Michel de Nostredame, sixteenth-century French apothecary and seer, was the most famous visionary of them all. In 1994, in the Italian National Library in Rome, a manuscript believed to be by the man himself was discovered along with 80 mysterious paintings drawing heavily on the symbolism of the tarot. John Matthews and Wil Kinghan realized the implications of this work and, after much research, now bring it to fruition. For the first time, the astounding power of the prophecies is married to the predictive imagery of the tarot. Fresh translations from the original quatrains add another dimension to the readings making this, without question, the ultimate oracle from the primary prognosticator.  Come along on the 7th June to Watkins Bookshop at 6.30pm and hear all about this amazing discovery as well as getting your own signed copy.

June 20, 2012, at 6.00pm – Dr. Robert Forman – Enlightment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be

What if you spent years of your life seeking spiritual enlightenment, but were looking in the wrong place? Dr Robert Forman shows lucidly how traditional spiritual ideas are giving seekers a wrong and frustrating impression about spiritual enlightenment.  Enlightenment may not be what it‘s cracked up to be… but according to Dr. Forman, a complete life of spiritual well being can be yours! Told in often poetic prose, it offers new direction for people looking for a sane and healthy spiritual pathway in our increasingly confusing world.

Through metaphor, humor, vulnerability and achingly beautiful prose, Dr. Forman‘s book offers newfound hope to spiritual seekers everywhere. Join us on June 20th, meet the author and get your own signed copy.

"Navigating the Out of Body Experience" by Graham Nicholls

Graham Nicholls has had hundreds of out-of-body experiences and is a world-recognized expert on the subject and an experienced speaker on many areas of spirituality, art, and psychical research. Join us for the UK launch of Graham Nicholls’s new book, “Navigating the Out of Body Experience“, which includes exciting new techniques developed over more than two decades. He has explored the science in the area and found usable insights and approaches to maximise your chance of consistently leaving your body. The book includes his explanation of his G-Technique, Three-Dimensional System and even a specially designed questionnaire to help you get the most tailored programme from the book. Facebook event page.

Wolfgang Held was born in Germany in 1964. He worked for many years in the Mathematics and Astronomy section of the Goetheanum, where he now runs the publicity department. His latest book, ‘The Quality of Numbers One to Thirty-one’ explores the fascinating characteristics of numbers in relation to our lives. Throughout March we will be featuring selected edited extracts from this book. Today, the 26^th of March, we are looking at the number 26.

Pierre De Fermat

The great mathematician Pierre de Fermat demonstrated that something applies to 26 which is true of no other number. Only 26 has neighbouring numbers that are a square (25 = 52) and a cube number (27 = 33). There are square numbers and cube numbers that adjoin each other such as eight and nine, with the satisfying reflection of 23 and 32. Square numbers and cube numbers can also meet in one and the same number. The smallest number this applies to is 64, which is simultaneously 43 and 82. The privilege of being both a square and a cube number belongs to all those where the number of the square is itself a cube number. After 64 (where eight is itself the cube of two) this applies to 729, which is both 93 and also 272. In the whole realm of numbers, however, there is only a single occasion when a number occupies a gap between square and cube, between, as it were, two and three dimensions. And this is 26. As in other instances, Pierre de Fermat published this fact but concealed the proof – in order to challenge other mathematicians. However the proof was so complex that his contemporaries such as John Wallis and Kenelm Digby failed to substantiate Fermat’s thesis.

The 26 is thus characterised by its special position between distinctive neighbours. This allows us to find another quality of 26 that likewise relates to its location — the Latin alphabet comprising 26 letters. This most widespread of writing systems consists of 26 building blocks, to which some languages add their own accented letters.

One of the mysteries of cultural history is that 26 appears as the number of written script a millennium prior to the Latin alphabet in the four Hebrew letters YHWH, the tetragram of the Creator God and Redeemer. As in other ancient scripts, vowels were not fixed in script, due to their high status. In Judaism, following the commandment ‘You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain’, this name YHWH cannot be uttered. Only the high priest was allowed to speak it at Yom Kippur, the highest festival. As this tradition was stopped after the destruction of Jerusalem in ad 70, the correct manner of speaking the sequence of consonants also vanished, so that it is unclear today whether we should say Yahweh or Yehovah. In accordance with ancient numerology, every letter corresponds with a numerical value. Many religious designations reveal something of their nature if one can decipher their numerical significance — which may seem surprising since the assignment occurs in a purely schematic way. In the case of YHWH, the values are ten for yod, twice five for heh and six for wav, giving 26. Thus 26 is the number of the inexpressible God. It is also interesting that in the biblical account, 26 generations extend from the Creation to the moment when Moses receives the script in the form of the Torah, so that something divine becomes earthly. This nature of script is expressed in the Greek word ‘hieroglyph’, which is a translation of the Egyptian ‘sacred sign’.

