will be writing more here soon but the third eye is real. It is a shard of limestone that I found one day. I love it dearly but my most valued possession is of no material value.


……….I decided it is time for me to write what I know about enlightenment and the third eye and put it on the record. This will not make me any friends. It is one of the least visited sites on the net should you stumble in unawares. Written for posterity, history not really for now.

There appear to be quite a few people in our world claiming enlightenment. Over the last 70 years I have met some of them and a surprising number of messiahs. I have also met quite a few women who have told me that is the secret of their partner. The messiah complex is so common it must be in our genes. I am sure they all mean well and want to save us.

I would never have known about this from first hand experience had I not practised for years as a clairvoyant. They would not have opened up their hearts on the matter but once I knew what was likely to be there and asked them about it, out it came. You do not need any special powers to convince yourself that you have been chosen. Nor do you need to be perfect. Perhaps they were looking for a clairvoyant to recognise them. How crazy do you have to be to consult a clairvoyant? Only as crazy as someone claiming to be one.

There are machines you can buy or rent now which claim to open your third eye. You just have to sit under a special lamp. There will be nothing to see on your forehead after the sessions but for a similar price you can have a hole drilled in it in Ecuador. It is nothing new. One burial site in France had forty skulls from 10,000 years ago that had drill holes in them. In fact between 5% and 10% of all Stone Age skulls have been trepanned. I may have the answer to the enigma of our first attempts at surgery. Most seemed to survive what is a tricky and dangerous operation but there is no eye waiting to be opened there whatever the salesmen claim.

In the late sixties, like many other young people then, I first came across the concept of ‘enlightenment‘ in the English hippy community. I had been brought up by a highly educated parish priest whose library included many volumes on religious matters but nothing on that, or not that I could find then. So I looked elsewhere.

My father knew he wanted to be a priest when he was fourteen. I knew I did not. I had spent many hours on my knees in holy places, usually thinking about something else or struggling to stay awake. But there was no doubt in my mind about some things. My father would sometimes dream of a racehorse. He would put a bet on it if he could remember the name and find it in his newspaper, and it would win.. He did not like to publicise this and I think only placed small bets on the few occasions it happened. One of my sisters was almost five when she dreamed of curious matters happening to relatives on another continent. They turned out to have happened exactly as she described. Clairvoyance was certainly around me from an early age even if it was not called that.


1956. My dad, brother squeezed in left of the cake (clock side) and me next to him.

john and dad

1978 with my dad, photo taken by sister.

Later in my life I was probably the first, and I suspect only, member of my family to offer their services as a clairvoyant. Over these years I encountered many others with some clairvoyant ability or other. Such people tend to keep their heads down. It is a much persecuted art, ridiculed by science but nevertheless real in some cases, even if it is a moneymaking scam in others, or a well meaning delusion. Which of these it is can only be evidenced if and when the predictions come true, sometimes generations later. In my dad’s case usually the next day, in my sister‘s it took months to verify and years for some details to emerge.

As a young man I started looking into other cultures and their religions, and the many gurus who actually claimed to be enlightened. I went to Krishnamurti at his mansion in Hampshire where he gave a talk but fell asleep. We did stare at each other in the lunch break probably as result of me nodding off as soon as he started talking. I met other ‘gurus’ but he was the one that seemed to get the best reviews at the time. At that time there were quite a few about. Others included Maharishi who trained a neighbour of mine on a Mediterranean island, who was then empowered to teach Transcendental Meditation himself. Baba stunned travellers to India with his conjuring and we had Uri Geller bending metal live on TV. In 1971 Maharaji passed enlightenment to a man I met many years later  who confided this to me.  Bhagwan’s photograph face appeared in rosewood lockets around the necks of friends who went out to Pune to see him in his Indian ashram and came back dressed in orange.  Poonja passed enlightenment to quite a few westerners now running their own vast foundations.

