HALLOWEEN - What Does It Mean?

All Hallows Eve (or Halloween, as it is more commonly known) is - according to Bel Mooney, writing in Saturday's Daily Mail - 'about death, mourning, darkness and remembrance. And that, Bel says, 'is why the festival speaks to our innermost selves, even if we don't realize it.'

She continues: 'Even in a secular age, the subconscious mind tunes into the spiritual at this time of year. Children dressed as witches and skeletons and parents laboriously carving out pumpkin lanterns are connecting to our ancestors and enacting the deeper meaning of October 31.

It is not hard to see how the idea of the dying of the light prompts thoughts of death. The Celts believed that on October 31 the border between our world and the 'other' world is especially thin. As plants died away, they believed that revered ancestors reached back through the veil separating them from the living.'

Whatever your beliefs, I wish you a Halloween that's as spooky (or not) as you want it to be!

PROOF OF HEAVEN

Can there be proof of heaven? I think there can, having recently read a very interesting story about a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon – Eben Alexander – who, in common with lots of scientists, used to be a non-believer.

But that was before contracting a rare form of bacterial meningitis, when he fell into a coma lasting seven days. After confounding the doctors who became increasingly convinced that he would never recover, Dr Alexander now claims he was somehow transported to a ‘place of clouds’.

He tells of a beautiful blue-eyed woman answering his unspoken thoughts, of ‘transparent shimmering beings’ gliding over an idyllic landscape – and of an all-powerful divine presence flooding him with intense, unconditional love.

He describes being a ‘speck on a butterfly wing’ along with millions of other butterflies in a swirling ‘river of life and colour’. They fluttered among trees and flowers that exploded into bloom as they passed.

He saw, below him, waterfalls, pools and ‘indescribable colours’, while above him were clouds – ‘big, puffy, pink-white ones showing up sharply against the deep blue-black sky’.

Dr Alexander goes on to describe flocks of ‘transparent, shimmering beings’ making arcs of gold and silver across the sky and incredible hymns and chants reaching him from these beings – ‘higher forms of life’ which he could only conclude were angels.

Throughout, he was acutely conscious of being loved and cherished forever and now remembers being ‘flooded with a vast and crazy sensation of relief.’

There is much, much more to his story, which he has written about in Newsweek and also in his book Proof Of Heaven, to be published next week. I really recommend reading it!