Under a Watchful Eye(70)

[Mark Fry]: Did you see anyone else when you were projecting?

[Liza]: Oh, yes, once I began to make it outside my room. That was in my fifth month at the Tor. But I never saw these others clearly. They were in the hall outside. Two very dim figures. There were only seven of us in residence at that time, but I was quite sure that the two I saw were not the projections of those in residence. They were not aware of each other, or of me. I tried to call out to them. But it was like calling out in a dream to deaf people. I had no voice. No strength. Everything was slow and laboured.

HE claimed that I was in Hades when I projected. This is the sphere closest to where we are now, but we were also told that it was possible, in time, to go further. Much further if you persisted, and if you worked at loosening your vehicle of vitality. Otherwise you remained earthbound. But the cost on your health, let alone the financial cost, became more and more obvious the longer I was there. I’m afraid I lost my faith in HIM.

[Mark Fry]: Did you ever go any further than the Tor?

[Liza]: Only once, and I never wanted to try again.

[pause]

[Mark Fry]: Can you tell me about it?

[Sound of Liza clearing her throat]

[Liza]: I was ill at the time. I’d had a chest infection that became quite serious. It was very cold at the Tor, and damp. You had to wrap up, you know. The cold seemed to get inside your bones. Even with the fires going you never warmed up. I used to think it was the moors, the air, the atmosphere. I’d say it rained there at least four days each week. But I wasn’t so sure by the end. I wasn’t certain of a great many things, even of who I was, or who I had become. I lost sight of that, and what was important, or should have been important to me. But I missed my husband, Eric. He was my first husband. I think I went mad when I lost him. I never stopped grieving. I never have.

[Mark Fry]: But you managed to travel further, just this once?

[Liza]: Oh yes. I was feverish with an awful cough. And I had been resting and it happened, just like that. I projected.

I’d been thinking of my daughter because I missed her terribly and I was regretting everything that I had done. I wanted to see her quite desperately. And I remember the sinking feeling, though that time I sank deeper, and more suddenly.

Then I was moving. I was travelling through the darkness. At speed across fields. I think they were fields and that I was in the countryside but I could barely see a thing. One could have passed it off as a dream. But I became very aware of her presence. I could actually sense her all around me. My daughter. My feelings for her, and how much, how intensely I loved her as if she were a small child again . . . It was like I was flooded with her. It was the most intense connection.

I then became briefly aware of her, as if she were no more than a few feet below me. That’s when I actually saw her. She was asleep and it was as if we were in the same room, but I was unable to speak to her.

I became too upset, too eager to communicate with her and I was returned to my sickbed at the Tor. But this sense of her, of how close we had once been, persisted. It lingered for days, and when I was well enough I called her. They listened to your calls, Alice and Fay. From another line they listened to the calls. But it was the strangest thing, on the night that I’d seen my daughter, she said that I had been in her thoughts too, and that she had been very worried about me. She said she had called and she had written to the SPR, though I had received nothing. So why do you think that was?

Anyway, I told her that I had been ill and that I had a sense that we had come together across a great distance. She never believed in what I was doing and had always disapproved of the SPR. It was what finally estranged us. But she admitted that she had felt a presence in her room, on the very night that I had projected. She was living in London and she had awoken feeling terribly hot and frightened. And she had been unable to dispel the idea that there was a presence, some thing, inside her room with her.

She turned on the lights, but still believed that the presence remained there, in her room. She said she was paralysed with a sense of dread, as if that emotion, the dread, had occupied the room. And she knew that what had entered her room was in pain. She said she’d thought it was drowning, or that it couldn’t breathe, and she believed that it was me, or was somehow connected to me.

This upset her for days because she had sensed me, her own mother, in terrible distress. And she had feared for me, at some deep instinctive level, after the presence had passed away. I even remember the word she used to describe the episode. She had said it had been ‘horrifying’ for her. Horrifying. It had not been a pleasant experience for me either. Quite the opposite. It left us both shaken and very upset. And it worsened my doubts about Summerland. Elysium, ha! This was HIS fabled paradise belt that we were supposed to find? It was horrid.

I left the SPR not long after. It was the furthest I’d ever travelled and the very last time that I consciously attempted the procedure. But I’d gone too far, you see. It was too late to stop by then. I’d loosened something inside myself. It’s hard to describe, but for many years, I could not prevent myself from sinking into the darkness again, over and over again.

When I think of how many times we practised the cultivation, it was as if we were programming ourselves. I think that was the whole point.

The image was always of the silver cord in the slow, dark river. Silver light turning fast, faster and faster and making me sink. With the water all around, the psychic stream. And then we were the light, the turning light, and we released ourselves from our bond and we focused on the sinking, the heavy, heavy sinking into the black and peaceful water. This represented the renunciation of the will to the deep.