This story written for the compilation book ‘Drawn To Dorset’ By Claire Whiles, published Dec.2018, is synopsis of some of the events related in the Transpersonal Autobiography – Parallel Worlds – written by Josephine Sellers and published by Archive Publishing: http://www.archivepublishing.co.uk/
Information about Josephine’s book, work and YouTube TV Channel can be seen at:
https://www.youtube.com/user/AwakeningChannel
‘I hold that when a person dies his soul returns again to earth;
Arrayed in some new flesh disguise, another mother gives him birth.
With sturdier limbs and brighter brain the old soul takes the road again.’
John Masefield 1878-1967
Upon a large country estate some 400 years ago resided a Cleric, The Rev. William Thomas, who was also the Tutor to some of the children of the Estate House. A particular bond of deeper understanding was formed over the years with one of his young charges, Catherine, who like him, seemed to possess a deeper understanding and hunger to delve into the deeper meaning and potential of human existence, and all that lay beyond in the Universe. In those days conversations on such matters were only spoken in whispers, behind the hedges of the beautiful gardens or upon long walks to explore the flora and fauna of the surrounding countryside. These were the times of persecution for anybody who strayed beyond the bounds of the orthodox religion.
In my early childhood, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I was quite psychically aware. I could see healing energies being sent towards me when I was unwell, requested by my parents, who were also psychically aware. I was particularly aware of a clerical gentleman by my side and at times felt him to be an intrusion into my childhood. I asked other children if they could see him, but they could not, and so I began in hide a part of myself from the world.
In the early 1960s I met, across a crowded room, the eyes of a young man and instantly recognised him at a deep soul level. We both felt the electrical charge that passed between the two of us. His name was Brian. By the end of that evening we were standing together deeply engrossed in developing a relationship with each other. I just knew that evening that I would spend the rest of my life with this man. We were just seventeen years old. Within a few years we were married.
At the time of this meeting I was just about to embark in the early stages of working in the legal profession in London. A career choice I was looking forward to.
The Cleric of 400 years prior, the Rev. William Thomas, also had a great interest and understanding of the workings of Law and also a passion for championing the rights of the common man. During his time serving as Estate Cleric, he even came into dispute with Sir Henry Uvedale concerning the income that derived from the great tithes of the Manor of Long Crichel in the Court of Queen Elizabeth 1 and lost.
The Uvedales were one of the great landed families of Dorset in the sixteenth century. The family network extended throughout Hampshire, Dorset and Somerset. Sir Henry Uvedale had six sons as well as five daughters, and at the centre of that five was Catherine.
During the early days of our marriage, I began to experience persistent flashbacks of a life spent upon a country estate long back in time. Such phenomenon would be classed as spontaneous past life recall, a subject that I had absolutely no knowledge of. I used to tease my husband Brian that I was not being kept in the manner to which I was accustomed. We lived in a tiny semi-detached house on the outskirts of London.
Within a few years of having our two children we both experienced an irresistible desire to relocate to the county of Dorset. It was in those early days in Dorset that I was drawn constantly to take my family and our dogs to walk upon the foot paths and by-ways of a beautiful nearby country estate.
In the early 1970s, just three years after arriving at Poole in Dorset, we began to look for a new home in the country area a few miles inland from Poole. One evening, after several weeks of searching without success, we saw a thatched cottage advertised in the local paper, just a few miles away near Wimborne. We were very tempted to go and view it, but decided against it as we were a little worried about the expense involved in the upkeep of the thatched roof. The paper got thrown away and the idea put out of our minds. However, several days later I got the most overpowering urge to retrieve the newspaper from the dustbin. Rummaging around in all the rubbish I eventually found it and there and then rang the estate agent for an appointment to view the cottage. Something had prodded and pushed me. I had responded and two days later Brian and I were on our way to view the cottage.
We approached up a long and winding, tree-lined driveway which opened into a horseshoe shaped garden with a thatched and whitewashed cottage standing right in the middle. It was so quaint – just like having stepped back into the past. We were greeted at the very low front door by a friendly, elderly lady who invited us inside. What a warm atmosphere we encountered as we stepped through the doorway. Brian and I both had the strangest feeling flood through us. If felt as if we had come home. We had returned! This is the only possible way to describe the strange sensation we both felt as we walked into the low, heavily beamed ceiling of the hallway of that ancient cottage.
