Catch Basket Concept

A New Approach to Life and Greater Spiritual Reality

In the mid nineteen-eighties, I experienced a serious belief system challenge. Glaring contradictions arose at every turn, between my ongoing hard-life experiences and popularly accepted New Age concepts of spiritual reality. I struggled to comprehend and integrate my experience with this paradigm, being forced time and time again to accept illogical compromises. But adaptation of my life experience soon became impossible and I began suffocating under its awkward burden. The popular model rapidly became unworkable in a practical sense. Either I was going crazy and experiencing consistent, repeatable delusions, as were all the people I was helping, or something was decidedly rotten in downtown Denmark.

Like many people down through the ages, I had spent my life searching for spiritual truth and meaning to life. For many years, I had sat in development groups, prayed, meditated, visualized and read until my eyes burned and my mind reeled under the massive contradictory onslaught. I developed psychic abilities, had spectacular OBE's, visions and mystical experiences. I made good progress, but still I need more. . .

I was eventually reborn and transformed when I raised my kundalini to its highest level around 1987 (this was when the enigma of my life became apparent to me). But raising kundalini, in itself, does not bring instant enlightenment. Kundalini has to be raised regularly and mastered, just like any other ability. The first time kundalini is raised it causes 'abstract' enlightenment, not actual enlightenment. You know everything while kundalini is raised, but cannot realize this when you return to a normal level of consciousness (the base level of consciousness in the normal waking state). There are no shortcuts, and there is no way of avoiding all the hard work and hard-life experience necessary for the abstracts to filter down into your conscious mind and physical reality.

All of this gleaned me glimpses of the greater spiritual reality above, with a few tantalizingly abstract snippets of abstract higher truth thrown in for good measure. But my increasingly strong contact with the greater spiritual reality provided me with a flood of contradictions to the popularly accepted model. This intellectual burden grew and grew as my belief system was stretched way beyond its design limits. It rapidly approached critical mass.

I was offered a solution in 1990. I had a major experience where an angel, or my higher-self (hard to tell which, and somewhat of a moot point really) manifested to me as a powerful objective voice. I could have recorded this had I a tape recorder handy; it was that audible. I was wide-awake and standing up. I had just stepped out of the shower and was about to start my evening meditation, around 9 pm. It was the most beautiful voice I have ever heard: deep, masculine, eloquent, loving, forgiving and wise. The atmosphere was intense. I felt like a small child might feel when standing before God in a great cathedral for the very first time. The sense of awe and loving fatherly forgiveness is overpowering. As I write, just revisiting my living memory of this causes tears of deep spiritual longing to flood down my face; such is the emotional impact of this experience.

NB: This was the same objective voice that had spoken to me a couple of years earlier, when it then instructed me to begin teaching myself how to write. Since I barely finished grade eight, this was no mean feat in itself. I had worked hard, and by the time of the second visitation, had already mastered the basics of English and grammar. Even so, I still felt I had not done enough. But direct contact with spiritual beings from the greater reality always has this effect, especially when they come to you.

The voice asked me to sit down, and then proceed to explain a great many things to me, the most important of which was advice on how to proceed on my quest for higher spiritual truth and knowledge. I was instructed to dismantle my belief system, and then to intelligently rebuild it from scratch. I was told to be disciplined in my approach and to use personal experience, logic and commonsense to build a new foundation belief system, upon which to continue my quest for true enlightenment.

The foundation belief system lies deep within the subconscious mind. This comprises a set of conceptual mental filters and shields, which are fundamental to one's physical and spiritual existence. These shape and affect your thoughts and perceptions by filtering ideas and inspirations, making these conform to a central theme, as set by your foundation beliefs. All knowledge lies within your heart. But accessing this is extraordinarily difficult. Everything has to pass through your conceptual filters before it can be perceived or realized.

If one's fundamental beliefs are even slightly flawed, information trying to pass through becomes distorted or blocked. Imagine new truths as being delicate square crystals, and flawed conceptual filters (contradictory beliefs) as being coarse round holes. New truths are effectively blocked. If one forces them through, the results are splintered octagonals, i.e., fractured, distorted or incomplete truths.

Therefore, if a higher intelligence (be it God, one's higher-self, holy guardian angel or spirit guide) tries to pass contradictory new truths through a flawed belief system, these truths are conceptually blocked or distorted. The greater the fundamental errors in one's belief system, the greater will be the distortion. All things being equal, this is why some people can receive inspiration (be it scientific or spiritual) and others cannot or receive only poorly.

This concept that you create your own spiritual reality is nothing new. Versions of this can be found in a great many books of spiritual philosophy. But actually realizing how this works and applying it to one's own foundation belief system in pursuit of higher truth and knowledge is an entirely different matter.

I was given detailed instructions on how to accomplish this. The next day I sat down and made a list of all the things I believed in concerning my spiritual reality. I then analyzed and erased all the things I had not actually experienced or proven for myself. After many days of pondering and revising, I ended up with a very small list indeed. It went something like this:

1. OBE is real: I've had Astral projections all my life.


2. Clairvoyance is real: I've seen auras and visions all my life.


3. Healing is real: I've both given and received it, seen and felt its power.


4. Kundalini is real: I raised mine to its highest level in 1987, and many times since.


5. We survive death: I've seen people after their deaths and have visited the spirit worlds.


6. A higher force is concerned with human existence and its spiritual evolution: I've experienced this many times -- the voice I heard above is just one example.


