Knowing Before Thought

More than an image

Adapted from Andrew’s original email of 6 April 2021. The spiritual explanations are his understanding expressed at that time; references such as Robert Monroe remain to be checked before publication.

In April 2021 I tried to explain something I had come to think of as a field around a person. I was reaching for a name: divine field, cosmic field, monadic field, soul. None of those words seemed to contain the whole idea.

What interested me was the sense that a person could be known as a whole. Their emotions, beliefs and history seemed to be present together, rather than arriving as a list of facts. In my spiritual understanding, the field held the story of our expression from Source. That was the language through which I was trying to describe it.

There are times when knowing seems to arrive faster than thought. I do not mean that I work out a series of clues very quickly. The impression is already there before I have started explaining it to myself. Afterwards I try to find words for what was received.

An orange gave me a useful way of explaining the difference. If I show you a picture of an orange, you recognise it. But suppose the experience also carries its smell, density, taste and texture. You have received much more than an image. Something of the object’s whole character has come with it.

That was why the idea Robert Monroe called a ‘rote’ interested me. I understood it as a gathered body of information, something received together rather than explained one sentence at a time. My own way of describing a large download was to compare it with scrubbing backwards and forwards through a recording. I could revisit it and notice parts I had not taken in the first time.

This matters when trying to write about inner experience. A paragraph moves in one direction. An experience may contain several senses, an emotional atmosphere and a whole understanding at once. Writing it down requires unfolding what originally arrived together.

The whole pattern arrives

I also tried to explain how being with someone can affect us. I used the image of tuning forks beginning to resonate together. People sometimes told me they felt safe or calm around me. Strangers would speak about deeply personal matters. In teaching situations, people near me sometimes began to notice or feel things for themselves.

I understood that through the idea of vibration and its strength. My spiritual language connected it with the influence of a teacher or a master. I was careful to say that I was not calling myself a master. My feet were on the ground, on the path. Neither was I claiming to be an angel.

There was a practical responsibility inside all this. I wrote that what comes out of your mouth matters. Receiving an impression does not take away your responsibility for how you use it. The person in front of you is still a person, with feelings and a life beyond the sitting.

I had also become interested in what I called chakra reading. Sometimes that happened in the pub, where I had really only intended to have a beer. It could become unexpectedly revealing and bring people to tears. I stopped doing it because it felt too intrusive. That decision belongs to the teaching just as much as the impressions themselves.

I wanted to understand more about the chakras than the diagrams alone seemed to offer. In my experience they appeared capable of working together and changing in their expression. I spoke about them taking on a quality of consciousness. Those were questions I was exploring through experience, not a completed system I had finished explaining.

At the end of the letter, after all the talk of fields and inner planes, I remembered that I had washing up to do. Ordinary life was still there. It generally is.

Date: 6 September 2026 (discussion of related experiences) | Classification: Family presence • life-record field • non-conversational mediumistic form

Responsibility remains

THE EXPERIENCE

Andrew described experiences of his mother and, later, Granddad Ryan in which each seemed to arrive as a whole life-record field: images, feelings and a sense of life path present together, without the sense of a conscious person standing there and deliberately communicating sentence by sentence.

POSSIBLE MEANINGS

This can be framed spiritually as access to an enduring field or record of the person, psychologically as a highly integrated relational memory gestalt, or in information-language as a non-linear packet of associated data. Crucially, the experience did not feel like ordinary conscious communication, so calling it ‘a message from Granddad’ would actually be less accurate than Andrew’s field description.

Public use: Book core; central to the new language-of-experience chapter.

Visual brief: Layers of old photographs, places and gestures orbiting a warm central absence — the person implied by a whole life rather than shown as a ghost.