BEAUTIFUL HANDS OF GOD

BEAUTIFUL HANDS OF GOD

I see myself reflected in the glass doors of the Ronald Laing Building at Glasgow University on this bright spring morning - all clean, white shirt, knife-edged creased grey flannel trousers, tweed jacket and most important of all the Contributionist tie with dragon’s wings outspread which allegorises the Founder of our movement. To think that before I was referred to him I took no pride in my appearance and was oblivious of my shabbiness! Nor did I know that I had Asperger’s Syndrome.

“Tony Bratch” enquires the receptionist and I nod assent. She pins on my lapel a badge bearing my name then I file into the lecture theatre ten minutes early with my two heavy holdalls filled with teaching aids. Students arrive and I check the equipment. A screen lights up and it displays the structure of polytime – a convoluted shape resembling a tangle-up of hosepipe that goes on for ever and ever. Longitudinal stripes in contrasting colours bisect lines like bar codes.

“Ladies and gentlemen we have here Tony Bratch who is going to explain what he calls “Polytime” – and he will make shattering disclosures about the destiny of every one of us... Over to you, Tony.”

I am no longer scared of speaking in public. I say I come from Corchester in Corveshire and I am a disciple of the illustrious Welsh philosopher Alan Moelwyn-Wright who is also the headmaster of Treheol College in Delormebury, for children with distressing peculiarities. I am going to talk about the structure of Time and how is affects all of our destinies. I myself have time warp experiences and so has my sister Gillian. When I was a baby, my parents told me, my sister shook me violently, when she was six. This may account for my persistent lucid dreams of being a boy called John Eccleshall from Staffordshire, a county that cannot possibly exist. She is older than me and she somehow had foreknowledge of where I would go when I was a small boy such as the precise spot in the Longmynd – a miniature mountain in Shropshire where I had scrambled at the age of three. I too had precognitive dreams about Wolstanbury which I had never set foot in when my sister took up her job there... that is dreams of its market square and Gothic chapel like structure covering the market cross, and the precise colour of the walls in her office as though my soul had taken leave of my body and I floated through walls to see Gillian with a man who has a handlebar moustache – her boss – I described him precisely and that was the trigger for her to tell me all her precognitions about myself. Then she showed me J W Dunne’s book An Experiment With Time and J B Priestley’s play I Have Been Here Before...

I brandish the books and resume.

Dunne has dreams of seeing the Daily Telegraph three weeks ahead of publication and one dream was that there had been a disaster that claimed four thousand lives – a volcanic eruption in the West Indies. Three weeks alter Dunne was horrified to pick up the paper and read that FORTY thousand people had died on the island of Martinique when they were burnt alive by incandescent gas. That prompted Dunne to do private research and ultimately write this now famous book that explains polytime. Some time later Dunne met the playwright J B Priestley who wrote the play about parallel universes I Have Been Here Before... Yes it has been performed in the University theatre nearby so all in the audience are familiar with the plot, how the scientist Gortler from a parallel universe steps into our time to prevent a suicide and save a firm from closing down and other effects of that catastrophe.

“I have stepped from one parallel universe to another in lucid dreams”, I continue. In these dreams I am a pupil at a Stafford school in this cathedral city located where a tributary of the Trent loops around a low gravel hill deposited by a glacier, on which the cathedral stands. One line forks to London and the other to Bristol I presume. In the heart of Stafford is a windmill without sails and a waterwheel beside a mill lade and also a row of old almshouses. I feel that I have lived in Stafford all my life but on waking I am in Corchester where the Trent Gorge cuts through the blood-red sandstones of the Pinnacle Country..... with the main railway from London going underneath the Shrewsbury to Derby line and opposite Corchester as you full well know the lofty cliffs of Honours Broadstone that fall sheer a hundred meters and loom above the London to Glasgow line... I hope that I am not boring you with my description of this preposterous city of my dreams...”

I seem to have got everybody’s attention as I continue, feeling very anxious now...

“In my dreams about my life as John Eccleshall I find myself on a bicycle cycling towards the town which bears my name. It is a charming place of Tudor houses with timber colonnades and it lines in a hollow. On the way there is a lace there the road dips, and a roundabout is perched on a hillock above a railway line. I lose control here and I am thrown over the handlebars onto the track and an electric train bears down and I cannot move and I wake up in terror in Corchester...”

Bright-eyed people in the sea of faces. I am not boring them, I hope...

“My sister Gillian has similar nightmares which end when she is told by a policeman that her brother John was pitched off his bicycle near Norton Bridge. In her dreams she sees signposts bearing authentic names which do not appear on our gazetteers. They are of Saxon derivation and allude to the topography of this preposterous Staffordshire – a county where rovers wind across fertile plains crossed by busy railways and highways, definitely not the rugged Pinnacle Country of Corveshire clothes in pine forests.”

I then point to the big diagram and say that this represents a simplification of polytime, then I enlarge a section to show what I mean... a shape like a salami sausage with slices and a longitudinal line marked arbitrarily with my birth year 1981 and my sister’s birth year 1974 and this year 2008. I declare that our universe is an infinitessimally thin salami slice of the complex slice in the first diagram which is itself only schematic. I cannot draw polydimensional shapes but I simplify...

