I`ve considered various arguments and speculations concerning the features of the World. But why is there a World at all? Why is anything there to have the features we argue and speculate about ….. or any other features, any features at all? Why is there something rather than nothing? We cannot plausibly argue that this is an illegitimate question owing to the fact that if there were nothing we should not be here to ask it. After all, essentially the same arguement could be addressed to the astronomer who asked why the sun had planets or to the biologist who inquired into the origin of life, and we all agree that questions about the origin of the planets or of life are legitimate questions. It does not follow, however, that the question, why is there something rather than nothing? is a legitimate question, and it is undeniable that in some respects it is strikingly unlike questions about the origin of the planets or of life.

The philosopher who asks why there is anything at all faces a difficulty to which nothing in the enquiries of our astronomer and our biologist corresponds. Before there was life, before there were planets, there were already lots of things, and the problem of explaining the origin of planets or the origin of life is just the problem of explaining how those already existing things interacted to produce the planets or to produce life. But before there was anything ….. if indeed the world `before` makes any sense in this context ….. there was, ofcourse, nothing. And how can `nothing`serve as the basis of an explanation? If nothing exists then nothing is going on. If nothing exists, then there is nothing that has any properties that can be used in giving an explanation as can the properties of a `pre-planetary` nebula surrounding the sun or the properties of the `pre-biotic soup` that some have said was the arena within which life developed. `Nothing` has no parts that could interact with another or display contrasting properties. For that matter, `nothing` has no parts that could fail to interact with one another or fail to display contrasting properties.

In fact the word `nothing` is not a name at all, although our use of the word in quotes in the last few sentenses might suggest that it is something like a name. Surrounding the word `nothing` with quotes makes the word look as if it were supposed to function as a sort of nickname for a vast emptiness or an enormous vacuum. But to regard the word `nothing` as functioning in that way would be to misunderstand it. To say that there is nothing is to say that there isn`t anything, not even a vast emptiness. If there were a vast emptiness, there would be no material objects ….. no atoms or elementary particles or anything made of them …. but there nevertheless would be something: the vast emptiness.

If it seems implausible to suppose that an emptiness is something, a thing, consider the fact that we have qualified this emptiness with an adjective `vast`. To say of something that it is vast is to say that it has a size, and only a thing can have a size ….. or any other property or feature or characteristic. One can of course see why someone would say that if there were only a vast emptiness there would be nothing. For that matter, one can see why someone would say that if there were no furniture or other large, solid objects in a room the room contained `nothing` or there was `nothing in` the room. It`s completely empty, you would probably regard it as a tedious joke if someone replied that you were mistaken because the room contained lots of air and water vapour and millions of dust motes. Nevertheless, what the tedious humorist said would be true. And the same applies to the vast emptiness. Nevertheless, it would be true that there was still a vast emptiness, for spatial extent would still exist, and there couldn`t even be spatial extent if there were really nothing.

The question `why is there life on Earth?`may be difficult, but it is easy enough to see in a very general way what sort of thing would be an answer to it. The question would be answered by someone`s showing how a state of affairs in which there were no living things but lots of non-living things developed into a state of affairs in which there were both non-living things and living things. The person who answered the question would show how non-living things interacted and came together and arranged themselves to produce living things. No one is going to show how non-existant things interacted and came together and rearranged themselves to produce existent things.

The strangeness of the question, if not it`s difficulty, doubtless explains why it has occured only to philosophers. One might expect that the religions of the World would have offered various explanations of why there was something rather than nothing. But it is in fact only under the impetus provided by philosophical speculation that any religion has provided an explanation, be it profound or silly, plausible or implausible, of the fact that there is something rather than nothing. It is true that the adherants of many religions tell stories that our culture describes as `creation myths`. It is often said that these stories are primitive attempts to explain the beginnings of things. I am doubtful about whether these stories really were attempts to explain the beginnings, but I do not propose to go into that question. The point I want to make is that none of these stories even pretends to answer the question, Why should there be anything at all? In the Hebrew story, God, at least, is on stage when the play begins. If an alternative translation is correct, a `heaven` and a formless, empty, watery `earth`are also present. It is clear, therefore, that if all the creation stories that any religion tells are like these, none of the stories addresses the question why there should be anything at all. This does not mean that no religion has ever had anything to say about why there is something rather than nothing, for it may be that some religion has had something to say about this question that is unrelated to or goes beyond the creation story it tells. And in a sense–but only in a sense–this is the case. It is the case because many religions have co-existed with philosophical speculation and have absorbed some of the ways of thinking generated by philosophical speculation.

