I’ve become so used to things being the way they are now that it almost feels normal. Not quite, of course. There’s nothing ‘normal’ or mundane about communicating with separate aspects of the same person/entity in totally different ways. That, though, has become the norm for me over the past few years. What I’d forgotten, somewhere along the road, is that this oddly divided existence has been this way for far longer than I’d realised.
Where we are now
Skip to the end of the italicised bit if you know how I work with Asher these days. For anyone unfamiliar with our story, I’ll recap briefly:
Asher was once a gifted young child I taught and learned from. We’ve known each other for 30 years and become good friends.
As things stand, I communicate with him in two quite different ways. I chat to his physical self via email and messaging. We’re in contact at least once or twice a week. He always reads my messages and responds briefly. Occasionally, if there’s something we need to discuss (book publicity or finances, for example) he sends longer, carefully considered replies. He prefers not to have face to face contact these days. Like many autistic people, he finds the time lag of email and WhatsApp less stressful and I respect his wishes.
There’s a quite separate aspect of Asher I communicate with telepathically. It’s a skill he’s taught me over the years and we now have it pretty much sorted. Almost every evening we work together that way. The only time lag comes from my desire to keep a record of our conversations in one of my notebooks. The dialogues themselves happen out of time. Asher can stop mid-sentence and continue exactly where he left off several days later if required. These conversations are about metaphysics, philosophy and spirituality and they feature prominently in both the books I’ve written (one published and the second in production).
These days, the two aspects of Asher don’t mix. They divide the cosmos up very rigidly between them. Physical Ash only does the mundane earthbound stuff; metaphysical Ash is sharing esoteric knowledge from The Realms. They’re fully aware of each other but there’s no overlap in content.
I often reminisce fondly about a time when Asher was more ‘joined up’. I recall long, deep discussions about how Life works, watching spellbound as he manifested what he needed, diagnosed and healed illnesses or used remote viewing to draw detailed maps and notes of places distant in space or time.
Somewhere along the line, the two sides of him had drifted apart. I felt it was quite recent — around the time I fully mastered picking him up telepathically. It seems, though, that a split had happened far earlier than that.
The Notebooks
As I explained in a previous blog, I’m currently reading through my old journals, prior to destroying parts no longer needed. It’s been an emotional process as I rediscover forgotten details that give a deeper context to our current way of being.
At the moment, I’m reviewing a diary set around ten years ago. Asher was in his mid-twenties. Back then we were still chatting by phone, having long, wide-ranging discussions via messaging, sending each other long emailed articles about all things esoteric and even, on rare occasions, meeting up in person.
I was reading widely and sharing my discoveries with him. He was doing his own research, thinking hard about what I’d told him and giving his responses.
For a couple of years, we’d been doing weekly remote viewing experiments. Asher was becoming frustrated with the variability of the results, though, and saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to continue, as he couldn’t progress any further.
Here is a journal extract describing and quoting a texted discussion that gives a flavour of those times:
Today I was sharing some (of a friend’s) research with Ash — her explanation for why without his ‘heart being in it’, he can’t get such good viewing results. I quoted Barbara Brennan, who says the electrical field around the heart is 60 times stronger than that round the brain, and that for the magnetic field it’s 5000 times stronger.
He thought for a bit and then replied, “So you’re saying good results are not so much dependent on the conscious intention of it but the motivation for the result emanating from an emotional desire to do it.”
Over the following few days, we had reached an agreement that this emotional, heart-based desire for connection was what Asher had previously dubbed ‘The Energies Thing’ (as in Chapter 14 of A Mind Beyond Words).
What struck me, though, as I re-read our deliberations was that the physical Asher I was communicating with at that time was searching for reasons and answers as avidly as I was. He knew how to perform various psychic skills, but he was no longer in possession of the instinctive ‘knowing’ he’d been quite sure of as a child. He no longer understood how or why he could do these things.
At the ages of 8 or 11 or 14, he’d had no doubts. He tried his best to explain to me the ‘map of all the atoms in the universe’ that resided within his mind and allowed him to share his wisdom. Only a paucity of available vocabulary (and my lack of comprehension) got in the way.
