Why I am Leaving Hong Kong: The Lowdown

Central, HK Island, seen from across Victoria Harbour

One of the wisest and most perceptive women I ever knew once said something I'll never forget. She said that people don't grow when they are too comfortable. In fact this message was relayed to the spiritual group I was in at the time, by the group teacher Tracy. Jessica  had phoned her from a city several hundred kilometres away and told Tracey that the group was getting too settled and that Tracy needed to "Stir up the dust!" Jessica didn't need to be present to know that because she was the most powerful clairvoyant I have ever known. More than once she rang me personally to inform me about issues that were going on in my own life and to give me feedback about my 'consciousnesss field', including what I needed to do to rectify the problem. She was always right.

I can assure you that it was tough being in that group. Expectations were extraordinarily high. You either did what was expected of you, or you were shown the door! There is no hiding stuff from Spirit. In its essence the mind is transparent. 'God' and certain spiritual entities can see everything - and some people can see most of it too! It's only human beings that hide things from themselves, and from each other.

There's a reason why I mention these things. I've been living in Hong Kong now for eight years. It's hard to believe it's been so long! During this time I have continued to write and speak as futurist and as a person involved in the consciousness movement. What's more I have also held down a full-time job throughout those eight years - as high school teacher in Hong Kong's public education system. It's a pretty good job by most measures. The workload is not that heavy and the pay is excellent, probably the best in the world for a public high school job. If I earned this amount of money in Australia (given the low tax rate in HK), I would be well into the top ten percent of wage earners. My school here has been wonderful. I particular the teachers, administrators and students are simply 'lovely' (to use HK vernacular).

So I almost get it all here. A good income, great work relations and low stress.

 Discovery Bay

So why am I leaving?

I am leaving because it is too comfortable. I could certainly do this for the next 15 years and then retire. But it would be too easy.

I also had a 'vision'.

About two months ago I awoke in the early hours of the morning, in the pitch black of night, and a clear image came into my mind's eye. It was a map of Australia. The map was dark, but the coastal outline of Australia was clear. On the map there were four bright red dots. One was in far north Queensland, around the location of the city of Cairns. The other three were all situated very close to Melbourne in the far south-east corner of the continent. Then a song began playing in my head. It was part of the song 'Funky Town', originally sung in the late 70s by a band called Lips Inc (if I recall correctly). Specifically, the line that played in my head was the following:

Gotta make a move to a town that's right for me

Gotta keep me movin' keep me groovin' with some energy

There was no need for me to analyse what I had seen and heard. After years of working with my spiritual intuition (what I call Integrated Intelligence), I have learned to allow certain knowings to settle immediately in my mind without needing to process the information in linear, sequential fashion. It's actually a clairvoyant process, quite literally. 'Clairvoyant' means 'clear seeing.'

I was being told that it was time for me to move on. Hong Kong was no longer the right town for me. Australia, my home country, was beckoning. The red dots referred to places that were suitable for me to visit or live.

When visions are this powerful you don't forget them. In the old days, when I first started developing my Integrated Intelligence, I used to write down important dreams and visions. Now I rarely do. I don't need to anymore because the connection between the 'rational' and 'intuitive' parts of my mind is well developed (I do make an exception when I have a long and profound dream, where I know I won't be able to remember it all the next day).

But did I follow my spiritual guidance? Actually, I dithered! I was feeling so comfortable with my life in Hong Kong, that I was really reluctant to leave.

Then I got a kick in the pants. One day at school the principal called me into his office and said the school would not renew my contract. This is perfectly the schools prerogative after a standard two-year contract is complete. To be honest, I was shocked, as I had always gotten on well with the principal and everyone else.

But this kick in the pants made me act. I looked at my situation more carefully, and realised that my guidance was correct. It was time for me to leave Hong Kong. Bizarrely, as soon as I moved to this committed position, the new principal of my school (it is changing leaders right now) called me into the office and asked me to stay on at the school, saying she thought I was a good teacher. While that did make me feel better, I knew that I needed to make a break for it. I thanked her and told her I was leaving.

It's fascinating that the old principal had decided to let me go. If he had not done this, I might have stayed. So even though I felt bad about the initial 'rejection', it was actually a blessing in disguise. It was the universe's way of tapping me on the shoulder and getting me to move along.