We may well be critical but Baba for example gave between $8 and $30 billion to create charities, hospitals and water treatment plants for the poorest Indians. If he was using ‘sleight of hand‘ to mesmerise visitors as some claim we should the not ignore his legacy.

There are also the Tibetans, the books of Gurdjieff, Blavatski and Lobsang Rampa, the plumber from Devon who housed the spirit of a lama and wrote ‘The Third Eye’ in 1956. Quite a lot on offer to searchers or researchers like me. One could travel overland to India very cheaply in those days and meet many wandering ascetics and saddhus. Another way of looking at it all however is that it was and is a jungle, with many paths claimed to take you through it to ‘liberation’.

These were just my experiences and not one convinced me that anyone was anywhere close. One worry was that many of these people were accused of sexually molesting their disciples. Not that they saw it like that. As a London based English guru once told me sex was a great way to pass enlightenment to his young attractive disciples. I doubt they see it like that now but many were having a go and many succumbed to the temptations along the way I feel. It all seems very corporate these days and those gurus are almost all dead but the business is still worth billions and is mostly run by corporations calling themselves not for profit foundations. None of them were able to help me it seemed, but perhaps they all had a measure of success. Individually all had flaws but we all have some kind of split in us.

Curiously within three hours of writing this a television programme took me to the Ganges and among other fascinating glimpses of its higher reaches it included a look at the long abandoned, ruined ashram of Maharishi. The jungle is consuming the whole place but it still proudly displays a large Beatles mural. They of course have a big responsibility for turning so many onto a search for spirituality and Nirvana.

Many gave up at this point and no wonder. Not everyone in this business was claiming enlightenment. There are also the ‘hidden masters’, male or female, who just get on with their work which is what the third eye is for. If you are one of them you may lead your field with your vision and dedication but no one will quite know why. You will be a nice person albeit with faults. Venial as my father would say, which means your faults are natural and forgivable. You may be something of a hermit. You may not ever think you are ’enlightened’.

We are all different and can go a different way. At a certain stages in life we can change. We move from student to employee, manager, spouse, householder and retiree. This happens with enlightenment too. You are in fact enlightened as soon as you start the work it takes to get there because when it happens and you reach that rung on your own ladder you will find yourself helping your younger self to make that choice. It is vocation. Literally a calling but this will be you calling yourself from the end of your life guiding you to do the work that can justify your life. It is a rare choice.

What happened stuns me now but did not at the time. It was 1988 and my father had died in January that year. We lived in a warehouse on the Thames then (apparently the name has a Sanskrit origin which I did not realise until this year). I was working on my interior life and practising my clairvoyance at the time and must have appeared off my rocker. Extraordinary things were happening, especially in my meditations but I wanted more and some physical signs that it was in any way real, some sign that it was not delusion. How about some lottery numbers? Fortunately none came up but this did.

I had distinctly imagined my father speaking to me that morning and urging me to go out and find a great treasure. This kind of imagining is not uncommon and we call it wishful thinking. However I had a day off and as he had just died I was a bit superstitious about imagining his voice and rejecting his advice. It is the problem of the clairvoyant, more especially clairaudient (where is the distinction between this hearing voices and schizophrenia?)  I got a bucket and a trowel and went down onto the foreshore beneath our home next to the Mayflower pub in Rotherhithe from which the Pilgrim fathers set off to America.

It was a very low tide and there was more exposed mud and shingle than normal so I started looking as far out as possible. I had the feeling I should be looking for something purple but saw none nor anything of value. What I did see however was a gang of youths making their way over to me and I got the impression from their body language at about two hundred yards that they wanted to mug me. They looked like the kids who regularly vandalised our car on a Friday night, once with a paving stone through the windscreen. I was about a hundred yards from our warehouse steps and decided to get back as fast as I could. But just as I turned to go I saw some purple plastic. I was torn.