In Christian Europe, for example, there was an intimate relation between philosophy and the Christian religion, a relation that lasted in one form or another from almost the begginings of Christianity till the eighteenth century. And many of the Christian philosophers belonging to one strand or another of this tradition were aware of this question `Why should there be anything at all? and attempted to answer this question from a Christian perspective. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these philosophers gave answers to this question that incorporated many Christian elements, even if they were never simply dictated by Christianity. Nevertheless, the investigations of these philosophers were philosophical investigations and stemmed at least in large part from philosophical motives: the discussion of the question may have belonged to Christian philosophy, but it certainly belonged to Christian philosophy and not to any other aspect of the Christian religion.

The same point could be made in relation to Jewish and Muslim philosophy. The philosophical traditions on which Christian, Jewish, and Muslim have drawn are Greek in origin and antedate Christianity and Islam. And if these roots do not antedate Judaism, they certainly antedate any Jewish concern with speculative philosophical questions. Why is there a World? Why are we here? How did we get here? A fascinating topic of discussion that will probably take eons of time for us to find the answer.

G xx

Philosophy literally is the love of wisdom, but that definition probably isn`t very informative. In my view philosophy is best thought of as an activity, an enterprise that largely consists in seeking wisdom through exploration. So the philosophic Enterprise has a mission not unlike that of the Starship Enterprise. Metaphysics – literally, “after physics” – is the branch of philosophy that explores the nature of existance.

Why explore at all? Because travel broardens the mind. When we visit other places and other people, we often encounter different ways of living, and this provokes us to examine our own lives anew. If we are objective and reasonable in this examination, sometimes we will conclude that there is more than one way to live, sometimes we will conclude that the way other people do things is not the way for us, and sometimes we will conclude that we ought to adopt that other way of living. So travel isn`t just about exploring other people and places, it`s about exploring ourselves and testing our limits. Ofcourse, not everyone who travels is objective and reasonable – sometimes travelers think they already know how to live and that the only possible interaction with those who think differently is to convert them. But in general, travelers are more likely to examine their lives than those stay – at – homes who presume that home and home ways are best. Nor are stay – at – homes usually enlightened merely by being told about other places. Travel enriches the mind because it makes other places real – it enables the traveler (temporarily at least) to detach themselves from the comfortable familiarity of home, to try something different on for size. And as any traveler knows, living away from home works even better, allowing genuine immersion in a different place. It is human nature to want what is familiar and to complain about what is not, and one needs time to get over those prejudices and see the new surroundings as they really are.

Star Trek asks us to imagine with hope, a future in which we have thoroughly explored the Earth and learned its lessons. By the twenty-third century, Earth has achieved peaceful, enlightened, worldwide government, with an end to all forms of discrimination based on sex, race, and species membership. Naturally enough, the boundaries of exploration have been extended into outer space. And just as early explorers on Earth discovered other human life and human civilizations, the explorers of outer space discover extraterrestrial civilizations. Exploring this world has broadened the human mind, and we should expect that the exploration of other planets, other worlds, will broaden it further.

There is one significant limitation on the mission of the starship Enterprise – it cannot discover what is not actually there. Hence it may be that important alternatives to accepted ways of living and thinking are overlooked, simply because no one has ever tried to live or think that way. This is where philosophy enters the picture: philosophers try to examine all the possibilities. Whereas the starship Enterprise traverses outer space, the philosophic Enterprise traverses logical space, visiting various possible worlds – that is, sets of internally consistant conceivable ways that things might be. It stays as long on each possible world as is appropriate, long enough to get a feel for the place. Its continuing mission: to boldly go where few human minds have gone before. And occasionally to return home, richer for the experience, since the major goal of such travel, remains the exploration of ourselves, the exploration of inner space! I feel that this is the reason why I find the human mind so fascinating and have studied human phsychology for most of my adulthood.