The Quality of Numbers One to Thirty-one by Wolfgang Held is available for £7.99 from Watkins Books http://www.watkinsbooks.com/catalog/product/view/id/10408/s/the-quality-of-numbers-one-to-thirty-one/

Wolfgang Held was born in Germany in 1964. He worked for many years in the Mathematics and Astronomy section of the Goetheanum, where he now runs the publicity department. His latest book, ‘The Quality of Numbers One to Thirty-one’ explores the fascinating characteristics of numbers in relation to our lives. Throughout March we will be featuring selected edited extracts from this book. Today, the 21^st of March, we are looking at the number 21.

The cannons thundered 21 times when the Crown Princess of Sweden said ‘I do’ in June 2010, and 21 times when President Obama was sworn in. And there is a 21-gun salute when the Queen Elizabeth visits a foreign state. Why 21?

When sailing ships were equipped with cannon in the fourteenth century, they were not allowed to enter harbour primed for battle. They therefore fired off the powder from their cannon without cannon balls, and this sign of peace led to the gun salute. Seven such shots were fired since these early battle ships each had seven cannon. Possibly because cannon on land could fire more quickly, the seven salute shots became 3 × 7 shots, and have remained so to this day.

But there are also deeper reasons for this twenty-one-fold thunder: twenty-one is a grand number, less in terms of quantity than due to its inner properties. It is the product of three and seven. Beside the three totals produced from opposite numbers when playing dice (1 + 6, 2 + 5, 3 + 4 = 21), three and seven are also both powerful numbers in their own right. Three is the number of the spirit, of the divine Trinity, and seven the number of development, of time. Thus 21 is the union of spirit and time. At the age of 21 the human spirit stands fully within time, or in other words in the earthly here and now, and has reached the age of majority in the fullest sense.

Whenever an enumerated list appears in religious texts, the number invoked is rarely chance. Probably the biggest single list that appears in the Bible itemises 21 qualities of wisdom in the Book of Wisdom, in the Apocrypha. These are, one can say, a 21-gun salute as hymn of praise to the divine value of wisdom. A spirit is said to live in wisdom that is ‘intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent and pure and most subtle’. (Wisd.7:22f) The human capacity for wisdom is nothing other than the faculty for drawing from the world of ideas, the eternal world, something that fills language and memory and is thus introduced into temporal conditions. Eternity is brought into time through the interplay of seven and three, the two factors of 21.

In Tarot cards widely used to interpret or predict destiny, the twenty-first card is highest in worth, and represents the world or the whole universe.

The Quality of Numbers One to Thirty-one by Wolfgang Held is available for £7.99 from Watkins Books http://www.watkinsbooks.com/catalog/product/view/id/10408/s/the-quality-of-numbers-one-to-thirty-one/

Wolfgang Held was born in Germany in 1964. He worked for many years in the Mathematics and Astronomy section of the Goetheanum, where he now runs the publicity department. His latest book, ‘The Quality of Numbers One to Thirty-one’ explores the fascinating characteristics of numbers in relation to our lives. Throughout March we will be featuring selected edited extracts from this book. Today, the 14^th of March, we are looking at the number 14.

The number 14 is twice seven, the second step in the seventimes table, and therefore, like that number, connected with time and development.

Salt

This is particularly apparent in human biography. School in Germany, Scandinavia and in Waldorf Schools begins during a child’s seventh year – that is, between the age of six and seven, when physical development is far enough advanced to allow intellectual development to begin, with writing, reading and arithmetic. At age 14 – or somewhat earlier today given good nutrition – soul maturity succeeds physical maturation, awakening in love for the opposite sex but also in enthusiasm for ideas and ideals. From being an ‘offspring’, one becomes a member of humankind. Thus it takes 14 years, or 14 steps, to come to belong fully to the human race. It is perhaps due to this that in the sixteenth century the idea formed of the 14 Stations of the Cross on the path to the Crucifixion. The sentencing of Christ, shouldering the cross and the first fall are the first three stations, while the fourteenth is the entombment of the body. Though enhanced in a great mythical image, this path also corresponds to the goal of becoming human. Another Christian tradition seems to be derived from this: the Catholic idea of the 14 holy helpers – saints and martyrs of the early Christian period to whom one can appeal at times of dire need.

