DAN

An enigma

James Bernard Shepard wrote the following comment on Episode 3 of my Autobiography as follows:

Sep 14, 2022

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I read that the entrance and exit to your building was automatically alarmed and that you had not nor had anyone switched off that alarm even for a moment and yet this strangely garbed man came and went without the alarm being triggered. To top that, this strangely garbed man handed you a scrap of paper on which was written the address of your intended husband's parental home written in his handwriting and you only found out what the address was when your intended told you. I'll leave it at that.

An AI rendition of the man who predicted the birth of my son, Dan

Such things do happen. I've personally been told similar stories of paranormal experiences and have read others which I have no reason to doubt and rational reason to credit as sincere. This information has convinced me because the stories have an air of credibility to me and I take my training in our language seriously and thus I take my skills in analysing statements seriously. Maybe you are trying to fool us all, odd and silly as that would be – what possible reason could you have for doing that and thus exposing yourself to ridicule? But all of the people whose similar accounts I have personally heard and all of the accounts I have read and found consistent and credible cannot possibly have been fabrications. These accounts, both heard and written, fit into a consistent whole. They describe a consistent picture. The physical reality of our bodies is a location in our time and space of our consciousness, describable as our souls., but it is not the only location. There is another dimension, a dimension out of our time and space into which those who die enter and some people who have died can and do pass back and forth between our material world and that other place.

Consciousness can exist outside of dead and living bodies. All of human written history testifies to living persons' experiences confirming that fact. It is the basis of every religion testified in every written record going back 5000 years. Beyond the bare fact that the spirits of the dead can manifest themselves to the living there is a veil of the unknowable well symbolized by the angel with a flaming sword guarding the Garden of Eden in Genesis. Thank God the tyrants of this mortal world will find out that fact when like all of us they pass away. It is enough that ghosts and spirits can tell us by their manifestations that the soul is real and enduring. Having accepted that on good evidence I have been revolutionized in my outlook on life and death.

To which I replied at the time:

I know that my story is hard to believe but I reported it here exactly as it happened. I have never been able to explain it and did, in fact, have a son as the stranger had stated. He impressed upon me that the boy would be 'important' and, of course, to me he certainly is! What further mission he has to perform concerns me but I know he is capable of whatever it is, due to his amazing nature. We can only wait and see....

Today (2nd February 2024) James added:

It is a very moving story to me. I had forgotten it and my reply until a reader named Audrey reminded me (thanks Audrey!). Thinking over the circumstances, I picture you spending an unspecified time answering that phone call after which you found the tea lady in the office kitchenette and then you "raced down the stairs to check the entrance" and found the door securely closed and alarmed and no one in the entrance way. It's possible that this man was a real physical man and that your answering the phone call was a long enough time for a man to go down the stairs and out the door and out of sight at a normal pace. But if so, the question would still remain how he opened the door to go without triggering the alarm, since as you said, opening the door for whatever reason would have set off the alarm bell in your office which you would have heard.

There is no physical possibility that you imagined the man or the note since Tony saw and read the note and confirmed that it was real. The note was certainly not a mere figment but a real object made of real paper and written upon with real ink or pencil and the address was real and written in Tony's real handwriting, though he did not recall writing it.

There's a perfectly rational explanation that fits all the evidence. The man was a real physical man but real, physically present in the hallway in the building in 1971, only for the purpose of giving you the note and his message. Having delivered his message and the note he then went on his way not by going through the door but by dematerializing just as he had come not by opening the door but by materializing in the hallway. However, the piece of paper did not dematerialize, rather it kept its material existence long enough for you to show it to Tony. The Annunciation which the messenger spoke was not written on the paper; the function of the note was to assure yourself and Tony and now all of us who read your account so many years in the future that the incident and the messenger could not possibly have been a figment of your imagination.

Maybe you are just making up a story. Maybe you'll now say, "Ha ha! I was lying. I made it all up just to make a fool of you and all my readers and myself." That would be a "rational explanation" for a lot of our modern believers in Rationalism. I dare say that you won't say that, that you are not lying at all. I don't find that "explanation" probable enough to even bother arguing it. There's no use bandying foolish words with prejudiced people.