As the viewing came to an end, although we felt slightly uncomfortable to be sitting in this lady’s home, whom we had only just met, it was the most difficult task to lift ourselves out of those chairs and leave. We both felt we wanted to stay and, as we eventually drove away down the long and winding driveway, we were very determined to take ownership of that cottage as soon as possible.
We had not been living at the cottage for very long before Brian and I began to experience a rather strange phenomenon. It was something that remained with us all the years we were there and, as our son grew older, it started to affect him as well. We found that when we travelled a few miles away from the cottage, after a short while we would experience a pulling sensation in the solar plexus. It was accompanied by an overwhelming desire to return home. I would find myself driving home at a ridiculous pace and I would have to force myself to reduce speed. However, we did find that if we travelled a considerable distance away, say over twenty five miles or so, the sensation disappeared and would re-occur again when back inside the twenty five mile radius. As the years moved on, we came to know exactly why the cottage had the power to draw us back.
In the ensuing years, with the help of several experts working in the fields of direct voice mediumship, earth energy rebalancing and archaeological dowsing, I had come to understand and remember my long past relationship with the Rev. William Thomas, as Catherine, his pupil. The Rev. William Thomas was my Tutor those 400 years ago, on the same country estate I had been drawn to since the early days of moving to Dorset. This corroborating those very early memories of the Cleric by my side in early childhood, and my memories of life on a country estate, which I had experienced in the early days of married life in London, as spontaneous past life recall. Brian, it later transpired, had been one of my brothers, Sir Edmund Uvedale. This fact made it possible for us to understand our drawing together so powerfully at the age of seventeen in this lifetime. I also discovered, via two independent sources, that together we had both also lived upon the site around 3,000 BC and were involved in the setting up of a stone circle. This discovery made it easier for us to appreciate the energetic power of the site to attract and draw people.
In our early years at the cottage, The Rev. William Thomas would communicate via a Direct Voice Medium. Apart from the spontaneous knowledge the Cleric imparted to us, I would telepathically ask questions of him and the answers were immediately forthcoming. It was as if he could read my thoughts. It was intriguing to learn so much about the past history of the cottage site and hear the voices of the people from the past who had lived or visited the site from way back in time. Eventually I went on to communicate directly with the Cleric, but only after having to let go of a lot of preconceived ideas and fears.
I always seemed to have, at the back of my mind, an idea that there was something worrying and wrong about my fascination for the subject as a whole. Some kind of guilt feelings kept intruding and eventually, I could see that I would have to choose between institutional religion and the spiritual path now opening up to me. I was, in truth, being offered far more than the dusty old dogmas of the bible, but traditions die hard and the penalty for changing them is guilt. One medium I met, during that period of my life, picked up my inner turmoil and suggested that I should meet a friend of hers who as an Anglican Vicar at a church in Bournemouth.
I had several meetings with this enlightened man. He was totally tuned into the whole subject of psychic phenomenon and yet somehow managed to fit it into his work as an Anglican Vicar. He understood my predicament perfectly and went to great pains to assure me that I was not offending anybody or anything in my quest. After full and lengthy discussions he took me into his church and gave me a blessing.
This vicar achieved a great deal for my future spiritual liberation, but not everybody can receive such enlightened treatment from the church. Most people will say that they have not been over influenced by religious education at school, but if invited to add up the hours spent at assembly each week, formal lessons of religious education, Sunday school and taking into account the religious attitudes of some of the more enthusiastic teachers, the time spent on religious persuasion is very considerable.
For my first attempt at direct communication with the Cleric, I left my bed at 3a.m. and went downstairs into the dining room of the old cottage, where we had received and experienced so much psychic communication. As a person who likes to write, I decided to take a pen and pad and sat in an arm chair, I made sure that our two Old English Sheepdogs were sitting by my sides as I felt apprehensive. At the same time I played Mozart, quiet, on headphones because I love music and find it a very good way to disconnect myself from the immediate surroundings. I sat and waited, rather frightened, as I expected the pen to dash across the paper as in the case of automatic writing. Automatic writing is a form of communication where a person sits with pen in hand, more often than not with eyes closed, and the hand writes uncontrolled by the writer. The speed at which the written word appears on the paper is unnaturally fast and often presented without punctuation. The content of the communication is passed directly from the communicant, to the hand of the writer. However, this was not to be the mode for me. After about fifteen minutes of quiet music gently relaxing my body, I was aware of a flow of words within my mind. I started to write what I sensed. The words flowed and my pen wrote at great speed. My eyes felt almost closed. I was writing by feel rather than vision.