This activity is not easy. Not only is it difficult to discover different possibilities, it is even harder to suspend your home beliefs and customs long enough to engage strange new worlds seriously. Yet that is what philosophers must do, and proper philosophical training is a slow process of release from one`s former prejudices. One method that philosophers use for this purpose is that of thought experiments – experiments we conduct solely in our imagination. Devising such experiments is something of an aquired skill, as is imagining the experimental situations with sufficient vividness, and that`s where the appropriate fiction – engages our imaginative faculties. This is the role of Star Trek in “doing philosophy.” Many of the situations in Star Trek resemble those in the thought experiments of philosophers, and watching a Star Trek scenario unfold forces us to entertain notions that our home prejudices would otherwise blind us to. For fifty minutes or so, we get to live in a different world, to try it on for size.

Looking at philosophy through the lens of Star Trek is a strategy I have adopted with some success, but here I am going to turn the tables and look at Star Trek through the lens of philosophy. I neither praise Star Trek nor bury it. There is much to ponder in the Star Trek series: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager, and the motion picture series. My interest is in showing how an introductory grasp of philosophy can lead you deeper into Star Trek, since Star Trek is by its nature so deeply philosophical.

Two brief remarks about the diverse discipline of philosophy. First I am part of the Analytic or “Anglo-American” school of philosophy, and moreover accept naturalism – roughly, the view that philosophy is and ought to be continuous with the natural sciences, since both enterprises employ the combination of reason and empirical investigation. Hence the philosophical lens with which I look at Star Trek, with particular emphasis on the scientific and technological devices and processes it depicts, is not representative of the whole of philosophy. For example, some philosophers think it`s hopeless to take an objective, scientific approach to studying the nature of the mind, that one must start instead from the inside – that is, from the subjective, phenomenological nature of mental experience. Other philosophers would be interested in the mysticism of Vulcans, Bajorans, and the Native American Commander Chakotay. Still other philosophers would be interested in the examination of Star Trek as mythology, as “text,” or as “cultural icon.” I am none of those philosophers. Second, even within the analytic, naturalist approach there is substantive disagreement over many philosophical issues, and I am sometimes in a minority. I shall often present and argue for what I take to be the most defensible position on an issue, but this should not be taken as representative of what all philosophers think. That said, I will consider the important views on an issue even if I must ultimately reject them.

As for metaphysics, it can be relatively pure or relatively applied. Star Trek raises some pure metaphysical issues, as in The Next Generation: “Where No One Has Gone Before,”  when young Wesley Crusher wonders whether thought is the basis for all existance. The Next Generation is in fact my favourite series.

G xx

A sighting in Delphos, Kansas, in 1971, is one of the great cases that combines credible multiple witnesses with physical trace evidence, goverment involvement, and residual physical biological effects that something anomalous took place. In fact, the case won an award in 1972 from the National Enquirer for being the best UFO case of the year backed up by scientific evidence.

On November 2nd, 1971, at about 6.30pm, sixteen year old Ron Johnson along with his dog, was out tending the family`s sheep when he saw a mushroom-domed, disk shaped object descending through the trees on the family`s land. The object hovered only a few feet off the ground and so amazed the boy that he tried to get a better look. But the brightness of the object forced him to squint, so he could see no specific details on the surface except for the shape. He remembered that he did hear a machine like sound as the object descended towards the ground. Momentarily blinded by the object, which had now begun to rise, Johnson quickly regained his sight and ran inside the house to get his parents. His parents alerted, came outside where they saw the object as it ascended still bright and about the size of the distant moon in the sky.

Their shock turned to utter amazement, however, when they saw that on the ground just below where the object was hovering there was a glowing ring that looked crystalline. The same type of glow was on the leaves of the trees where the object had descended. Johnson`s mother touched the substance and remarked that it felt slick, but her fingers suddenly became numb.