I will interrupt this tale to mention that a very good friend of mine had told me about his brush with enlightenment. He was an author of one book that he wrote in 1961 and just before he died a couple of years ago it acquired an iconic status. He had a very extraordinary life which included studying Berber magic in Morocco. His book was the first to mention LSD and it was on this drug that it happened. He told me that he was being offered enlightenment and at that moment his wife called him from the kitchen. Seemingly he chose her and the offer was never repeated.

That story suddenly came to my mind and so I took my little spade and scooped the plastic and mud beneath it into the bucket then fled. As I was running back up the steps to our wharf I suddenly imagined hearing my father exclaim ‘Congratulations this is the day of your enlightenment’. I was not amused and thought it a bad joke.

Now I will explain the nature of my enlightenment and my particular way. The bucket stayed under the kitchen sink until my wife wanted it removed because it stank. Reluctant to throw it all out I took it into the bathroom and started washing out the contents. One curious flat pebble stood out when I did that as it was white limestone, two and a half inches by one a half and about quarter of an inch thick. When I turned it over under the tap my third eye looked back at me.

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If you look at the older examples of the Eye of Horus in Egypt you can see how the pupils in that eye and mine are partially eclipsed by the upper eye lid and white of eye is exposed beneath. This is also seen in the trance state and self hypnosis.

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photo: back of the eye next to a flint bladelet I found in the sand in the Ramesseum

My way seems to be following my instinct and not finding the results of doing that until later. I seem to need some physical proof too. My third eye is my greatest treasure, worthless to anyone else. And that is when my work really started. If you have enlightenment what can you do with it, what should you do? Only now am I finding the proof for much of my work back then.

I certainly would not be able to believe any of this were I not the one who experienced it. So much was going on in my life then that it seemed quite a small event and very personal. I do not find belief helpful anyway, it often enslaves the world and usually hides the truth. Certainly it is no substitute for knowledge or science. The truth is unbelievable but I will put it here for the record. What I discovered is far from the expectations and hopes of generations of humans, but the truth is in there awaiting revelation when the muck surrounding it is washed away. I do not therefore want anyone to believe me, and am sure no one will. How can anyone believe what I am about reveal?

I did not feel any different. The bills still arrived, life was as hard as ever and about to get very much harder. However I found my clairvoyant life taking off and demanding much more from me. I will only say this about my wife who supported me throughout these years. I could not have done any of this without her and she is more important to this tale than any guru. It must have been excruciatingly embarrassing for her at times.

The arrival of the eye did make one difference. I now asked for physical confirmation of the work I was doing in the unseen world. Unless you are a good mind reader, setting up stall as a clairvoyant is difficult and uncomfortable. Most have learned their art from other clairvoyants but I did not. Your clients would soon shoot you down if you did not meet their expectations. But if you are predicting rather than dissecting their situations it will be a while before either of you know the result. Lots of people have mentioned something a clairvoyant told them which came true years later and which they had taken with a pinch of salt at the time. I am sure most of my readings were taken with quite a lot of salt.

I now have to condense a life time’s work into a couple of paragraphs but when we buy a tin of beans we do not really need to know all the logistics of how it came to be on the shelf. I will have to spill the beans and explain where the third eye comes from.

I started meditating in my bath in the dark. There were no windows and I had to turn the fan off as it distracted me. I decided to put copious amounts of salt in the bath and immerse myself. Then I wanted to meet with others like me and go back in time to do so. They were rather like conscious dreams (taken with a lot of salt). The first was startling. As I came back up from beneath the water I found myself in a campfire with a few men sitting around it. I was a bit silly in those days and took some of the embers and rubbed them in my eyes. The people watching wanted to know who I was. It happened many times until I got my first feedback which is when I got worried and stopped. Always I asked these mysterious people to leave something for me.

The climax was one day when I decided that if I could go backwards in time I should try to go back to the beginning. As I submerged myself I was told that if I did this I would die. I carried on anyway. I was not in a campfire this time but somewhere almost identical to my hot, dark bath. Again I had to tell them who I was and what I wanted. I told whoever was there my name and told them I wanted to show them what our world was like, what Creation would create. Then I summoned a vision of what at the time seemed to me to be the best of humanity. It was nothing grandiose but something I had attended and absolutely loved, so much so that I changed overnight.

