little TV programme I sometimes watch, a zoo keeper had called in the vet to look at a seahorse which was floating upside down.  It seems that the male seahorse carries the eggs for the female until they are ready to hatch – just one of many ways in which seahorses are different from other creatures – and as he was chock full of eggs something had gone wrong for him.  Thankfully it was an easy thing for the vet to put right.   I was fascinated to watch the vet and the zookeeper as they contemplated the seahorse with a mixture of adoration and reverence.   This is exactly how I feel about seahorses.  They are so strange, so dignified, so beautiful, so self-contained, that they seem almost to be a superior life form to us.  It’s as if we are irrelevant to them.

There must be a spiritual link somehow between seahorses, land horses and donkeys and the celestial horses known as unicorns.  There also exist miniature white horses in another dimension which are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.  There was an old idea that every form of creation on earth was mirrored in other worlds.  Everything on land for instance had a counterpart in the sea, and as we now know, the sea is where we originally came from:

                                              The Mind, that Ocean where each kind/ Does straight its own resemblance find; / Yet it creates, transcending these/ Far other worlds and other  seas …

                                                                                                   Andrew Marvell, The Garden

     When I was younger I used to enjoy making fruit cakes, and I made my own candied peel as well as it was easy to make and incomparably better than the shop bought kind.  I also used to make my own candied angelica – anyone who has ever heard of it probably knows it only in the form of those rather nasty little dark green cubes you sometimes find in fruit cake.  Shop bought angelica is so pointless that you rarely see it nowadays, which is a pity, because the angelica I made was glorious.  It came out a soft, delicious pale green in varying sizes and misshapes, which is how I like it.  If it were available in the shops in a pretty package next to the crystallised ginger it would soon attract devotees.  And it might be an extra source of income for the right person.

     I love herbs.  The herb angelica is a biennial, wonderful to look at in its second year, and rather angelic, as you can tell from its name.  Traditionally all parts of it were used in food or medicine or alcoholic drinks.  I used to grow it, partly for candying and partly for its appearance.  It is easy to grow if you have fresh seeds, and the candied peel is easy to make if a little time-consuming.

     There are several recipes.  This is the one I used to use, from “Farmhouse Kitchen” by Audrey Ellis.  “Cut young stems of angelica into matching lengths and boil till tender.  Remove from water and peel off the outer skin, then return to the pan and simmer very slowly until they are green.  Dry well, then weigh.  Allow equal quantities of granulated sugar and angelica.  Place the stems in a shallow dish and sprinkle the sugar over them.  Leave them for 2 days then boil the sugar and stems well together.  When thoroughly  boiled, remove the angelica and add 2 oz of granulated sugar to the existing syrup.   Boil this, then add the angelica and boil for a further 5 minutes.  Drain the angelica and spread it on a tray in a cool oven to dry.”  Any leftover syrup will keep and can be used to make another batch.

      It might be a good idea to experiment a little, as old recipes sometimes seem unnecessarily complicated.  Leaving the angelica to soak 2 days in sugar is a case in point.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone started making candied angelica and putting it in the shops where I could find it.