Fourteen also surfaces as an important factor in the world of physics, in a realm quite opposite to the spiritual path of development. The French mathematician Auguste Bravais investigated the different means by which the tiniest particles in space can arrange themselves to form a crystal lattice. Table salt, for instance, forms a so-called ‘cubic face-centred lattice’. This means that the smallest structure is cube-shaped, with one atom respectively situated not only at the eight corners of such a conceived cube but also at the centre of the six faces or planes. Accordingly, a cube of this kind has 14 particles.

In Islamic number mysticism, this breadth of the number 14 is well known. There it is regarded as the number of the moon, since there are just about 14 days between new moon and full moon. It determines the rhythm in which the moon, as the bridge between earth and cosmos, grows to full size and fades away again to nothing. Thus 14 is a mediating rhythm between heaven and earth. Crystals, with their special relationship to the light, likewise stand in this heavenly-earthly axis, as do the birds we mentioned at the start.

The Quality of Numbers One to Thirty-one by Wolfgang Held is available for £7.99 from Watkins Books http://www.watkinsbooks.com/catalog/product/view/id/10408/s/the-quality-of-numbers-one-to-thirty-one/

How much does our ancestry shape our identity? How relevant is it to our lives today? In this highly practical and inspiring book, experienced family researcher Cherry Gilchrist takes us on a fascinating journey to the heart of who we really are and demonstrates how looking at our past can change the present.

Growing Your Family Tree: Tracing your roots and discovering who you are

‘It happened one summer night, a few years ago. I had been working on my Welsh line of ancestry, trying to figure out the branch of the tree which I could now trace back to my 3 x great-grandfather, Edward Owens of Abbeycwmhir, a soldier who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. All that night, my sleep was disturbed by what seemed like a babble of voices. I heard people chattering insistently, and I knew that they were my Welsh ancestors. I could not make out what they were saying, but I had the distinct impression that they wanted to be ‘found’ again, and that they wanted their story to be told.’ (Chapter Two: Growing Your Family Tree)

It was a shock when I discovered that ancestors are not just names in birth, marriage and death records, but may still be intimately connected to us. I had held out against family history, and laughed off my father’s pursuit of it until at a certain age my perspective changed. Then I became intensely curious about my ancestry, especially on my mother’s side; going up the female line had an intrinsic appeal. Taking the plunge into the world of genealogical websites, microfiches and dusty documents, I began to trace the past, and found myself in the middle of an exciting detective story. Names were wrested from the shadowy past, faces unexpectedly put to names when photos turned up, and stories of heroes and villains built from nuggets of evidence. Overall, I found lives which were examples of love and endurance. There were no noble names on this side of the family, but I didn’t need them – there was enough nobility of being to inspire my loyalty.

But family history doesn’t stop with the stories either, as my encounter with ‘the Welsh voices’ shows. Was I just a victim of my imagination? All over the world, I reasoned, in times past and present, people have made a connection with those that have gone before them, in what anthropologists now like to call ‘ancestor veneration’. Ancestors are seen as protecting, guiding, and sometimes even disruptive influences – but they form a part of ongoing human life. I discovered, on my travels, ceremonies on Bali and on Easter Island that celebrate and invite the presence of the ancestors. So perhaps our practice of family history is at root a form of this. And when I began to interview other family historians, in the process of writing this book, I found that many of them shared this view that our ancestors are, in some sense, still present in our lives. Whatever terms we see this in – as a living chain of DNA recognised deep in our bodies, as a web of spirits or an imprint of historical events that can never be erased from consciousness – it is powerful and inspiring, and may be a dimension that we can reinstate in our lives. Even the diagrammatic family tree is a version of the Tree of Life, which features in so many myths and in core spiritual practices.

The subsequent chain of events in my life showed to my own satisfaction that this was not just imagination on my part. When such contact with the ancestral chain is made, the course of events may change.

‘Within a couple of months extraordinary things started to happen. A seemingly random hit on a website for a Welsh chapel led me to finding two separate lots of new cousins, also direct descendants of Edward Owens, and still living in the same region as my ancestors in mid-Wales. I had previously thought that everyone had moved away from the area. When I met up with Harold, my third cousin, he shook my hand, looked deep into my eyes, and said, “You’re the first member of the family to come back for a hundred years.”’