The next morning, the family returned to the sight where they had seen the ring and discovered that the glowing ring was still there. It had rained the night before and the ground was wet everywhere except for the surface of the ring. It looked like the soil where the ring was simply shed the water or was impervious to it. The ring remained through the winter snow, but again, unlike the surrounding soil, the soil where the ring was would not admit any water. Snow sat on the ring as if it were the surface of a car. The soil remained impervious to water.

THE STORY CIRCULATES

Within days, a local newspaper picked up the story, this time calling it a UFO incident, and the news about the ring on the soil also attracted the interest of both the county sheriff and undersheriff, as well as the highway patrol. They, too, filed a report, remarking that the doughnut-shaped ring was completely dry despite the rain the night before and that the discolouration of the soil matched the `slight` discolouration of the limbs of the trees above the area where the witness had said the object had descended. Photographs of the ring even after almost four years still showed that the soil had a whitish colour.

The entire incident was investigated by Ted Phillips, who photographed the area and turned soil samples over to chemist Phyllis Buddinger. When UFO Hunters investigated this case, they evaluated the soil sample and were able to report that, forty years after the incident, the soil was still impervious to water. They also uncovered two facts of interest. First, the witness Ron Johnson, although he did not report it at the time, revealed that he could not account for a period of time between his trying to get a better glimpse of the object and his realization that the object was ascending through the trees. He does not know what happened during that missing time and has been reluctant to recover those memories. Two, he later discovered that his dog was in discomfort around his snout. He took the dog to the vet, who was able to retrieve a long, metalic, insect-like object that looked like it had been implanted into the dog. Whatever it was, Johnson has kept the object to this very day, still reluctant to explore what that object might be!

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CASE!

This was a case that combined a family of witnesses, a police report verifying the existance of physical trace evidence on the ground, independant corroboration that the imperviousness of the soil continued for over forty years, a case of missing time, and the physical trace evidence of the implant of a metalic object inside the witness`s dog`s snout. Certainly these facts make the Delphos case one of the better cases in American UFO history.

Watch the skies closely folks, you never know!!

G xx

In December 1972 an Eastern Airlines Tristar jetliner, flight 401, crashed into a Florida swamp. One hundred and one people died in the crash, including the pilot, Robert Loft, and the flight engineer, Donald Repo. On more than twenty occasions thereafter, crew members of other Eastern Tristars-especially those that had been fitted with parts salvaged from the wreck of flight 401. People have seen entirely lifelike apparitions of the pilots Loft and Repo. In some cases the apparitions were identified by people who had known the two men and in some cases by reference to photographs.

RESURRECTION MARY!

For a number of years motorists driving along Archer Avenue in Chicago`s South Side have reported giving rides to a beautiful young hitchhiker, a blond wearing a white gown that seems to date from the 1920`s or 1930`s. The drivers are said to be mostly young men and the girl often jumps into their cars uninvited, saying that she needs a ride home. Home turns out to be the Resurrection Cemetry, at 7200 South Archer Avenue, and when the car draws level with it, the hitchhiker gets out ( sometimes opening the car door, sometimes passing right through it ). She walks up to the wrought iron gates, and passes through them, disappearing into thin air once inside the cemetery.

Resurrection Mary, as the specter has been named, is said to be the ghost of a young Polish girl who was killed in an auto accident while being driven home from a dance in the Willowbrook Ballroom on Archer Avenue in 1931 and burried in her party dress and dancing shoes in Resurrection Cemetery.

One night in December 1977 a motorist noticed a young woman dressed in white standing inside the Cemetery gates. She was looking out and holding onto the iron bars of the gates. Thinking that the girl had been inadvertently locked inside the cemetery, the motorist called the police, but by the time that the patrol car arrived the girl had vanished. The officer beamed his searchlight into the cemetery but saw nothing. He and the motorist did notice, though, that two of the iron bars in the gate were bent apart and that at the point where they were bent were the marks, seemingly etched into the iron, of two small hands!!