The truth is that, just as my vision had suggested, Hong Kong does not quite have the right "energy" for me. It is a peaceful and well organised city. But on the downside it is very conservative and materialistic. The education system encourages repetition and an adherence to the 'one correct answer'. It's also a very hectic place, where people work long hours. Across the wider city it is difficult to find people who are committed to the kinds of ideas that I am. It's not the right fit for me.

 Peak hour at Admiralty Station, HK Island

Still, I will miss Hong Kong. I have lived in beautiful Discovery Bay on Lantau Island for the past few years,. The ocean and the hills are just minutes away from my apartment. Hong Kong also has a vibrant nightlife, great transpiration systems, and is exceedingly efficient. Efficiency and comfort are the order of the day. But these things do not encourage 'growth'. The actually promote stagnation of the spirit.

Halloween in the Lan Kwai Fong bar area

Yet the bottom line is that I feel that I have knowledge and skills that cannot be readily used here. All of us are given certain gifts by God. I know what mine are. Living here I am a bit like the Biblical son who buries his talents (coins) in the ground, believing that his father will be proud of him when he later shows him that he hasn't lost any of it.

I am not doing the work that I am meant to be doing.

Thank you Hong Kong. I will miss you!

Blessings,

Marcus

Time, Space, Will and Synchronicity

Thanks to Anita Moorjani posting the link on her Facebook page, yesterday's blog post about her wonderful book Dying to be Me, created quite a stir. There were a few fascinating and important things about the experience - and the great reaction to the blog post - that I thought I would write about today.

For those who didn't read through the comments below yesterday's post, there was another fascinating occurrence yesterday which only confirmed what I have been writing and speaking about all these years: that mind and cosmos are intimately linked, and that mainstream science has got it hopelessly wrong in its understanding of who we are as human beings and where we fit in the greater scheme of things. 

I wrote the post about Anita late (by my standards) on Sunday night, the same day I met her. I normally go to bed by 11.00 pm, because I have to get up by 6.00 am to commute to work. But that night I felt very relaxed and energised, so I decided to write of my synchronicity in meeting Anita, beginning around my normal bedtime. I completed it still feeling relaxed and barely tired, but went to bed to try to get a decent six hours of sleep.

Early  Monday morning at around 5.00 am I had a vision as I was sleeping. At the age of 26 (twenty years ago) I began having regular visions and prophetic dreams. This coincided with my new habit of meditating and recording dreams and intuitions. Ever since that time, such visionary experiences have been a regular part of my daily life (I give a semi-autobiographical account of how this happened in my brand new e-novel Shadow Light). Visions have a slightly different quality from dreams, and tend to be very short - often just a flash of insight, or even a mere symbol which is 'embedded' with information which is telepathically "transmitted" without words. At least that is how I experience many of them.

In my early morning vision yesterday I saw a friend of mine standing before a huge computer screen - Doug Seiddon, the transpersonal psychologist I mentioned in yesterday's post. There was a vertical white bar of 'energy' on the right-hand side of the screen, and it began to expand upwards, beginning near the bottom of the screen, then shooting upwards towards the top. The energy was white luminescent, quite bright to look at. The screen looked like the image at the top of this blog - the guy standing in front of the earth (but in this case the man was Doug). I intuitively knew that the white bar of energy represented traffic on a web site - this blog. I felt slightly apprehensive, as I wondered whether the increased 'attention' might attract some negative posters (this happened in a previous viral 'hit'). As he stood there examining the bar of light (in the vision) Doug said; "This is because of something you wrote." 

I awoke immediately. I knew that in the dream Doug represented the mystical side of the cosmos (he is a transpersonal psychologist, after all!). 

Around 1.00 pm yesterday, I opened my blog and went to the 'design' section to check on web traffic. I was not overly surprised to discover that instead of the 10-20 hits I normally get for a blog post within the first 24 hours of posting, the blog post about Anita had already received 400 odd hits in only half a day (In fact the post has now gotten 1400 hits so far, and this blog got a total of 1800 hits yesterday, massively above the average 180-200!)