I show an enlargement. The hosepipe is curved and along its length there is a line marked 14 Sept. 1981 and another, my sister’s birthdate 15 June 1974. I say in every 14 Sept 1981 I will be born, perhaps as Tony Bratch, perhaps as John Eccleshall, likewise my sister Gillian will be born on successive 15th Junes in every salami slice, then I point to serial reincarnations since the dawn of history and now refer to my mentor’s past lives starting from ancient Greek times when he was a contemporary of Pericles. I extrapolate Alan’s future lives as ref lines of segments of a huge circle which may be part of a spiral reading back to successive Ancient Greek Hegemonies, Roman Empires, Albigensian Crusades and so on to reincarnations as part of a Windsor King where Alan will not be burnt as a heretic but flourish in a Britain with free speech and become the founder of a movement which lifts the veil of Mortality to show how if we struggle to live exemplary lives we will be born again and again in serial reincarnations and in parallel universes to become Hands of the Cosmic Mind we call God. I now project the points on this spiral where my lives interact with Alan’s lives and what flows from them is a burst of light – symbolising how Alan has taught me the ways of Right Living but before I was referred to him I was a very disturbed adolescent. Now he has unlocked my mind it is my duty as his disciple to pass on to everybody my experience of the parallel universe where I was John Eccleshall who was evidently drunk in charge of a bicycle and lost his life by crass carelessness. But the Gods in the Great Beyond reincarnated me as Tony Bratch expressly in order to meet Alan and absorb his teaching...

(Will I be flayed by the Christians for saying that?)
..... + I must talk about theology but not repeat not Christian theology. We are all immortal souls and we are reborn in successive parallel universes. Some of us have acquired the faculty to slip between universes... and this gives rise to what is the most important finding of all. There is serial reincarnation and there is parallel universe reincarnation. My mentor lives several lives and so did his wife and son. Bob Wright has proved to the world that he was headmaster of Friarshill Grammar School in Romanbridge in Tudor times till he was flung off the Roman Bridge by Mary Tudor’s thugs. Now in every life we live, to quote Masefield’s Creed we suffer the consequences of dissoluteness in past lives or reap the rewards of being virtuous. So our immortal souls, everybody have a kind of psychic DNA which is modified by our personal behaviour. As Masefield so eloquently expounded in A Creed it behoves us all to live virtuous lives.

On the train I suffered a gypsy who stank of unwashedness as I was busy preparing for this presentation. I threatened to have him put out of the train as he was looking over my shoulder at my portabrain and reading my lecture notes and so I quizzed him. It was obvious that he was of lowly intelligence and he was trapped in a karmic cycle of what we call gricehood.

(Do these people understand Alan’s beautiful coinage from the German word Greis to denote self-inflicted stupefaction...? Carry on, Bratch!)

I am simply horrified to read about the alcohol problem with grips Scotland. We Contributionists are strict teetotallers and one of our number is David Derrypool, graduate of your University who lives at Carkilty. There he is in the audience. David has vainly tried to provide edifying pursuits for his neighbours but he has been rebuffed at every attempt. Now we Contributionsists regard the Poet Laureate John Masefield as no less an avatar – a messenger of God than Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and of course Christ. Masefield’s Creed has apparently been written in every parallel Universe as that Code of Behaviour which is founded in the teachings of avatars sent to us...

I show the next diagram. How souls migrate from one Dunnean time-cycle to the next. I say that the most highly evolved souls of all may have this faculty to slip along the axis of polytime at right angles to our own cycles. In all the successive parallel universes there can be slight differences caused by changes in people’s fortunes – a shop is sold to another owner – a boy is killed when pitched into the path of a train – a frail child dies – but in another cycle he survives to become a judge. A battle might have been won by someone else long ago and Britain became part of a French or Norwegian empire so her people alive in the equivalent of 2008 might speak languages more akin to French or Norwegian than our English. Then there will be universes where glaciers completely altered geography as seems to be the case when I was John Eccleshall. Now David Derrypool might pick up the thread after our presentation because HE has had disturbing dreams of a world where he lived in a city called Stafford with much in common with the Stafford of my lucid dreams to the extent that I hold that he and I have slipped along this axis – our life-lines clearly marked – precisely in order that we should meet and collaborate to elucidate the nature of polytime....

Another diagram. A globe marked Tony Bratch emanates light. Next to the globe is the likeness of a dishevelled man as a silhouette. I say that there is no way I can teach the concept of polytime and all that flows from it, to the gypsy on the train as he simply lacks the intelligence to grasp it. He is doomed for evermore to live like Plato’s cave dwellers...

I show a globe marked Tony Bratch speaking into a microphone and a symbolic world listening. The world-globe and the Tony Bratch globe emanate rhythmic pulses of light as on the time-sausage sparks fly along its longitudinal axis.

“If you understand the mechanics of your own immortality, dear friends, as a result of my talk, you will daily endeavour to improve yourselves and one another...”
(Globes grow bigger as they emit sparks of varying colours and merge with one another to shower rays in all directions.)

“and that is how you create your own psychic DNA... for as Masefield declared, every thought or deed in every life affects your potential to be either trapped in the darkness of gricehood like that gypsy – or growth to enjoy such superior abilities and aesthetic awareness - that like all of us Dragon Tie wearers your only passion will be to share the fruits of your self-createdness – and so all of you dear friends I trust will say NO to the DEMON DRINK and grow to be beautiful Hands of God.”
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library, May 2008