Many of those early written communications contained instructions and encouragement from The Rev. William Thomas directed towards me as a ‘trainee’ communicator. The most marked, physical sensation that I experienced, whilst attempting to write in this way, was that of an immense love being directed towards me. It felt like ecstasy.
The depth of feeling I received from The Rev.William Thomas is almost impossible to put into words. It was a feeling I was able to reciprocate to him after short while. It is like the joining together of two souls. It was a truly beautiful experience. I now find it difficult to understand why I should ever have been afraid of it.
Following sixteen years of living and owning that beautiful thatched cottage, raising our family and caring for all our animals and engaging with many etheric communicators, relating their lives and times upon the site, I was drawn into conflict with the injustices of relationships between local planning, land owners and developers. They were threatening the very existence of our beautiful home and land surrounding it. An intense legal situation ensued that I won against all the odds. During this period I was most ably guided, on a telepathic level, by the disincarnate energy of that long dead Cleric, the Rev. William Thomas, whose powerful energy I had become familiar with over the years and had gradually come to trust and work with.
I would add that these experiences, that I relate, were not completely comfortable for me to come to terms with in the early days. I found very little literature in the 1980s that would support such phenomena and few people who could relate to my experience personally. Eventually as my story began to circulate, following the publication of my first edition of my autobiography, ‘The Return’ in 1989, I was overwhelmed with support from around the world from people who could relate to what I had to say and found my story gave them some comfort too. The Cleric and I shared an emotional bond and interests that traversed the centuries and suggested a continuum of life beyond the grave. It gave a purpose to reincarnation as a process of experiential, emotional and spiritual growth.
In the early 1990s, when Brian and I owned and lived in a beautiful Victorian farmhouse set deep within Dorset, having left the cottage, we were drawn yet again into another legal battle, this time in regard to the crushing abuse of power that the banking system inflicted on its customers during the recession of the early 90s. Both of us throughout our married life had been self-employed, and ran our own businesses.
My legal fight this time was again ably aided, telepathically by the disincarnate legal mind of my long passed Tutor, the Rev. William Thomas. He was able to communicate insights to me that he could perceive had been going on behind the scenes. As the litigation process moved forward and we were granted access to internal documents, in a process known as ‘discovery’, I found he could indeed communicate knowledge that had been unavailable to me a few months prior.
I worked alongside of a Barrister who then took our case, against our bank, through both Civil and Criminal Legal proceedings. We uncovered a mine field of corruption and met with many other victims of the vicious intimidation inflicted upon customers during the recession of the early 90s by the banks. They were struggling to minimise their losses, resulting from irresponsible lending, at the expense of their long term loyal customers. Between us all we were making extremely uncomfortable ripples within the banking system. I was being referred to by our bank’s Head of Customer Services, as ‘a loose cannon’. As we came close to a settlement with our bankers, we were suddenly ‘stone walled’ by the bank’s lawyers. Our enraged Barrister attempted to gain a Criminal prosecution and took our case the Director of Public Prosecutions. Again we were ‘stone walled’. At this stage we were becoming aware of countless other victims who were experiencing the same stone walling by the legal system regarding their disputes with the banking system. I was told, by our Solicitor at the time, that cases were being bought off by the Banks. Some of these abused customers were moving forward to the European Court of Human Rights. I declined to join with them.
For sure there are influences and powers out there within the hierarchy of the political, commercial and legal systems of this country and across the world that are determined to keep the voice of the ‘little man’ silent.
At this point I decided to withdraw from the process and get on with my life and went on to train and study as a Transpersonal Counsellor. My experiences to date had demonstrated powerfully to me an inner potential that is available to us all. That quiet inner voice of intuition that can so easily be drowned out by the constant bombardment of external voices telling us to do this and that. If this intuitive talent were only recognised in our childhood and if we, as adults, could refrain from forcing our own beliefs onto our children, thus allowing them to develop their own sensitivity, much sadness could be avoided in later life.
We do appear to live and live again. Maybe to fulfil our soul’s potential of remembering that we are all co-creators of this Universe we inhabit. We are not alone for sure and when life is difficult to cope with and understand, we only have to ask for help from the Great Life Force, to which we are intrinsically linked. The Universe and the Cosmos reach into infinity and we have a choice to reach out and explore and interact or not.