The fascinating thing for me is that, as far as I am aware, Anita did not share the link to the post till sometime late morning, several hours after I had the vision. If Anita reads this, perhaps she can confirm the timing. (Edit: Anita has confirmed that she didn't post the link till about 11.00 am - six hours after the vision)

The vision was therefore a precognition of a significant event that was about to unfold in my day. It is interesting to note that so much of what Anita learned during her NDE mirrors perfectly what I (and many others) have come to understand from developing Integrated Intelligence, or INI (my term for spiritual intuition - see my book Discover Your Soul Template if you are interested in developing INI). Time is not the simple linear concept that we often assume it to be; and mind is not confined to the head. Human beings are perfectly capable of sensing connections in other places and times - just as Anita did during her NDE. You don't actually need to die to access this ability! Not everyone will experience it the way I do though. My brain is very visual and auditory. I also developed the 'feeling' aspect of INI through many years of practice, and thanks to having the privilege of working with some wonderful spiritual teachers.

There is one more important point I would like to make about yesterday's synchronicity in meeting Anita. A few people leaving comments suggested that I had "willed" the event into existence. Actually, this is not true. I made no attempt to create the meeting with Anita at any time. When I wrote that I had been imagining the spontaneous meeting with her in the days leading up to the the actual meeting, I was not trying to do anything. This imagined scenario was coming into my mind regularly as a kind of daydream (at least 3 times, I recall). There was an element of 'desire' - perhaps 'excitement' is a better word - with the scenario, but I wasn't trying to create it, or manifest it as some New Age law-of-attraction philosophies might suggest is possible.

The last time the scenario came to me was Saturday night (the night before I met Anita), when I met two of my friends, Doug Seiddon and Alick Lau in a Hong Kong Central restaurant for dinner. We had agreed to meet at a Chinese restaurant, but when we got there we decided to make a late change to an Indian restaurant. When we arrived at the Indian restuarant and started eating, I began to 'feel' that Anita was close by. I actually looked around the restaurant to see if she was there!

Rather than my creating the event, I think what was happening was that I was sensing an important upcoming connection. Time was collapsing in on itself - in a sense - and I was already experiencing the energy of the upcoming meeting with her, still about sixteen hours away. 

This is not the first time this kind of thing has happened to me. I have had numerous precognitions in the past. The first similar one I recall was about twenty years ago when I was walking down the street in Grafton, New South Wales, Australia. I was merely passing through the town at the time. As I was walking down the main street I looked up and saw a man walking towards me. For some reason I thought he was Warren, a guy who had lived on my wing of the University of Newcastle campus hall of residence some five years previously. When the man got closer, I saw it wasn't Warren. It struck me that it was truly bizarre that I had thought it was Warren, as I barely knew the guy, and hadn't thought of him even once in the preceding five years. But what happened next was even more bizarre. I walked around a corner, and down a street, and on a whim decided to pop into a little clothes shop. I was shocked to see Warren buying a shirt at the counter! I went over to him, and even mentioned how I'd just been thinking of him!

Again, I think this was simply a case of the mind drawing in information - and especially emotional energy - from the 'future.' When an event has special emotional or spiritual importance, the intuitions will be stronger.

It's a wonderful and mysterious universe we live in. There is so much we don't know or understand. I suggest we all relax and just enjoy living here!

Blessings,

Marcus

Dying to be Me. Incredible!

Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at: is www.mind-futures.com.

The universe works in mysterious ways. 

Last week I was out and about with my wife in the IFC Mall, one of Hong Kong's more pricey shopping establishments. Walking around on the third floor, I stumbled across a book shop and went in. There, right on top of a pile of books on a table near the front of the bookshop was a certain volume which caught my eye: Dying to be Me, by Anita Moorjani. I picked it up and did what I always do when deciding whether or not to buy a book: I stilled myself, bringing my mind fully present, then felt the book. My intuition told me that the book was for me, so I went straight to the counter and bought it.

I wasn't disappointed. The author, I found out, is a Hong Kong woman of Indian decent. Several years ago she was diagnosed with cancer. The book details her experience with the disease, and her remarkable visit to death's door. To cut a long story short, Anita describes how her condition gradually deteriorated, until she was admitted to hospital in a coma. Her doctor's had basically given up on her, and her organs had begun to shut down. One of the doctor's wrote down that her family should be informed of her true condition, meaning that he was convinced that she was about to die.

