There is no denying that Rev. Shanes has had a very active life filled with experiences and encounters with angels, demons, aliens and the paranormal. She grew up in a family that had supernatural experiences; at age four she started doing yoga exercises and at fourteen she communicated with a guardian spirit she called Norman using a Ouija board. At about the same time she was given a copy of The Exorcist by her grandfather who probably did not realise it was not age appropriate.
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Shanes tells the story of a friend who, being an alcoholic, was vulnerable to the nasty spirits that can get to you via the Ouija board. He got visitations from no less a spirit than Alastair Crowley and from an even more nasty demon called Quabula, who appeared to him as a child-sized black male with white eyes. After that he went missing for a day and told how he found himself on a golf course where guardian angels fought off Crowley and Quabula, and from that day on he no longer had a drink problem.
She has not used a Ouija board since her twenties, and although she does not have a problem with them, but warns that they can open the door to evil spirits, as in the case of her friend.
As a student of mysticism, shamanism and paganism, Shanes acknowledges that; “It is a struggle to unite spirituality with modern science and rational thinking.”
Her ability to see ghosts, angels, aliens and the like she attributes to being plagued with illnesses since childhood and has often been close to the “otherside.” Meditation and being in a relaxed state also allows you to see these visions.
Some of these entities have been incredibly frightening and have included seeing an old lady in her bedroom and an imp-like creature outside her window. Years later she discovered that a UFO was photographed over her home in the same time period.
Links like that are not too convincing, and easily put down to coincidence. Equally many of her visions can be explained as being due to sleep paralysis. Even less impressive are her precognitions of future events, that are fuzzy and unspecific. She put that down as being due to her lack of experience as a medium at that time. Also, her family’s cursed associations with tragic events like the Lockerbie and Herald of Free Enterprise disasters, although disturbing, seem more like examples of bad luck rather than anything more sinister.
I like her story of Malcolm Robinson teaching a pre-Beatle Paul McCartney the lyrics to, appropriately enough, Yesterday when travelling back in time on the astral plane. Shane herself has had out of the body experiences when she has flown over Glasgow.
Woven into and linked with her own accounts is a good deal of information about the occult, demonic possession, angels, Greek and Roman mythology, art, yoga and magick. It is quite a heady mixture, but fortunately she does offer advice on how to protect yourself from the darker side of the supernatural.
This short book covers plenty of ground and shows the complexity of high-strangeness experiences and how they are related to religion and mythology. From our modern-day perspective we might say all these experiences are caused by 'aliens'. Certainly that is an easy option but any single 'explanation' seems very inadequate.
Shanes describes her book as a training manual for mystics, and it could very well be helpful to people who have had similar experiences. For the rest of us we can only wonder what is going on. Are there forces out there we can barely understand or is this another example of psychosociological influences shaping how unusual experiences are understood and interpreted by the experiencer? Either way this makes fascinating reading.
- Nigel Watson
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