***

About the Author: Cherry Gilchrist is the author of nearly thirty books on relationships, personal development and culture. She runs an annual course on life story writing at Marlborough Summer School. Cherry also works with patients at a local hospice, helping them to set down their life stories and she has participated in creating a training programme for new volunteers. Growing Your Family Tree is her latest book.

By Simon Small (Article from Watkins’ Mind Body Spirit magazine, issue 29, February 2012)

There is no escape from the Greatest Question.

Yet individuals can spend a lifetime refusing to acknowledge its existence; civilisations, eons.

Every now and again it forces its way into the open at a personal level, for most to be resolutely reburied as expeditiously as possible. Even more rarely, if ever, does a whole culture turn to look the Greatest Question firmly in the eye.

Star Pilgrim is a novel, set in the near future, about a civilisation that does just that. It is about an old, incredibly advanced alien race that has realised that only this question ultimately matters. It has become their all-consuming quest.

***

About the Author: Simon Small is chaplain to the Abbey House retreat centre in Glastonbury. He also works independently in the field of spirituality – writing books, leading retreats and seminars across the UK, and acting as a spiritual guide to individuals. Simon lives in Glastonbury UK with his wife, Jane. The great passion of his life (apart from Jane) is exploring and sharing the awesome mystery of existence. In this quest he is inspired by the great spiritual traditions and the insights of science and philosophy. “Star Pilgrim” is his latest book.

Wolfgang Held was born in Germany in 1964. He worked for many years in the Mathematics and Astronomy section of the Goetheanum, where he now runs the publicity department. His latest book, ‘The Quality of Numbers One to Thirty-one’ explores the fascinating characteristics of numbers in relation to our lives. Throughout March we will be featuring selected edited extracts from this book. Today, the 6^th of March, we are looking at the number 6.

If you catch single [snow]flakes on a cold sheet of glass and, keeping conditions cold, observe them under a simple microscope, something of the distinctive nature of six will be revealed. Every crystal, sometimes as compact as honeycomb, sometimes finely branching, will show a six-pointed star in millions of variations. More perfectly than in the growth of mineral crystals, these fleeting water crystals reveal and embody hexagonal symmetry; and one can observe this wealth of snow crystal forms for hours without ever tiring of them.

The idea that, when snow falls in winter, something falls from the cosmos to the earth, is more than a merely poetic image. The number six, as expressed in this most archetypal phenomenon, is cosmic in nature.

Working with compasses, the radius of a circle can be transferred onto the circumference exactly six times. The circle, the simplest and most perfect geometric figure, seen in ancient times as the archetype of the cosmos, divides by six. And it is indeed the case that, from moons through planets to the stars and galaxies, almost everything in the universe is round, rotates and thus bears six within it. It is scarcely surprising therefore that Babylonia, the great culture and epoch during which our spiritual relationship with the cosmos began to rupture, invoked six as the measure of all things. Wherever cyclical measurements come into play, in angular and time measurements (6 × 60 = 360 degrees, and 2 × 6 = 12 hours) the cosmic, Babylonian way of enumerating has been preserved. This mathematically cumbersome mode of counting and measuring has retained something of an inner connection with the cosmos.

Just as the circumference of a circle leads us back to our starting point, so the factors of six lead us back to this same number. It rests in itself, and reproduces itself out of its parts. Or one might also say: the inside and outside of six are identical, and it is in absolute accord and congruence with itself. This is why Pythagoras regarded it as the most perfect number.

Six is the focus of many religions. In the Persian religion of Zarathustra, there are six periods of Creation with six angelic beings. The six-pointed star, as an image of the interlacing of above and below, is present as the Vishnu triangle and Shiva triangle in Hinduism. And in Judaism and Christianity, too, six has a special meaning: for both in the Old and New Testament it stands for perfection: the world was created in six days; and on the sixth day at the sixth hour, the Son on the cross united himself with this world.

The Angels of Atlantis, published by Findhorn Press

April 17, 5.30pm – Stewart Pearce – The Angels of Atlantis
During 1987 Stewart received divine transmission from a communion of twelve Orb Wanderers. This is now radical information concerning the major personal, planetary and galactic changes leading to 21.12.12. The Angels are emissaries from the Source, and at this time of vast transition provide us with twelve archetypal keys, that reflect the teachings of the Crystal Skulls, and may literally transform our lives as we experience the current Solar flashes, Galactic realignments, and Earth shifts.

Stewart Pearce is a world renowned Voice Coach with a career spanning three decades, enhancing the presentations of Margaret Thatcher, Vanessa Redgrave, Diana Princess of Wales, Dame Anita Roddick, and the LONDON 2012 OLYMPIC BID, just to name a few. Stewart was Head f Voice at the Webber Douglas Academy from 1980-1997, and Master of Voice at Shakespeare’s Globe from 1997-2008.