THE SILENT HITCHHIKER

One evening in October 1979 Mr Roy Fulton, who was a carpet fitter at that time, was driving back home from a darts match in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, here in England. As he neared the village of Stanbridge, he stopped to pick up a young hitchhiker, a man of pale complextion, with short curly hair and tan trousers with a white shirt that had an old fashioned round collar. When Mr Fulton asked him where he was going, the young man just pointed down the road. Mr Fulton thought his passenger might be a deaf-mute so he drove on in silence. After driving a mile or two, though, at a steady 45mph, he thought a cigarette might help to break the ice, and turned to offer one to his passenger. The passenger seat was empty! The young man had silently vanished from the moving van, whose door had never been opened. Mr Fulton drove to his local pub, ordered a large scotch to steady his nerves, and told his story. The landlord of the pub and the Dunstable police inspector there, both said later that they believed Mr Fulton had experienced something strange.

G xx

The same folk that worked on what would become the internet, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), also instituted a potentially chilling project in the 1960`s called Project Pegasus, a time traveler training program. According to one of the self described time travelers, author Andrew Basiago, DARPA had been researching and then developing Nikola Tesler`s teleportation theories. Ultimately, they were able to come up with a plan for a proof of the concept of time travel, but they needed time travelers, or chrononauts, as Biago says they were called.

PERSONAL EVIDENCE OF TIME TRAVEL.

The training program lasted at least a decade, culminating in 1981, when the first missions were launched. Basiago says, and offers evidence in the form of a photograph, that he was transported back in time to the Gettysburg battle field during the American civil war. He says that he was also transported to the planet Mars twice, once alone and once with his trainer, CIA operative Courtney Hunt. And Basiago has said, is inhabited, and American intelligence and space agency`s have dealt with its inhabitants.

One theory among conspiracy theorists is that time travel has been going on for a while and that history is already being tampered with. As an example, some conspiracy theorists cite the 2000 presidential election in Florida where former CIA director and fourty-first president George H W Bush had already ordered vote tampering in the past to ensure that his son George W Bush would win the Florida electoral vote.

More than one UFO researcher has suggested that what are refered to as extratarrestrial space travelers are really time travelers either from some other planet or from right here on Earth. There is lots of intriguing, though hardly any dispositive, evidence. For example in Egyptian, Sumarian, and Mayan hieroglyphics, there are symbols of craft that look like a modern helicopter, a human being or humanoid in a space suit of today, and craft that look intriguingly like a space shuttle. In fact, Legendary Times magazine editor Giorgio Tsoukalis wears a piece of jewelry that is a model of a bird? When Tsoukalis appeared as a guest on UFO Hunters, he explained his theory that what many paleoanthropologists called a bird was really an aircraft.

UFO Hunters tested this theory and created a scale model with bolsa wood to see whether it might actually glide back to Earth if launched from a catapult device. Would the wings suport it? Would the odd-looking tail assembly on the artifact act like a modern aircraft tail assembly? This was the challenge.

UFO Hunters modeled the aircraft, launched it from a catapult, and, to everyones delight, the bird space shuttle-like craft climed into the air. Then, because it was unpowered, it settled back on its tail assembly that stabilized it. Its delta wings provided the lift for the nose to rise as the craft settled easily down to the ground in a perfect landing, just like the space shuttle. This doesn`t prove the theory of UFO time travel, but it showed that if a time traveler visited the past in a shuttle-like lander and stayed, imparting a jump-start to Mayan Inca technology, the bird artifact might have been the result of a cargo-cult memorialization.

Another intruguing part of the story came from Philip Corso, who claimed he saw a strange, other worldly craft in the New Mexico desert at the Army Misile Proving Grounds in Red Canion in the 1950s. Corso said that he was flying over the misile range in an army Pipa Cub, he looked down into the scrub bush and chaparral landscape below him and saw a shiny metallic object on the ground. It wasn`t huge, but he said, clearly the size that a human being could pilot. Corso told his pilot to head back to base, and when he landed he got his staff car and drove out to that spot in the desert.

The object was still there, almost shimmering in the desert heat. Corso got out of his car and approuched the object, wary about touching it, but, after his experience with the Roswell cargo at Fort Riley ten years earlier, more curious than wary. He touched the surface of the object, feeling a little disoriented because the object seemed to be fuzzing around the edges as if it were winking in and out of reality. It was surprisingly cold to the touch. He noted its oval shape and stepped back as the thing began to hum, as if reacting to his presence. Then right before his eyes, the object simply disappeared.

