Chapter XXII: THE DREAM UNFOLDS...


Within thirty-six hours of the departure from Bombay I was back with my son at Woodend. The London bus had brought us back through the high, looming granite of the Cairngorms. Above their snow clad peaks the moon glowed. It was good to be back in the cold, wilderness beauty of northern Scotland.

That night, I lay awake watching the stars in the south-western sky. Orion’s Belt, only visible during the winter months, glittered above and, below it, Sirius flashed its brilliant diamond colours across light years to the Earth.

Jenny was still with Swami at Prashanti. Would I see her again or would her destiny take her elsewhere, to Australia or maybe with Charles and Heather on their boat, the Sai Light, on adventures across the Pacific? And what lay ahead for me?


I spent the next weeks typing-up the diary I had kept at the ashram. While reading a biography of Sri Aurobindo, I discovered the title for my book, The Spirit that dreams Within Us. It perfectly described the many inner experiences I had had, culminating in the epiphany at Prashanti. More than that it provided a blueprint of meaning for the book that Baba had blessed as he cut away the invisible shackles that bound me.


In March, Jenny returned to Woodend. It was a difficult, unsettled time for her and by May she had returned to her caravan at Findhorn Bay. Feeling very confused by events I could only imagine that I had reaped instant karma for my behaviour at the ashram. It was, nevertheless, painful to help remove her belongings from Woodend.

On my forty-first birthday that June, Jenny gave me a regression during which I found myself returning, with the greatest of reluctance, to an immediate past-life in wartime Germany. I tried, consciously, to avoid it but kept going back there. Finally, deciding that something remained from that lifetime that needed healing, I returned.

Looking out through the perspex nose of a wide-winged bomber flying towards England, I watched the smoke and vapour trails of fighter ‘planes as they swooped and spiralled in the skies around me. Then the scene changed very suddenly and I found myself, in an earlier time, training as a pilot when my instructor, knowing that I had no love of the war, had failed me.

For the first time in my life, I began to understand the deep psychic wound I had been carrying about within for so long. In my present life, I had tried unsuccessfully to join the RAF. My hopes of a flying career had been dashed yet again when I had been turned down by civilian airlines. An unseen power over which I had no control seemed to have undermined my life. More and more, I had felt the victim of a bureaucratic machine that had seemed to pronounce me a failure.

Through that regression experience I began to understand where the wound had originated. It seemed to be in a previous life where I had hoped that, through becoming a fighter pilot, I would have been able to remain above the impersonal death and destruction which dropped out of the skies over Europe.

Instead, like Arjuna at Kurukshetra, it seems I had in that life to face doing the most despicable job of all, the one I had tried to avoid.

Now I was able to understand that my feelings of failure in this life stemmed from a previous time. I could see my present circumstances more objectively. Jenny had gone and left me with plenty of time to think.

Sitting at the pine kitchen table, next day, I was struck by a thought whose very simplicity took me quite by surprise. I was reminiscing about teenage days when future adulthood had loomed only just around the corner. If I had really needed to fly why hadn’t I asked my parents to help me take private lessons? Was it because flying as a career had offered an escape from the challenges of the more earthbound experiences in this life as it may have in another? I certainly couldn’t afford lessons now but if it was the very act of flying that was important there was a way I could do it ... I could learn to glide.

The regression with Jenny had given me several insights into my present life. For the first time I was shocked into realizing that I had been carrying a deep psychic wound of failure around with me ever since I had been turned down by the RAF twenty-seven years ago. And if my regression experiences were more than experiences — if they were more than merely a convoluted process of the subconscious mind — then I had been carrying this wound around with me for more than a lifetime!

Suddenly, my life seemed to be in a crisis once more. I was alone in a big, empty farm-house, a single parent on welfare with a son to look after. I felt a cloud of deep, dark depression which threatened to settle over my days. I felt terribly alone again. Everything I touched seemed to go wrong.

Sitting by the large kitchen window I watched night creep ominously over the pine forests outside. Finally the tears came in huge convulsive bursts and I regressed, instantly, to the little lost helpless child I had once been. At last I could release the pain.

But this time I wasn’t quite alone. As if Swami had sent him to comfort me, the cat walked purposefully over to where I sat on the bench, jumped into my lap, and started to purr loudly. It seemed very clear that this was a comforting sign from Swami for not long before the cat had behaved in a very curious way. One Sunday, at bhajans, he entered the Shrine Room, walked over to everyone present, sniffed each in greeting and then proceeded to make a straight line over to the little seat in the corner of the room that was left there, as is the tradition in India, for Swami. Climbing onto it he sat surveying one and all in the most regal feline manner as if to say, “Well, can you see who I am beyond the appearance of a cat?”

In those days when Jenny and I seemed to move through a never-ending series of emotionally fraught incidents I began to sense Baba more and more as the Lord Krishna. It was as if the lessons he had taught me at the ashram were moving towards a new level of realization. Suddenly, Krishna was everywhere in my life. He was in the forests, in the grass, in the waters of the Moray Firth and in the magnificent dragon-red dusks that northern summer when the Sun set in the far north and rose simultaneously a little further east.

“And I am in the cat, too!” I could hear the little-boy-blue Krishna whisper impishly in my ear.

