I don't think there was ever a time that I believed in a supreme God, and disbelieved in ghosts and reincarnation and all that spooky possum shit.

I think it always just "was" in my head. We never went to church, we didn't go to Sunday school (hell, we never even got to go to Kindy, but that's a whole other ramble), we were raised in such a way as to encourage good human growth without the need to resort to God as the reason we should pull our heads in.

We had, sometimes strange, literature littering the landscape (awesome alliteration, huh?) like Erich Von Daniken and Colin Lambert; things that would spill over the boundaries that organised religion would attempt to cage us within.

I grew up with my feet in the mud and horseshit on my pants and developed a need as an adult to have green things, not houses, outside my door. Well, I got it half right :-)

I mean, really, if God had created all this fabulously huge universe and made us the only people in it, don't you think we deserved something a bit better than this watery hole with bloody great deserts covering heaps of what land there is? Ok, so it's really pretty and everything, but let's face it, there's room for improvement.

As a teenager addicted to reading, I discovered deeper concepts of reincarnation and ghosties (and that beings scared of the dark wasn't going away) and eventually I got around to reading this book - Life Between Life: Scientific Explorations into the Void Separating One Incarnation from the Next by Joel L. Whitton and Joe Fisher.

Since then I have read hundreds of books on all sorts of things but I still remember that book being what brought it all togther in my head, when it all made sense. I don't bat an eyelid when I walk into a house and find tarot cards and crystals everywhere, or when Deb or Chris do their energy healing or Mark starts doing whatever the hell it is he does when he starts fucking with ya head; after all, Irene pinpointed places in my head and neck that were in trouble a month before I was diagnosed with MS, and 4 months before the MRI showed the location of the lesions, in my neck and head. And all she did was wave her hands over me.

I think that being an energy healer is really the opposite of what the Llewellyn Journal talks about in this article - Psychic Vampires, although Chris can be rather moody when he's been wearing his Hookers Bastard t-shirt. He said it himself. Perhaps a case of what you are portraying being made real? The more I read about these naughty vamps, the more I realise that everyone IS one to some extent. What matters is how much taking you do versus how much giving, and what kind it is. And no, doing "charitable" stuff for public consumption and approbation doesn't cut it. Neither does killing people in the name of whatever deity you are hung up on.

Ok, ok I'm getting to it.

Is what the charismatic religious preachers tap into to elicit fervent worship an extreme form of psychic vampirism? And if this is so, are they not using something more along the lines of this so-called New Age spirituality rather than orthodox religion? Yet they still call it witchcraft?

Ha!

Even good Catholic, The Venerable Bede back in the 7th century CE wrote about reincarnation. Of course, he lived in a time when Christ's teachings on the subject hadn't yet been doctored for the masses.

I think it was in Joel Whitton's book that I read how when people die, the heaven they experience is the one they have spent their life visualising. A bit like that movie I was yapping about a few weeks ago - What Dreams May Come. In this movie, they created their Heaven to look the way they wanted.

And why not?

I think I'll go to bed now and work on my Heaven. Tonight I have to add the endless flowing alcohol, the bowls full of chocolate, pots and pots of er pot, the seven gorjus blokes at my beck and call and a body like Shakira. For me, not for the blokes.



Now tell me I don't have any class.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Bill Shakespeare, Hamlet.