The Age of Reason
As he transitioned from child to adult, however, society stepped in. A medical expert diagnosed him with Asperger’s Syndrome. Family, classmates and teachers hemmed him into a world where there was no space for his knowing and any attempts to discuss it were met by smirks and derision.
Just as a seven-year-old will (publicly, at least) turn her back on the ‘imaginary’ friends and fairies who were trusted pre-school companions, so Asher, in a desperate attempt to fit into society, spent several years refuting all the wisdom he’d once shared with me with such conviction.
Rediscovering the Magic
This faded journal I’ve come across marks a further level of maturity. Fitting in with peers was no longer his only priority. His innate understanding of the workings of the cosmos had been suppressed, not forgotten. His excitement at discovering the physical evidence of dowsing rods and remote viewing was too exciting to be brushed aside. Now, though, it was different. He was attempting to combine it with the ‘rational’ materialist world he’d been educated in. That involved taking absolutely nothing for granted.
The child Asher would have cheerfully accepted that being able to ‘see’ where a trusted friend would be on a particular date and time a week or so in the future was simply the way things worked. The adolescent Asher would have angrily pushed any such thoughts aside and dismissed them as delusions. This young adult Asher was marvelling at his abilities, but trying to bend and blend them into the mainstream view of the world. He seized gratefully upon the New Age theories I shared with him, but felt deflated when they failed to fit the rigor of reductionist scientific enquiry.
Higher Asher
Ah, but a new player was about to enter the scene. I’d been experimenting, on and off, with contacting Asher telepathically. Trusted spirit guides, channelled by a friend, had suggested it would work and although the results varied greatly in those early days, there were occasions when I felt I was reaching an expanded version of Asher, one I called Higher Ash.
To my surprise, the journal offered a single and apparently unique occasion on which I worked with both these aspects of Asher at one time: the questing and confused physical self and the out-of-body version who was new to me then, but so familiar now.
Here is the extract, written about an afternoon in early January 2017:
Today Ash has the whole afternoon free and so do I. We talk round and round in circles. We have no idea what to do next and we’re about to give up and wait for inspiration. Then I suddenly remember Higher Ash’s promise to answer his questions. So he asks some — writes them down for me — and I dowse his higher self. I remember how much I love to communicate with that being — still Asher, but so much more.
The answers are clear, unequivocal and helpful. Asher loves them. We have our direction back. The hypersensitivity, so hard for him to manage in everyday life, is there to aid the (remote) viewing: senses so strong, they reach into remote places.
I wish I could finish this piece by speaking of an ongoing three-way dialogue which would have been of great benefit to us all. Sadly, that didn’t happen. There are no more mentions in the diaries of my contact with ‘Higher Ash’ for several years. As for physical Asher, he seemed to gradually drift further away from his psychic gifts and metaphysical alter ego.
As he explains so poignantly in A Mind Beyond Words,
I believed, in equal measure, that I was able to access The Realms and that I was sick and delusional. It simply became impossible for me to maintain these two opposing views of myself. For years — since my teens — I’d been swapping between the two, but finally the split became inevitable. I doubted all the wisdom I ‘knew’ and wrote. I couldn’t take the strain of that and needed to release it.
Fractured but Functioning
So here we are, all these years later, with our current state of affairs. Recently, both aspects of Asher have told me they prefer it this way. Here’s a fragment of telepathic discussion from our forthcoming book, The Realms Beyond Words:
Jes: Am I right in thinking your ‘split’ was not part of your original plan? The way you tell it suggests you came up with a Plan B when you jettisoned the psychic abilities from your physical self.
Asher: Yes, that’s accurate. But it has worked out very well. Better than Plan A.
As for me, for the time being I’ll carry on getting brief texts from the human side of him, who still does his best to fit into the mainstream world, while I faithfully record the messages sent by his metaphysical self, grateful that I’m able to receive and share them.
I wonder whether those fractured sides will one day knit together again.