Things were not the same anymore. Whether I was always aware of it or not my life was ever more infused with the presence of that ineffable phenomenon that is Krishna as well as the contemporary Sathya Sai Baba. And Baba wasn’t going to let me fall into the illusion of loneliness. On several occasions I sensed his presence around Woodend.

The magic kept on working.

A few days later I found myself no longer alone. Sally, a friend of Jenny’s from London, came to stay at Woodend with her son who was also called Jan. She had been having a hard emotional time too and had needed to get away. It was good to have the company.


One afternoon I found myself outside the gates of the RAF base at Kinloss. It seemed the right time to act. I drove over to the Guardhouse and asked about the Glider Club which flew regularly, every weekend, above the airbase.

“Well, it so happens that someone from the Club will be up here in a few minutes,” an airman informed me. “Do you want to wait?”

Feeling, again, an uncanny sense that Baba was preparing me for something I agreed that I would and sat in my car to wait. During the hour that followed it became clear that a great event in my life had begun to take place. Everything moved smoothly and by the time I drove out of the airbase gates back home it was in the knowledge that I was to take my first flying lessons that Saturday.


On the eventful morning I entered the Shrine Room to pray. Just by the altar under Baba’s picture I was astonished to see a model aeroplane parked neatly as if ready for takeoff. Wondering how it had got there, I remembered that Jan had been playing with it the day before. With the innocence of a child he had left it there, as if moved to do so by an invisible, angelic hand. It was a clear sign that I was being given a powerful blessing. Again, two lifetimes seemed to merge and flow into each other in a vaster pattern of continuity. What I had experienced the afternoon at the ashram as a psychic awakening seemed to be manifesting itself now into material reality.

It wasn’t long before I was stepping into the harness of a parachute and the slender cockpit of a training glider. We went through the usual safety checklist, pulled the canopy down and gave the thumbs-up for take-off. The steel cable that snaked in front of us snapped taut and tugged the glider forward and up into the sky. Ascending steeply we soared hundreds of feet into the air. With a slight jolt and a bang the pilot released the cable, now trailing underneath. Relieved of its weight the glider’s nose dipped slightly and settled down in free flight.

We banked steeply to port and headed towards the open waters of the Moray Firth. Below, like tiny matchboxes, were the caravans of the Findhorn Community. Ahead lay the mountains of the Highlands lying silent in the smoky blue distance. We flew over the sea which kept changing colour, now dark and murky, now emerald green. The wind buffeted and rushed, whistling over the glider’s wings.

Suddenly, the pilot put the glider into a steep dive and I could feel the gravity change hit the pit of my empty stomach. Though the ground seemed to come rushing towards us I wasn’t scared. I could sense he was trying to see if I would panic.

“You’ve got good nerves,” he shouted over the sound of the airstream.

“I’ve waited a long time for this!” I replied, wondering if he could begin to understand the significance of the words.

He levelled out and began to lift the nose sharply and, again, I was clutched by changing gravity forces as we shot upward. Levelling finally we flew towards the eastern runway perimeter. Rolling to starboard the pilot began a steep descent with the airbrakes full on.

As the ground raced to meet us he lifted the nose slightly and eased the glider’s keel onto the grass. Bumping several times on the rough ground we came to a halt. It was over. I had finally regained my wings.


During the next few weeks I took another nine flying lessons in which I took over the glider’s controls, learning the subtle art of flying it firmly yet with sensitivity, like a great gentle eagle which responded to the slightest command.

At last I could sense a very deep healing of the old wounds begin to take place. And with it I began to understand that I need never feel grounded again or be a victim to circumstances. It felt as if Baba had begun to teach me the first steps towards co-creation, gently guiding me through the events of each day in the unfolding of a much greater purpose.

I began to experience confidence, to know that I could deal with the challenges I needed to face so that inner growth could take place. And, as I allowed myself to open up to that growth I began to grasp intuitively at the meaning of some of the awesome mysteries that were being revealed through the Higher Self.

The UFO phenomenon, the appearances of the Blessed Virgin and archetypal beings like Arthur, the many prophecies of social change to come before the second millennium, channellings giving warnings of climatic disasters, inner visions of being lifted into the light and of rebirth on other planes and vibrations where life is much, much longer, the coming of a New Heaven and a New Earth ... I knew that we experienced all these by God’s grace as a beckoning evolution which was, for me, inseparable from the Sai experience.

It was the same experience that had brought my family from Asia to Europe, that had let me work out my karma over twenty-eight years in the south of England and which then guided me to Findhorn and Woodend where I found Sai waiting for me. It had guided me into a process of self-healing and into a life where I could help heal others, it had taught me that the spirit and the body were part of a much greater dream where love rules and steers its course through an eternal voyage of learning between the dance of the light and the dark.

A dance in which Sai tells us he takes us through every step.


It is my hope, that by the telling of this story, I may help contribute something towards the unfolding of the greater dream-dance and encourage others to find the inspiration and the courage to open themselves in trust to the unfolding of the spirit within.

As a healer, using the regression and Alpha state experience into that dance, I learn much about myself and this life given me, as it is given to each, by the Spirit that Dreams Within Us. I am learning to live more gently and consciously everyday. I thank God to be alive in this time of discovery and wish us all wonder and joy as together we move towards the farthest shores of our human experience.

...And then beyond into the yet greater unfolding of the mystery that awaits us.


©RW1989