The author then describes the miracle that happened next. She had a classic near death experience where she was able to hear not only what was being said by doctors who were treating her, but she could also see into the minds of her close relatives, including a brother who was on  plane, rushing to see her. She saw her current life in a grand spiritual context, witnessed her past lives, and experienced an expanded state of mind which transcended time and space. This is mental state is what I call a classic experience of Integrated Intelligence (INI), as I outline in my book Discover Your Soul Template, INI is the experience of mind which extends out from the body and interacts with other people, places and even other times.

Anita Moorjani shares her wonderful spiritual insights with the reader. The message is clear. We spend too much of our lives denying our own magnificence, living for some future goal, or just believing that we are inadequate. It is these beliefs and attitudes that the author sees as being central to her becoming sick. Her cancer was an expression of a greater dis-ease in her mind. The genuine miracle occurred when Anita awakened from her coma. Within two weeks her cancers had reduced dramatically in size, and soon they had vanished from her body without a trace.

I love the book. In fact, as I read it I realised that I had a strong connection with its message. Although I have never had a near death experience, I have experienced many non-ordinary states of consciousness and had many spiritual experiences where I received insights that mirror those of Anita Moorjani.

As I was reading the book, I texted one of my good friends in the consciousnesses movement here in Hong Kong, transpersonal psychologist Doug Seiddon, and told him he should read the book. He texted me back saying that he had met Anita two years previously at the Hong Kong Consciousness Festival. He said she was a very nice woman. I felt rather envious.

What I will relate next is actually true, even though it may seem rather incredulous. I was seriously considering contacting the author, as we live in the same city. A scenario kept popping into my head during the first few days after I purchased the book. 

I am sitting in a public space. Suddenly I realise that Anita Moorjani is sitting right beside me. I walk over to her and say "Are you Anita Moorjani?" I point to her book, which I am holding.

In fact this scenario came to me just yesterday when I was travelling on public transport. It was as if I could feel Anita very close to my physically. There definitely felt like a connection.

So today, Sunday, I went out in the afternoon to the Pacific Coffee place in Discovery Bay, not far from my apartment. I sat down and began to do a little writing on my computer. Suddenly a woman's voice caught my attention. I looked up to see three people of Indian heritage sitting just a metre away from me at the next table. The woman, who was turned away from me, was talking about her publicist. I realised that she must be a writer. The idea immediately came to me that this woman was Anita Moorjani. I couldn't see her face clearly, but I could see a distinguishing facial feature on her right cheek. So I opened my copy of Dying to Be Me (which I had on the table) and turned to the author page. Sure enough, the woman sitting a metre away from me had the same feature in exactly the same spot on her face. I checked her energy intuitively, and saw that she had a soft and very feminine energy, and was very relaxed in her body. It was a perfect match!

I was just thinking about how I might interrupt their conversation (as I am not a natural extrovert) when suddenly the Indian man chatting to the woman got up and walked over to me. "Is that book any good?" he asked. He was smiling. 

"Yes! Is this Anita?" I asked indicating to the woman. They were all smiling.

Sure enough it was her. I kindly invited myself over for a chat with them! The man was Danny, Anita's amiable husband. We chatted for about twenty minutes or so, and I was delighted to discover that Anita was as genuine as her book suggests. But the synchronicity didn't end there. I discovered that the couple live in Discovery Bay too. But even more incredibly, we found out that we had both lived in the same tiny village of a few hundred people in Hong Kong's New Territories at the same time (2008) - at opposite ends of the village. They knew several of my friends in the village. The odds of that must be astronomical. I honestly can't remember seeing Anita or Danny there, but I must have seen them at some time, because the village is quite isolated, with only one mini-bus which takes about 25 minutes to get to the nearest train station.

 

Anita and Danny

What a wonderful series of synchronicities! 

Even better, if you go to Amazon.com you'll see Anita's book has become an instant best seller. I have to be honest and say I have read some spiritual best sellers which I would describe as simply awful - where I intuitively sensed that the author was not capable of walking the talk. Happily with Dying to be Me, this is not the case. I give it five stars out of five.

(* I have written a little more about the aftermath to this incident and a profound vision I had the next day in the following blog post)

Blessings,

Marcus