David Shaw - An Average Joe's Search For The Meaning Of Life

The next morning we discussed the previous night’s traumatic event. I asked Anne if the person she saw was dressed as an eighteenth century gentleman with long dark hair and a beard. She again looked at me with those disbelieving eyes, before reluctantly nodding in agreement. It was time to sort out this menace once and for all. He was about to get a taste of his own medicine. I will tell you later just how I dealt with this character. Oh, and if you happen to be wondering about the man with the horns sticking out of his head, well he is in fact an American Indian Medicine Man. I wonder who that could be!

The rest of my childhood was ironically pretty normal for a lad growing up in Kilmarnock. As I mentioned earlier, I supported Kilmarnock, but being only twenty miles from Glasgow, most of my friends supported Rangers or Celtic. Kilmarnock was a major industrial town in the seventies and industry attracted workers seeking good affordable housing away from the big city. My friends were all from Glasgow and being either ‘one side of the religious fence or the other’ it was very much a love-hate relationship for most of us – especially for the Killie fan stuck in the middle.

However, there was a great camaraderie between all the families living in my housing estate. There were no two-car families, most households had only one parent working as far as I know, and everybody rented their house from the local council. But they were good times as the 1970s were a relatively peaceful decade. There were no organised gangs roaming the streets, yet the kids were far tougher than they are nowadays. Adults could walk the streets at night without fear of being assaulted or even killed – yet the standard of living was much lower than it is today.

When I used to perform spirit readings, very often spirits would visually come through to me dressed in the style of the seventies. You know – long hair, flared trousers, hideous floral patterned garments etc. Spirits will always try to convey a loving, peaceful scenario when making contact. They certainly wouldn’t wish to show themselves when they were ill, depressed or having their £250,000 house repossessed!

Of course, society has changed immensely since the seventies. The cost of living is now so much cheaper and with the technological boom we can easily purchase amazing consumer products that would have seemed totally inconceivable in the 1970s. We can easily travel to luxurious foreign destinations, we can affordably run one or more cars per family, and we can even contemplate private health care and send our children to private education. We may even own several properties since banks and building societies will now lend you 95 times your annual wage, top it up by £50,000 per child, add £25,000 if your surname ends in ‘Y’ and give you a fantastic interest rate of only 5 per cent, provided you take out their home insurance and multiple credit card facility.

So why is the world an unhappy place? Why are people killing each other over a disputed parking space? Why are we injecting ourselves with mind-altering substances when a bottle of cider costs less than a bag of four apples?

I think we all know the answers to these questions, but unfortunately we’re afraid to admit the truth. The reason is that we are actually all guilty in some way of allowing this situation to arise. We are all greedy of wanting more for our families and for ourselves. We work over forty hours per week and then have the audacity to complain when we feel absolutely exhausted. We don’t allow ourselves time to unwind, or time to enjoy what free time we have. We sit in front of a television set watching news documentaries and reality shows that paint a morally disturbing picture of how our world is developing, yet we do nothing about it apart from moan.

Now thanks indirectly to the ‘politically correct brigade’ and over-submissive politicians, we have a society that allows the acceptance of violence and abuse to govern our lives. We can either hide behind the curtains or run to a safer domain, thus eventually creating a divided society where each party hates the other because of circumstances inevitably created by our own misgivings.

These days you only have to switch on a television news programme, any news programme on any day, and you are brainwashed with tales of abuse, corruption, and violence. It’s extremely difficult to escape from the media, eventually you start to feel the pain and horror of the poor individual whose home has been devastated by a flood, or the poor girl who has just broken up with Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor! I personally know of several mediums who will categorically not watch any news programme whatsoever as it horribly affects their energy.

And here lies the problem – negative activity creates negative energy. People who used to live together harmoniously in the seventies are nowadays less tolerant of each other. There is no socialising, unless it’s on ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’, and communities very rarely thrive, they merely exist.

So where am I going with this? What’s my point? My point is merely that, yes we are open to attack from spirits, and it can be extremely frightening, but we are far more at risk from attack from the physical world in which we live in. After all, when was the last time you switched on News at Ten and found that an evil spirit had attacked someone?

The best way to protect yourself from negative energy is to imagine a golden ball of light coming down from above your head and surrounding you in a protective force field. Then imagine that this light is impregnable and protects you from all physical and spiritual harm. You must believe that you are protected and your guides will ensure that this powerful seal cannot be broken. I urge you to try this out – it really works.

I’ve seen gangs of youths walk across the street to avoid me. OK, maybe I hadn’t washed for three days, but hey they probably hadn’t either! The trick is to remove any fears and doubts and your confidence will grow, your aura will expand and your sex life will improve! Or so I’m told!

And if all else fails you could always march along the street shouting ‘Ayr United, Somerset, Phoenix’ at the top of your voice. Rest assured the gangs won’t dare mess with you and chances are that even the police will give you a wide berth – till eventually those men with white coats turn up.

I went to James Hamilton Academy in Kilmarnock from 1979 to 1983. I hated it and nothing vaguely spiritual happened to me there, although I did get five ‘O’ Grades, only one of which attained a pass mark – Arithmetic. In my first year at school, I was in the top three in my class, but I fell out with one of the teachers in year two and started to rebel against the education system. I was a teenager! They should have made me study!

Actually, this is one of the big problems with teenagers. Everybody hates them and it’s not their fault!

I left school at sixteen and joined a Government Youth Training Scheme. I worked for forty-two hours a week and earned £25. These days I would need to emigrate to China to earn that kind of money. Still, it was a good learning curve for me. If you don’t put the effort in at school you work for peanuts and then get dumped at the end of the year for some other rebel without a clue.

It was during this first working year that I would often stay with my grandfather at the weekend. I can’t remember why exactly this commenced but we were both creatures of habit and we enjoyed each other’s company. My grandfather had lived alone since my grandmother passed to spirit in 1980. My mother was devastated by the loss of my grandmother and suffered terrible depression for many years after. I never really sensed my grandmother in spirit, but this was possibly due to the fact that I wasn’t very spiritually active at this time.