Corso was a man who kept his secrets close while he was in uniform and did not make a big report of what he saw. Instead, four years later when he was head of Foreign Technology at the Army Office of Reseach and Development in the Pentagon, he told former Nazi rocket scientist Hermann Oberth about what he saw in the desert that day. Hermann Oberth, once quoted as having said that the Germans were helped in their technological development by people from another world, suggested to Corso that it might be that the craft he saw was not an extraterrestrial spacecraft but actually a `time ship`.

It was a statement that stayed with Corso for the rest of his life, and during his television appearance on NBC`s Dateline in 1997, fourty years after the incident, he told correspondent John Hockenbury the story of the craft in the desert. It was one of the most memorable moments of Corso`s appearance.

TEMPORAL DISLOCATION

There have been many other hints concerning the relationship between UFOs and temperal dislocation, as if time manipulation were part of their ability to navigate through space and, thus time. Witnesses have reported short periods of missing time, moments when they could not account for the passage of time. Clocks mysteriously stop that would not because they are not electric and should not have been affected by an electromagnetic field. Engines that cut off when a UFO passes overhead mysteriously start up again as if they were never stopped but only hesitated in time and were running the entire time. Plants and trees touched by beams from UFOs seem to age years in an instant. And UFOs themselves simply don`t accelerate as if they are gathering speed. They disappear in a direction in an instant as if they`ve passed into another time continuum.

Perhaps if ever the secret of UFOs becomes public knowledge, the secret of temperal manipulation will be exposed. At that point, it is to be hoped that mankind will hopefully be ready for that astounding knowledge and won`t, like the Krell people of the motion picture `Forbidden Planet`, destroy that population with that power.

G xx

Three days after I lost Andrew, he came to me as I lay in the dark. I was trying to shut out this horrible nightmare that was now my life. I was definitely suicidal and so very close to taking a full weeks worth of prescription drugs for pain. I have a very bad hip and spine, and with age, it`s getting worse. I have to take many different drugs to keep me going. I was in such deep shock that I actually didn`t want anything more to do with life, without him! This vision was Andrews way of saving my life and I`ll treasure the gift and the vision always.

This was my very first vision of Andrew after he`d died. He had come to give me a very special gift from above.

It was a Sunday evening and I was in bed in complete shock and disbelief that I`d lost him, wanting the whole world to just leave me alone and go away. Suddenly I realised that I was looking at Andrew standing at the edge of the bed and he was smiling at me, but also his face was shining wet with tears. He used sign language to say `No mum please don`t do it! I love you` I looked at where he was pointing, it was at the bedside table where I had laid out all the tablets, I was about to get up and get some water to take them with, when he came to me!

In this vision, I couldn`t hear him speak but I could read what he was saying to me. The vision of him was so clear that I could even see what colour shirt he was wearing, it was his red Liverpool football shirt and jeans. I could see that he was holding a large silver picture frame, the photo was one taken on his wedding day, it shows me stood with Andrew and his dad. I was puzzled because I hadn`t seen the photograph before and it was a really lovely photograph. He kept mouthing the word photograph to me very clearly, then he blew me a kiss and signed I love you, then he faded out and was gone. I realised at once what he was doing, he really came to save me from doing something stupid with the only option open to him, and that was to give me that very clear vision of him.

I got hold of those tablets and tipped them down the toilet and have never thought that way ever since that day. My son literally saved my life, from the after life. I still find it just as hard to cope without him, but it comforts me greatly knowing that I still have him with me.

Now back to that photograph! The next day after the vision, I saw Tracey his wife coming to call on me and she was carrying something big in a bag. When she came in, we both realised that it was the first time she`d walked to our house without Andrew, all those little `first`s` after a death are so painful! We cried, but eventually pulled ourselves together. `I`ve brought you something that Andrew had organised for you before he died, I had to bring it to you after he died and he told me to promise not to let you see it till after the funeral` I opened the bag and inside was that same photograph that he was holding in my vision. It is an absolutely stunning big silver ornate frame and the picture is one I`d never seen before because a friend of the family had taken it.

