This article is provided by kind permission of Andrew Hutchinson. This article MAY NOT BE REPRODUCED without the permission of the author.

Nine Ways to Touch the Soul

We would like to introduce you to ‘Nine Ways to Touch the Soul’ and ‘Journey of the Seeker’ the resulting works of two friends who were reunited after twenty years by the strangest of coincidences.

After a trip around the world the friends met and shared their experiences from the previous two decades, the pains, the triumphs but more importantly their parallel journey in seeking the inner self.

Night after night they spoke and compared lives. Through tears and through joy and from the heart, two pieces of work were born that they hoped could be one day shared with others.

We hope you can help with their wish.

In the words of the friend

It still feels strange to me now, even after all this time that I may have been caught up in something mystical and unexplainable. Cynics will say it was all a coincidence, a lottery of chance, but I know. I know what I felt; I know what I saw.

Can I prove any of it it? Can I even show you evidence? Would I have believed the story had someone told me? I would have to answer no to all.

All I can do is tell you what happened and let you decide for yourself, let you know what happened to me and tell you that I now truly believe that at that point in my life, for some reason, my hand was taken and guided across the world and a new life began, a quest, one that continues to this day and shows no sign of abating.

I would love for romanticisms sake to say the following happened on a mountain in Tibet, but it didn’t, it happened in my bedroom on a cold wintry evening. I was just sat on my bed with candles burning, mulling over the chaos that was my life.

As I sat there upright gazing into the air, I started to notice haziness around the edge of my vision. At first I thought it was just a trick of the candlelight, but if I looked straight ahead I was sure I could see something at the side. I started becoming aware of someone stood to my left, but feared if I turned my head he would move; yes it was a he, although how I knew this was unfathomable as I saw no one.

Suddenly everything around me, my thoughts, my attention my very knowledge became focused on something in front of me, something I couldn’t see, a pin point in time. The rest I find difficult as I don’t want to sound foolish and I am as aware as anyone as to how mad all of this sounds, but there are no words that can do justice to what happened next.

Although the room stayed in vision, it was like a part of me became aware of outside, and then further, the country the world and then the size of the universe. I could see outside my own body. I seemed to shrink as everything around me exploded into infinity, and as every molecule around me expanded, I became aware of how miniscule I was compared not only to the size of the Universe, but also to its past its present and its future.

I was alone in a universe of stars just drifting with only a breathtaking view for company, but just as that loneliness became too harsh to bare, the universe embraced me and showed that every miniscule part of this universe relies on each other to complete the whole, and suddenly rather than being detached from everything, I became part of it, and it felt blissful.

The sensation seemed to last forever but as the bliss built in intensity, my body seemed to expand, the sensation built and built until I was sure I was about to explode and get lost in this whole scene, I thought I was about to die.

In panic I started to fight it, but just as I did calmness surrounded me like a bubble and without words I was told ‘Don’t worry, just watch.’

I was overwhelmed to tears by a presence that neither asked anything of me, nor expected anything from me, but I felt in awe of this thing that was guiding me.

Suddenly thoughts were placed in my head, masses of information. Thousands of words were placed inside me. My head started to hurt and I wanted it to stop but I was torn between my fear and the need to hear or feel more of what was being shown to me, and the more I saw, the more I changed. I was shown the future, I was shown people I was yet to meet, points in my life that I had to get to and places where I had to go but with no clear connecting path.

I was no longer the same person, and although the experience left as gently as it arrived, I was left with an overwhelming urge to visit the place I had been shown and also to seek out a friend, a friend who many years ago had given me great comfort and guidance in my hours of need.

I wasn’t sure why this had happened to me, what had triggered it off and why such an insignificant person had been allowed to share in so much. I was however left with a migraine that lasted for three days.

I had been looking for my friend for over ten years but had given up; every path I took seemed to end with a brick wall. Life had separated us twenty years ago, not through anything dramatic, just life taking two people down separate paths.

I then remembered an internet site called ‘Friends Reunited’, and wondered what would happen if I placed our old work place up there? Maybe someone would one day see it and then who knows?

It was a Wednesday when I placed the company name on the site with no particular expectation, but the following morning I was taken a back by a reply, it was from someone who once worked for the company and was now in Australia. I immediately replied and the following day had an Email back. The email read

‘I was amazed you replied, I only put the company up on ‘Friends Reunited’ last night its great to hear from you.’

Surely there had been some confusion; I was the one that had put the company up on the site. I logged back onto the site and sure enough, there was the same company entered onto the site twice.

After twenty years, on the same evening, two people from opposite sides of the world had logged on to ‘Friends Reunited’ and then contacted each other, and of course, my old acquaintance had the address of the friend I had been looking for.

Maybe it was all coincidence, at that point I never really challenged that it could be anything else, and even the weird experience of what I fondly called ‘the night the thing happened’ drifted into the distance and joined with the other memories of weirdness from my life. But if I thought they were going to remain there, distant and vague, I was wrong, for the day was coming where they would return and I would have to question everything I had been told and everything I believed.

It took me over a year to save the money for my flight to Australia, but as I sat on the plane flying over countries I had had only read about in books, the time seemed to pass in minutes.

From saving for over a year, to boarding a three day flight to flying over seventeen thousand miles the day arrived where my friend stood across the road from me.

My eyes filled with tears, and continued to fall for many days, but these were not normal tears, they were the tears of a child, tears that welled from an indefinable source of emotion.

Something was happening to me that I couldn’t control, I could sense an inevitability, a journey that was to take me somewhere that had been written before my eyes had even opened on this earth, and if I thought for one moment that I had been shown everything on ‘the night the thing happened’, I was soon to realise I had only scratched the surface.

Further information: www.momtazi.com