As our legal case against the Bank began to collapse, I could not help but feel there had to be a deeper reason for the situation we found ourselves in. I decided to test the water. I placed the name of the particular individual concerned, in our bank, who had refused to own up to his actions, in a sealed envelope and gave it to my good friend Mary Kingston. She was a medium and who I had previously come to understand had been Mother to Brian and I some four hundred years prior upon The Crichel Estate. Her name was Isabel Uvedale. I knew Mary had a considerable ability at psychometry. This is the ability to read the energy contained in an object or, in my case, the name of a person written and placed inside a sealed envelope. Such psychic investigation was something she had been asked to do, time and time again, in respect of missing people, to assess integrity, or to judge compatibility of people. I was not all together surprised to learn from Mary that I had a karmic link to the person named in the envelope. She told me that several hundreds of years ago I had betrayed this person in connection with smuggling activities in Cornwall. This time he was betraying me. Mary gave us a lot of personal details about the individual. This information contained graphic evidence that Mary had ‘tuned in’ accurately, as she confirmed facts what we already knew about him.
Having been starved out, financially speaking, of our beautiful Dorset farm only four years after having purchased it, we found ourselves living in a rented Ancient Stone Farmhouse on the Dorset/Somerset border. The actual boundary between the counties crossed through the property.
Shortly after moving into this new farm, it became obvious to me that I had, at some time in the past, lived on the site of the old farmhouse. I felt a familiarity with it, which was later to be confirmed by more than one of my many psychic colleagues. We were aware that the farm was located on an ancient preaching site marked by an Ash tree. In times past, monks from the nearby abbey had preached to the local inhabitants under this Ash tree.
On the second day in this farmhouse, I stood on the upstairs first landing, looking out the window. I was dressed in what felt like Quaker or Puritan dress. I felt lonely, cold and oppressed. I knew I had lived in this home before and it had not been a happy situation for some reason. I had an overwhelming feeling that I really did not want to be here again.
As I have mentioned earlier, I had lived in a beautiful thatched cottage on an ancient stone circle site for many years, where the energy was quite amazing. Living on a powerful, but positive site can be a very uplifting experience, and such energy can be used and projected in a very beneficial way. To find oneself actually living over a site of intense negativity is a very different situation. I now was beginning to realise that our new home had extremely black and restless energies within, possibly as a result of past events. The effect it had upon us all as a family was dramatic, distressing and very difficult to cope with and understand. However, there must be light within darkness and the result of the experiences that followed added to our understanding of the complexities of life and the many faceted layers involved in living.
When in the house alone, on several occasions, I heard the sound of a fist hammering on the heavy old wooden front door. The dogs in the house heard the sound as well and rushed with me to the door, barking excitedly. There was never anybody to be seen on the other side. At other times I would hear heavy footsteps on the staircase.
During the eighteen months at the farmhouse I found it very hard to maintain the will to keep going and had to dig very deeply into my own reserves. I had to hold on to the belief that life is a gift and try to reach an understanding of what this experience was all about. During that difficult period, one of our dogs fell backwards down the staircase in the middle of the night and broke its back. And one of my beautiful horses that I had loved and ridden for some fifteen years, died of what appeared to be a heart attack, outside my bedroom window. It had felt all along that the site was baying for blood.
I still had no understanding of what my part had been in this unfolding mystery. I felt I might never do so, other than have faint recollections of a life as a Puritan girl a few hundred years before. However, within a few months I was to gain a greater insight. It was the day of the funeral of Princess Diana. Brian and I had been out riding our horses early in the morning as it was a beautiful day. We came back to watch the funeral on the television. We were sitting in the lounge with the dogs at our sides. About fifteen minutes into the funeral proceedings I became aware of a very tall man standing outside the lounge window which faced a rear door of the farmhouse. I was seeing what I like to refer to, these days, as a ‘yesterday’s person’. His presence bought a shiver down my spine. I told Brian and expressed the fact that I did not wish to see this man’s eyes because I had a great fear of them. The dogs also seemed transfixed, looking silently up at the window. The man was dressed in a black cloak with a huge brimmed black hat.
I tried to erase the presence of this man from my mind and get on with watching the funeral, but he did not go away. After some thirty minutes I felt the room around me filling with white light. Brian and I were both aware of this light. It was not an unpleasant experience. Then I witnessed the plaster on the walls falling away and I could see the original bare stone of the farmhouse. Brian did not see this, but continued to experience the light. I then saw the stone walls falling away and could clearly see that the farmhouse site was on a mound. Surrounding the mound, down on one knee, with muskets pointed at the site of the farmhouse, were twenty or thirty soldiers in black and white uniforms. They had buckles on their shoes, buckled sashes around their waists and were wearing small round helmets.