I told Tracey about the vision that I`d had the day before, and we both broke down sobbing, but at the same time amongst such total devastation, we were both so comforted because he had proved  to me, and so soon after he`d died, that the afterlife is very real. It is that simple piece of metaphysical and spiritual proof that has kept me alive ever since! It has made me value so, so much more of what we all have here! At the same time Andrew and his loving nature and beautiful soul has also proved to me that God is very real. Take it from me, please make the most of the people that you love, and tell them every day that you love them, because you never know when it`s all going to be snatched away from you. I talk to Andrew every day and the knowledge that he can see and hear me keeps me sane! He`s given me so much proof in the last six years since his death. Needless to say! his mum is very proud of him!

G xx

It was World Cancer Day this week and I decided to post a photograph of my son Andrew on my Facebook page in memory of him, with a message for him to go with it. As you all know, I lost him to cancer on the fourth of May 2009, he was thirty one. Obviously I miss him terribly and I was upset as I was writing his message.

That night as I was getting ready for bed, Geoff came into the room to comfort me as he`d heard me crying. He sat on the bed with me and just held me in his arms till I managed to calm myself down. I felt a hand stroke my hair and then my neck, it wasn`t Geoff because he`d got up from the bed and was trying to cheer me up by telling me silly jokes! I told him what I could feel, he just told me that I was imagining it, he doesn`t believe in life after death despite all the proof I`ve had.

I said aloud to Andrew ” Give your dad a sign that it was you Andrew and that you did stroke my hair and neck! ” Suddenly the jewelry box that belonged to my mother started playing music, that doesn`t sound strange does it? But it has been broken for 55 years! It won`t play the music and the key to it won`t turn around to wind it up! Geoff picked it up and saw the key turning and the little ballerina inside the glass front was turning round.

Now that box only played the music, before it was broken! by winding it up with the key and you also had to open the lid. The lid was closed and the box is kept on the top of the wardrobe, I can`t reach it! Geoff just looked at me in shock! I said to Andrew ” Make it stop and then start it up again to prove to your dad that it is you doing it sweety! he did exactly that. Geoff went very pale and just went down stairs to get a cup of tea for his nerves!! I love it when Andrew gets in touch with me but it`s fantastic when he does it in front of his dad! Yet he still refuses to believe in life after death!

When Geoff finally came to bed, as he walked into the room the light switched off then on again three times. After it came back on again for the third time I said do it again Andrew! and yes! he did it again! This time he actually made his dad laugh and I sensed that deep down he really does believe sometimes, he is just one of those people who needs irrefutable proof, even then he doesn`t admit to it, he still tries to explain it away. But I think it`s great fun when Andrew and my parents play games and give me proof. It is a wonderful comfort knowing for definite that our souls go back home to God and that we can still take care and watch over our families. I have written to each member of my family, letters explaining what I will do for them to prove that I`m still with them and Geoff is under strict instructions of when to give them to my children after I go home to God.

G xx

THE STRANGENESS OF TIME!

Most theories of prophecy concentrate on what are professed to be ambiguities in our conventional notion of what the future is and claim that the future either unfolds or coexists with the present. A somewhat novel approach to the problem, focusing on ambiguities in what we call the present, was proposed in 1934 by H. F. Saltmarsh.

Saltmarsh begins by pointing out that what we conventionally name the present is nothing of the kind. For when we see something –  a falling leaf or the prick of a pin for instance, we regard our perception and what it reveals as occurring simultaineously in time. But sensory impressions do not occur all at once. We feel the pinprick an instant after it happens; the leaf touches the ground an instant before we register the landing. In addition to the time it takes for the sensory impressions to reach our brain is the time it takes our brain to process the signals when they arrive. So based on Saltmarsh`s proposal, our perception of anything happening is inevitably a bit later than the event itself. Consequently, we have two kinds of present. The interval between these two presents might well be considered a third level, or intermediate present, in which events can occur or begin to occur. We can further conjecture that it is in the third level of time that certain people receive intimations of the future.

