I usually buy Gordon Smith’s latest books as they are published, because they always contain rich nuggets of wisdom on all aspects of the spiritual and the afterlife.

Gordon Smith is generally held to be the most accurate spiritual medium in Britain. He started life in a lowly part of Glasgow, ran his own hairdressing business for a while, and now makes his living as a TV presenter and an author of books.

The following passage occurs in his latest volume : Stories From The Other Side.

Our consciousness keeps expanding but because we live in a world where there are linear thought and time and space we are restricted by what we can describe and what we can understand.

The very nature of our existence is about ripening our consciousness. So often people restrict themselves by thinking that everything has to be achieved or got over in this life. It is such an unburdening process to come to the realision that there is no beginning and no end.

Eventually we learn to mistrust the material world because everything we hold on to ages and dies, including our bodies — a process we monitor daily. As that happens, we become dimly aware of a realm above the bodily which, strangely, a part of us already inhabits.

Gordon Smith is acutely aware of the thin veil which prevents many of us seeing beyond the linear aspects of our daily lives.

Syntagma’s new network magazine, 21st-century Phi, has just been launched and, while Spiritual Nirvana is not included in this one, we will be in the next, LifeTimes, covering lifestyles and celebrities.

Phi is a letter of the Greek alphabet that’s used by science to describe the mathematical formula behind a spiral form that occurs over and over in nature. The spiral of a conch shell is phi.

Phi also has mystical connotations, if only because of the mystery of its appearance time and again in nature. Clearly, it shows a background intelligence at work, a “mind” far beyond the human one.

We’ll be discussing these matters in more depth in the coming weeks.

Spiritual healing has rarely received the attention it deserves from the medical profession. It’s mostly regarded as something akin to witchcraft by learned doctors of the chemical healing we apply to today’s diseases. Famous healers like Harry Edwards (pictured left) have been dismissed by most medical practitioners.

However, that tide is turning and turning fast. Scientists in the U.S. and UK have begun to put together all the evidence that’s out there and compiled it into a very persuasive dossier.

One of the earliest experiments was on the flipside of healing: the curse. In the 1960s, American scientists subjected some mould to a vindictive curse. Out of 194 mould cultures subjected to the curse, 151 exhibited retarded growth.

The cardiologist Dr Randolph Byrd at San Francisco General Hospital discovered that heart patients who are prayed for by Christian groups needed less intervention and suffered fewer complications.

Professor Walach of Northampton University in England recently set up a massive analysis of all the evidence and data and arrived at the conclusion that spiritual healing really does work. Many other workers in the field are supporting him.

Dean Radin, a parapsychologist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California has found compelling evidence that positive healing has a noticeable impact on another’s mind and body. The results of his tests on cancer pathients were startling. At the precise moment a partner transmitted the healing thoughts, remarkable changes occurred in the mind and body of the ailing person.

The UK National Health Service employs spiritual healers to comfort and help seriously ill and dying patients. One of them, Ruth Kaye, says : “Patients who use things like spiritual healing often use fewer drugs and are less reliant on antidepressants or sleeping tablets. In short, they are less of a drain on an over-stretched NHS.”

One of her patentis said : “Ruth has a special gift. I simply closed my eyes when she was healing me and I saw loads of bright lights. I felt as if I was having my battery recharged.”

The wealth of anecdotal, as well as experimental, evidence shows that some individuals do have the gift of spiritual healing.

In a new study to examine what he calls “extended mind”, Dr Rupert Sheldrake states that people often know who is calling when the telephone rings :

“By far the most common apparent kind of telepathy in the modern world occurs in connection with telephone calls — when you think of someone for no apparent reason and then they ring and you say, ‘That’s funny I was just thinking about you.’ Is it a mass delusion or is something really happening?”

Extended mind is a phrase used often by Sheldrake, the Cambridge biologist, to explain all kinds of paranormal phenomena. He believes that this mind stretches out beyond us and accounts for the way some of us know when another person is looking at us.

Try watching people on the street as they walk past from a high window. The number who suddenly look up directly at you shows that they “know” they are being “pinged” by you. The only way it could happen is if there is a continuity of “mindstuff” between the two people.

Sheldrake conducts many experiments in this field, with remarkable results. His book, The Sense of Being Stared At, is a classic of the genre. As an accredited scientist, his experiments are always well designed and hard to fault.

His controversial research paper was presented at the British Association’s Festival of Science in Norwich, England.