7. Angels, masters, deities and good spirits are real: I've interacted with these many times.


8. Bad spirits are real: I've experienced poltergeists and psychic attacks, been possessed and self-exorcised, and helped many people and children with similar problems.

Gone were personal spirit guides (while I had learned to believe I had one, I had never actually met or openly communicated with him). Gone was the involvement of spirits in just about everything spiritual and psychic (I had no hard experience to support this, only vague assumptions). And gone was the entire organized spirit structure above us that I had been taught to believe in (I had no real proof this was accurate). I also had a quandary. Apart from angels and other such exalted beings (which have such power and presence they are impossible to mistake for who they truly are) I had no reliable way of telling good spirits from bad spirits. Therefore, logically, I had to reject all lesser spirits until I discovered a reliable method of discernment.

The above might sound extreme, but it is eminently logical. Given the source, I took the advice I had been given to heart. I would learn to live this new way of truth and to apply it to my life.

My final list was real and true, as I had personally experienced everything on it. As instructed, I would build on what was real and discard everything else. I was told to shelve items of 'possible' truth aside, until proven or disproven. However, this is easier said than done and I went into what I can only describe as spiritual shock. I felt empty, alone and depressed. I had to keep stopping myself from talking to my spirit guide during prayers. If I was to do this at all, as instructed, I had to go all the way.

In time, this new foundation belief system settled more comfortably within me. I got over my emptiness and began filling my aching void with practical truth and knowledge. From this point onwards, slowly and surely, everything started to come together in my life. As instructed, I began writing a journal of my thoughts and ideas. I used the writing process to nurture my inner genius, to free up the flow of inspiration between my physical-self and my higher-self. This flow, I had been told, was blocked not only by my previously flawed conceptual filters, but by the vast differences in consciousness: between the level of consciousness of my normal awake mind (my base level of consciousness) and the more rarified and abstract level where my higher-self resided within me.

I turned my unanswered questions into journal articles. These contained everything I experientially knew to be true about each subject. I found myself putting in many logical subtitles and question marks to represent gaps in my knowledge. I used the writing process (revision, sleep, revision, sleep, and so on) to coax the truth from my dreams, and from the deep recesses of my higher spiritual-self. As instructed, I began shutting myself away in a dark, silent room for several hours at a time, discovering a profound new level of deep trance thinking. I thought, dreamed, meditated and wrote on seemingly unfathomable arcane matters.

In time I began receiving inspirational ideas. My dreams and visions swam with sparkling clues; tiny pieces of the jigsaws I was trying to build. My logical and inspirational processes began working overtime, far more powerful than ever before. I found myself waking many times during sleep, compelled to reach for pen and paper to record new ideas. Mundane conversations and events triggered intellectual storms through the mental associations they caused, necessitating much frantic note-taking as inspirational ideas surfaced like glistening dolphins leaping from the murky waters of my subconscious mind.

I accepted this process and began working with it. I felt like I had been reborn. This is how I developed my Catch Basket concept. During the day, I set my catch baskets by pondering unanswered questions. These are baited with rich crumbs of personal experience, tantalizing ideas and juicy pieces of logic. In the morning, I check these for fruits that have been cast into them from above. I record everything and add each small harvest to my questioning articles. Pretty soon, these began fleshing themselves out and filling in the mysterious gaps.

In truth, my work teaches me just as much as it teaches those I share it with. Over the years since I began this process, my catch basket repository began groaning with ripe esoteric fruits. As instructed, I began pouring these into the articles, tutorials and books I eventually began writing.

Over the years since my arcane riddle began, my inspirational process grew into a finely-tuned subtle mechanism. Now, if I have a serious question the answer always comes to me. Sometimes it surfaces immediately, sometimes days, months or even years later, but the clues that lead me to the answers always come. This has given me drive and purpose, plus an ever-increasing fascination for this many-splendored thing we call mortal life. Whatever the future holds in store, I look forward to living it with great interest.

I hope the above explanation of where I am coming from is of some help to people who might be struggling with their own beliefs. It is neither my intention nor my joy to cast doubts upon anyone's heartfelt theories and beliefs. But if my work causes you belief system discomfort, then how solid were your beliefs to begin with? While faith is a priceless jewel, if one accepts anything blindly one risks polluting one's essential foundation belief system with the curse of mindless dogmatism.

Please keep an open mind to the possibilities I have introduced here. The popular New Age spiritual model contains a great deal of beautiful, comforting philosophy. But it can fall down quite badly in a practical sense, especially when applied to dark supernatural problems. If one clings to this model, the development of new concepts and the gathering of higher spiritual truths becomes virtually impossible. The parameters of current popular spiritual models simply do not allow for this. Because of this, many people today bend the rules and invent elaborate explanations to get around these problems, while dogmatically holding true to popular beliefs. But this increased complexity prohibits a more direct approach. It leads to belief system obfuscation and ineffective methods being developed.

A Little Sage Advice To Close On

Question everything, especially the sacred cows of dogma. Always think for yourself. Experiment and learn from all that life has to offer you. Listen to and consider the wisdom of others, and try on their ideas as you might try on a new coat for size. Never buy a new coat just because it seems to fit; it must be practical, within your price range, and look good on you too. And above all, build your own foundation belief system from the wealth of your own personal life experience.