Because all transitions take time, we can hardly suppose that the contents of the intermediate present pass into our awareness intact or unchanged. We can therefore say that the intermediate present, like the real present, is unavailable to ordinary consciousness and that its contents can never be quite the same as those of our normal awareness. It is in this nether area between an event and the perception of it that precognition might occur.

SPOOKY G`S PREDICTIONS!

Nearly four years ago I had two wonderful premonitions about my two sons and my two daughter-in-laws. We were visiting Jenna and Geoffrey one weekend, when suddenly I got a strange feeling as we parked the car. When we greeted each other the feeling became very strong especially when I hugged my daughter-in-law Jenna. It was very like the feeling you get when you drive over a hill at speed, it`s that tummy tickle that you get as the car lifts in the air, or like the feeling of great excitement. As I hugged her I saw a picture in my mind of my son Geoffrey changing a baby boys nappy, then Jenna cradling the baby in her arms. I said to her ” Jenna you`re going to have a baby in March ” this was in the summer the year before. I whispered to her that the baby is a little boy. She looked at me completely stunned and said ” I`m not pregnant G! am I Geoffrey?. ” Geoffrey just looked at me and said `spooky G strikes again ` then smiled and told Jenna he was going to the chemist right away to get a pregnancy test for her, because he knew that I`ve had these premonitions before. She was baffled because she didn`t know how I could tell, she didn`t feel any different. They had just moved house and a baby wasn`t planned for a few years.

While he was out, I got a piece of paper and wrote the baby`s name down, Jack Andrew Geoffrey. I then said that I had written the name and I folded the paper and locked it in a little box that I keep important papers in, driving licence and so on. I told her that I won`t show it to her until after the baby is born and that I didn`t want her to tell us what names she was going to choose. She laughed and just said ” But I`m not pregnant G!! I`m sure of it!! ” Then Geoffrey came home and immediately told her to do the test. She came into the kitchen looking as white as a sheet and showed Geoffrey the test, it was positive and it told her that she was three weeks pregnant! The tests are amazing these days, there was nothing so accurate when I was having my children. She cried with shock and Geoffrey was dancing around the kitchen with her, they were both thrilled. Geoffrey asked what I`d written, but I wouldn`t tell them because that would have spoilt the surprise! When she was twenty weeks, she went for the usual scan, when the doctor checks to see that everything is going well. She told them that they both wanted to know what they were having? and yes, it was a boy!

The day they came home with him she asked me for the bit of paper with his name on it. She said that they had decided to call him Jack Andrew Geoffrey. I showed her the paper and she burst into tears with amazement. She was so shocked!

Three weeks after I`d told Jenna that she was pregnant, the same thing happened for my other son Adam and his wife. Laura and Adam came to see me when I was poorly with flu. I said to them that she`s pregnant with a boy and due in March just like Jenna was. I actually saw the date this time, the number 4. I told them that I could see a baby wrapped in a blue shawl in Adams arms! Adam just laughed and said ” Mum that`s what we came to tell you, we`ve just come from the doctor`s because Laura has been feeling a bit sickly! ” Again the baby wasn`t planned.

I did the same thing for them about the baby`s name and told them that I didn`t want to know his name when they had decided on it. Laura was absolutely thrilled because she`d always wanted a son for her first baby. Then I was able to tell her, before she`d found out! how far along she was. The name I wrote down and put in my little box was Alexander Daniel Andrew. I told them that I would show them the paper when he was born. I was thrilled to find out that I was right again, and he was born at 3am on the 4th of March. The doctors had told her that the baby was due on the 20th of March! The day he was born we went to visit them at the hospital, I handed them the box and told her to open it, but first I wanted her to tell us what they had decided on for his name. I wish you could have seen their faces when they read the piece of paper. Laura and Jenna actually have the piece of paper framed at home. Adam`s comment when he told me the baby`s name was ” You watch Laura, I bet she`s right, she`s strange is my mum. We call her spooky G! ”

While we were with them, Laura`s mum came in with a present for the baby. Laura opened it and it was a beautiful hand knitted baby blue shawl from her grandmother. We all had fun that day and fell about laughing because I got that bit right as well.

G xx