It was a festival in Somerset in 1971. Looking back I would say it incorporated most of what I still find important. It was ecological, pastoral, beautiful and the people were lovely. There were hippies from all over the world, locals, gurus, priests, farmers, musicians and more all congregating peacefully. If you look at the images now on the internet you will see them all, even me. There was a scale model of the Great Pyramid which housed the stage and was sited on a junction of ley lines etc. It was also where I took my first LSD trip so perhaps that influenced my choice. The countryside was a paradise that weekend. I had no idea how much more was there than I thought but over the years have found out. By pure chance late in 1971 I was renting Worthy farmhouse and my daughter was born.


1971. the pyramid that inspired pyramids all over the world when the ancients saw it. very dramatic at night, as white as the Giza ones when coated in polished limestone.


1971. Thanks to whoever took this. I am holding my camera but have no pics surviving from it.  I am still vegetarian.



1971. My arms crossed, friend holding my daughter, my other daughter with her friend at the top of the steps to the flat next to the farmhouse we lived in to the right. An accountant in Wells gave me the number (Pilton 254) as he saw a flat advertised in the local paper (£7.50 a week) and was hoping I would come down from London to work with him. Michael Eavis answered the phone and started by asking me ‘You’re not a hippy are you?’ Lovely enlightened man. The Alvis belonged to the musician Alexis Korner, whose daughter lived in the flat to the left of the steps.

Very gradually the feedback came and the stuff that these ancients had left for me. I invited them all to come and live in me poor things. If they knew how tough that would be they perhaps might have declined the invitation but it was a life that must have interested those that came.

If you look at my third eye you may notice that it has its own third eye, or part of one. Most of the face is missing. As I was looking at Ancient Egyptian in 1989 I discovered that there is a hieroglyph very similar to my eye. And my name was also there right at the beginning, when writing was emerging. I was dubious but it was staring right at me and it seemed churlish to discount the things that a few ascetics had left in stone for me hoping they would still be around thousands of years later. Actually those here with me now knew they would still be around. They have seen the things they left to record our meetings and make a big song and dance when we uncover, discover or recover them.


This hieroglyph can face either way when written. This is the wrong way, that is the left rather than right eye.

The hieroglyph is unique. It has several meanings – smell (the bucket under the sink)  and rejoice. It is also what became in time the well known Eye of Horus. Egypt had other ’eyes’. The father of the gods had eyes too, called the Eye of Re. These eyes are not without problems in the histories handed down to us about them. Set is supposed to have torn an eye from Horus which was then restored. They wrote that the Eye of Re (who was in fact any one of five different goddesses) became very angry with humanity and had to be restrained with red wine from killing all of us. She drank it thinking it was blood. Sounds like communion.

It has been unnerving navigating some of this. Although Set (pronounced Sutah) was originally considered the god of foreigners and a kindly deity, later pharaohs did not like him and he was demonised. They had a problem with him as he favoured democracy over hereditary kingship, hence why he was accused of murdering King Osiris.  They said that he conspired with a group of elders to murder the king. Osiris is not a name but a title. Wsir in Egyptian – vizier I would say.  Kingship not a king. As it happens I have the greatest respect for our present monarch and have never killed anyone. This was how the ancients saw our government now, even if their stories were corrupted over the millennia. Unfortunately we must rely on the works of some late Greek authors to understand some things that predated them by three thousand years. Original Egyptian texts do not say that at all. It is always a problem as oral tales change dramatically with age and changing politics. Like me Sutah had two sisters and two brothers.