Our materialistic culture is specifically informed and challenged by this incident. There will be readers who will insist that the incident could not possibly be real. There must be, they will insist, a "rational explanation". I would reply, and so should you I think, that there is a perfectly rational explanation since there is nothing at all irrational in accepting what the evidence plainly tells us. What is irrational, motivated by prejudice and not by observation and reason, is to try to 'explain away' what our senses and reason so obviously and specifically tell us. The resemblance between your experience and the Annunciation of Mary in the Gospel of Luke will occur to the common materialistic skeptic and prompt such a person to say you imagined it all or you are telling a fib. But your messenger, angelic as he seems, has already anticipated this argument by giving you the real material paper note and by Tony reading it. So your angelic messenger anticipated the future in this small (but very significant!) way as well. He was not bound by time or space. So we may take his message even further: he informs us that our physical being and every physical being is real in time and space but also that nothing is always real in time and space because there is another reality which contains time and space and transcends it and has absolute power over it all. What was his purpose, why is your son "important" and to whom? That's for Others to know, I suppose, and for us to find out, maybe. After all:

"Not as the world gives give I unto you" – Jesus, so they said.

"Why do you doubt your senses?" – Marley's Ghost in Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"

"There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" – Hamlet

To which I replied as follows:

Your careful analysis of that incident is most appreciated by my son and I. We often touch on it in discussion and we do not have a clue why Dan is 'important'. Every mum wants to think that her children are super special but, from the moment Dan arrived in my belly, his father and I were highly conscious that he had been mysteriously predicted. Dan has his own extra knowledge to impart to the story.

He remembers, distinctly, being on a long journey with others, travelling through time and space but quite reluctantly. He says that he remembers entering my body at conception and being born later. He did have a very unusual birth reaction. You can read about that further on in my autobiography.

He was a very easy child to care for, gaining speech and physical abilities very early. He often said, when he was quite small, that he had memories of travelling and that he did not really want to come, because he was forgetting what happened before.

He did some extremely dangerous things as a baby. Like poking a fork into an electric socket and acquiring a fascination for all things electrical or related to fire. He climbed up a ladder to follow his father onto a neighbour's roof and was completely fearless when he arrived up there, viewing the world from the apex of a roof.

He learned to read, write and do math before he began school and took virtually no teaching. I had to study science 101 with the Open University to be able to answer his questions! This was especially hard for me because I really disliked all math and science subjects, preferring languages when I was at school.

School was a major disappointment to him and he considered it a waste of precious time. He complained that 'teachers know nothing' until we paid a small fortune to get him into a private school in Aberdeen, when we lived there from 1979 to 1981. He formed a special relationship with one, ex RAF man, Mr Sutherland, who encouraged Dan to develop his interest in electronics and computing.

Robert Gordon’s College, Schoolhill, Aberdeen

After that I home-schooled him, which again did not require much from me. Dan self taught at all hours of the day and night until he became proficient at computer programming, electronics and ham radio. He worked on Saturdays with his uncle, a car mechanic to become familiar with engines. He also befriended a researcher from Essex University who provided him with some advanced teaching in physics and technology.

I never did produce another child, despite wanting to brood a large family. It just never happened and I used to worry that, being an only child, Dan might suffer loneliness, but he didn't. He loved to do experiments, alone in his room and he is STILL like that.

He has fathered five children.

The oldest is 25 and just like him emotionally and intellectually. The others are under 14 and their mother moved away years ago with a new boyfriend. Dan took a very long time to recover from losing those children from his life. He was a fantastic father - the kind who lavished endless patience and love onto his children. When we mention them (rarely) he holds a hope that they will try to find him when they are old enough to make their own decisions.

At 51 now, Dan is a happy hermit with very few friends. He has a man-cave, filled with tech and related paraphernalia. He keeps weird hours because he connects, via internet, with people all over the world and he is often consulted to resolve difficult coding problems. Recently, he worked on a project with a Texas company developing 3-D for computer screens. He is very proud of that contribution to cutting edge technology and I admit that I was stunned when he showed me how he made an image jump out of the screen of his computer and appear to be in mid air!

We still do not know why that Indian gentleman impressed upon me, before Dan was even thought of, that he was going to be important. Dan is as baffled about it as I am!

He has always had some very unusual characteristics.

When he was working on building sites as a late teenager, he was already bearded, had very long copper hair and his workmates used to tease him by calling him Naz, short for Nazareth, because besides looking like Jesus, he would often come out with deep profundities that stopped people in their tracks.

I am completely used to it, he has always done that.

Dan has very strong views about metaphysics and he has always spent a lot of energy trying to explain his beliefs to me and others. That is the one thing which can make him angry.... he gets cross with HIMSELF for being unable to verbalise his ideas in a sufficiently accurate manner.

Maybe his importance is yet to come? That is all I can guess. 💜

ps
I have not included any photographs of Dan at his request. He has to work hard enough at preserving our privacy and security online as it is! Apparently I don’t make that especially easy for him!