I could sense myself moving towards a big door to respond to a heavy fist hammering on it. I opened the door and looked into the cold dark eyes of the tall man in the black cloak, wearing the large brimmed black hat with a huge white plume feather in it. He handed me a rolled up piece of paper. It contained notification that we were, as a community, charged with hiding a fugitive who was on the run from what I assume where Royalists. I may have been experiencing a scene from the times of Cromwell. I knew we were innocent of the accusation, and yet what followed appeared to be some kind of search of the farm and massacre of people and animals. Fortunately I was spared the details.
I felt I was experiencing a situation that required rescue from the trauma of its own history. I had witnessed psychic rescue mediums work in this field over the years and I knew what I had to do. I prayed, blessed and forgave those souls involved and implored them to do the same for themselves and move on to other brighter and higher realms of existence.
I returned to the reality of our lounge and the funeral of the Princess of Wales on television. I felt extreme relief, almost joy, at what had transpired because I had gained a deep insight into the past events that had polluted the environment of that farm. I had also played a small part in the clearance of those horrible vibrations. I had always admired and respected those who worked in the realms of psychic rescue, though I had never had any desire to work in that area myself. However, spontaneously, having learned from observing others carry out such work, I had reacted automatically.
Brian had remained silent through these events, realising that I was in some kind of strange dream like state and obviously dealing with something connected to the light in the room and man with the frightening eyes. When I told him what had happened he was relieved that we seemed to have solved the mystery about why it had been our fate to live at that farm. I felt, and so did Brian, that the time to leave had now arrived. We both very much wanted to move on. The site was now cleansed for others and we had earned a release from past memories.
Just one week prior to leaving the Farmhouse, I called into a local reference library, with my daughter to see if we could trace the history of the farm. We were told that most of the records relating to the area were in Taunton, being re-complied, so there was little information we could access. Maybe that is just as well, because readers might think I had read the records first and then invented the tale – a not unreasonable suspicion in the present cultural climate. However, with my hand on my heart, I do say that this is not so.
There was one small book in the library, taken from a locked glass cabinet by the librarian. She searched the index for the name of our farm and found that the site had been the location of secret Puritan meetings following the ‘driving out’ of a Puritan preacher from a local village. We also discovered that skeletons, in shallow graves, had been found on the hill at the entrance of the farm driveway when the new Turnpike Roads had been constructed. Incidentally that driveway entrance had, over the years, proved to be an accident black spot! The records for that village on the Somerset boarder, relating to the arrest, imprisonment and transportation of people involved in the Cromwellian uprisings have been lost for all time, although they still existed for other villages! One day, perhaps, we shall learn what actually happened.
This next move for Brian and I was further south in Dorset to yet another beautiful thatched cottage surrounded by a river with a large rambling garden, attached to a grand country house. It was open to the public and had a reputation for being haunted. More events of the past presented themselves for us to unravel at the request of one of the owners.
In more recent years, the person living today, who carries within him a deep remembrance of his lifetime as the Cleric, The Rev.William Thomas, found Brian and I as a result of a strange string of synchronicities. He enabled us eventually to return to live upon the lands of that estate yet again, to help with an environmental project, as he was part of the family that resided there in the present day. Over the years, as I have already related, we had met with others who had shared that lifetime with us. We came to understand that friends and family from the sixteenth century were now living in Dorset today and experiencing the phenomenon of Group Reincarnation.
During our days back upon our ancient homelands, we had the opportunity to address unresolved karmic issues and transform them into rays of sunlight, as the angst of centuries long gone dissolved into the ether. A sacred contract completed.
Over the years I have been able to recall countless other lives, aided by hypnosis. Many of those lives re-explored, I could see linked to my current life by way of ‘drives’ or ‘passions’. Some would describe them as Archetypal Energies. I have for sure passionately fought throughout my life this time around, for the rights and voice of the individual when up against the power and persuasions of the system that seeks to control us.
Brushes with the authority of the church, the banking system, legal profession, education and medical professions are a part of my story of struggle to find personal authenticity. And I offer the suggestion that in our current times, each one of us needs to seek the knowledge of our own reality. It is through this Gnosis that we will be able to cope with the dangerous tendencies and detrimental influences that are beginning to pile up on the horizons of the future.
We all enter into our lives with a Call or Contract. It is the quiet voice of intuition, deep within, that has the power to encourage us towards fulfilment of that Call or Contract. It is our choice whether or not to engage and break out of some of the more rigorous structures that seek to persuade us that we do not have our own individual voice and destiny.
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