The other original third eye belonged to the Hindu god Shiva. He also has a distant origin and much oral history but was seen or known by very early ascetics who passed on the story and practices associated with it. Tantric yoga for example. Shiva’s eye was also given to him, it is not his eye nor did it come from his forehead. His devotees paint three white lines on their foreheads. If you look closely at my eye you may note this but you have to bear in mind that I have a white forehead as does my eye. They painted their foreheads white in imitation and the lines are in fact the three dark lines around the third eye of my fragment.

They are just things and stories they left for me, most I am sure were lost. It is personal and worthless to anyone else. However out of this a disturbing number of religions and practices have emerged and as religion has caused as much violence as anything else in our world it is a dread responsibility for me even if the problems stem from wicked people using this to exploit others or to govern nations by divine right.

The real third eye is the shard I found on the day that I correctly followed my instincts. The rest is nonsense really but well meaning mostly.  As you can see the truth is completely unbelievable, if this is true. There is a very painful side to this eye which will explain why they thought it was torn out.

I mentioned above that life became harder after finding the eye. I am not a spirit or deity just a man like any other, however not exactly like most. When I was forty it was discovered that I had been born severely deaf. It sounds impossible and my family could not accept it at first. The diagnosis was confirmed by an MRI scan of the neural pathways to my ears. I got hearing aids and began to hear what others hear. This explains much about my troubles at school. But after my treasure hunt I became more and more ill. My hair fell out in big unsightly patches, I shrank to half the weight of a man my size and my heart was fluttering at between 120 and 150 beats a minute. In fact I had so many symptoms they masked the problem eventually diagnosed as a hyperactive thyroid. That then required radioactive iodine to destroy the troublesome gland in my neck.

The ancients watched this with interest and must have recounted it. Shiva they said took the world poison to save it and his quick thinking wife managed to half strangle him to make sure it went no further than his neck. This is why they paint him blue although really it is his neck that should be. The world poison is radioactive and iodine is a purplish colour. I did not really go blue. The radioactive iodine was taken up by the thyroid in the neck and was burned by it to stop it being hyperactive and killing me . It does not usually affect the rest of the body and it did the trick.

I had been having terrible migraines too and resorted to taking painkillers which usually helped for a few hours. One day my right eye was so agonising I saw my doctor. I was lucky she was able to see it so inflamed and she thought it was Shingles. She gave me some acyclovir which took a few days to resolve it. But it soon came back. Then a man at work remarked that my face had fallen on one side. That led to the diagnosis of a cluster headache confirmed as usual by an MRI scan, this time at the Institute of Neurology in London. The NHS last year announced that cluster headaches are the most painful human condition and there is no cure. They are called suicide heads because no pain killers work, not even morphine, and many sufferers take their own lives in agony and frustration. I was asked to take a photo of one when it came. They come in clusters of days or weeks. I had five a day and each time the red hot poker in my eye wiggled around for almost an hour. I had worked with them but cannot imagine how. It really did feel like someone trying to wrench my eye out. Each time I took a painkiller I thought it had worked when after an hour the pain receded, but that was how they worked. When they at last discovered what they were I was offered a steroid injection in the back of my head when the next one came along. Instead I took acyclovir again although my doctor did not think it would work on them. A few courses of that took them away completely. Neurology did not believe me. Nor did the organisation that caters for sufferers all over the world. They took down my post about it then closed their comment section. Big pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in the condition to find a cure or something that alleviates the pain. Acyclovir is generic and very cheap, also without many side effects.

I removed this 2009 Classic cluster headache photo of my eye as it was too horrible to look at even for me.

Having a third eye is not without problems and a lot of pain. This is why some fakirs have tried to emulate my condition, but pain did not bring me the eye. It was quite the reverse. They warned me but I went for it anyway. If you want this think long and hard. It impacts on everyone who loves us.

Everything I have written here is an honest account but can only cover a fraction of my life. Humanity now stands at the border with cyberspace. Maybe we will move into it and expand it, as our own little universe that we have created. This is a record for that cyber world when it has time to look into these matters and either verify or dismiss them.



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