Stewart is also an inveterate Sound Healer, Seer and Angel Medium, teaching the intelligence and compassion of the heart, through the understanding that we each have a unique signature note, which is the song of our soul. Stewart is also an author of The Alchemy of Voice and the Angels of Atlantis Oracle Cards.

Something is happening to us. Trying to make sense of their awakening experiences, people troll the Internet and discover the idea of “ascension” – the doctrine that humanity is on the verge of a process of spiritualization, a transition to a higher, and less material, dimension. Implicit in the term is the concept of rising above. Rising above what, may we ask? When did rising above become something to aspire to?

The concept has deep roots indeed, as old as civilization (though less old than humanity). When mass agriculture allowed a differentiation of labor, with farmers at the base of a hierarchy and the king at the top, the idea grew that to be working in the dirt was to be lowly, inferior, lesser. Often, the king’s feet were not allowed to touch the ground. He, along with the priests, occupied another realm, removed as much as possible from materiality. Indeed, they were seen as emissaries of the heavens, where the gods were believed to reside.

All of this was original to agricultural civilizations. Hunter-gatherers found their gods everywhere, not just in the sky but in the waters, rocks, mountains, and trees. There was no aspiration to rise above nature, nor to conquer it. That ambition only arose with the domestication of plants and animals. Soon thereafter, the wild realm became something separate from the domestic realm, and natural forces became something threatening, something to be tamed for the good of humanity. The concepts of good and evil arose then too, modeled after a new, oppositional relationship to nature. While the hunter-gatherer understands that each species has a necessary gift to give for the good of the whole, to the farmer, it was the corn that was good and the weed bad; the sheep that was good and the wolf or the locusts bad.

SACRED ECONOMICS: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein, paperback (496 pages).

And so was born the ambition to conquer and transcend nature. We conceived of a non-material soul or spirit separate from, and more sacred than, the material body. We elevated the mind over the body, the will over the desires, the conquest of biological drives over their fulfillment. We aspired to rise above our animality, to become creatures of (depending on whether one took a scientific or a religious view) pure reason, or pure spirit. The way to do that was to retreat from the world: to meditate in a cave or monastery, or retreat into a laboratory or study.

Why is rising above a good thing? Why does “superior” mean better and “inferior” mean worse? Why is lowly or base not a compliment? Why do we want to “raise our vibration”? Is a piccolo better than a bassoon?

The mythology of ascension taps into the same ambition as our other attempts to master, control, and transcend nature, whether they be through technological or psychological means. It is quite understandable, looking out at the world today, that one would want to leave the sordid life of materiality behind. That, however, might be more a comment on how we have treated the material world than on materiality itself.

Perhaps what we need is not the transcendence of materiality, but to embrace it more fully. Having made a ruin of Earth, are we then to leave it behind for some spiritual realm of the fifth dimension? That is an example of the very attitude that has enabled us to ruin it to begin with: matter doesn’t matter, it is not sacred. We have certainly treated the planet that way. Today we feel pulled to reconnect with nature, with community, with our emotions, with our physicality.

An evolutionary shift is nigh, but it is not a raising of our vibration into non-materiality. It is a reconnection with and resacralization of the material realm. Our “ascent” to supposed mastery of nature has run its course, generating a multitude of crises that are birthing a transition into a new age: an Age of Reunion. No longer seeing ourselves as separate, our relationship to nature is becoming one of cocreative partnership

Paradoxically, our reunion with nature, materiality, and the flesh might bring on the state of being we associate with ascension after all. For matter is much more than we have made of it; it is much more than a pile of inert, generic building blocks. Every bit of it is alive, sentient; it is spirit manifest, and every body is soul made flesh. All the qualities that we have relegated to a separate spiritual realm exist already, right here, in the world of matter. By returning fully to this world, here and now, we will find ourselves living, paradoxically, in a different world, relating to all beings in a different way, enjoying an unimagined sensitivity of perception. Ascension implies leaving the world behind for a more rarefied realm, but that realm is already here, if only we can lower our vibration.

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About the author: Charles Eisenstein is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution. He speaks frequently at conferences and other events, and gives numerous interviews on radio and podcasts. Eisenstein graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy, and spent the next ten years as a Chinese-English translator. He currently lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and serves on the faculty of Goddard College. http://charleseisenstein.net/