Posted on 22 April 2020, 9:46

Predestination… taken in its widest meaning, is every Divine decree by which God, owing to His infallible prescience of the future, has appointed and ordained from eternity all events occurring in time, especially those which directly proceed from, or at least are influenced by, man’s free will. It includes all historical facts, as for instance the appearance of Napoleon or the foundation of the United States, and particularly the turning-points in the history of supernatural salvation, as the mission of Moses and the Prophets, or the election of Mary to the Divine Motherhood. Taken in this general sense, predestination clearly coincides with Divine Providence and with the government of the world”.

The Greeks and the Romans believed that the Fates, also called the Moirai or the Parcae, determined when life begins, when it ends, and what happens in between. They were composed of three women: Clotho appeared as a maiden and spun the thread of life. Her name meant The Spinner. Lachesis appeared as a matron and measured the thread of life. She is the Caster of lots.

Atropos cut the thread of life, and appeared as a crone. Her name meant, Unbending. Though the smallest of the three, she is the most terrible.

Scandinavians also had three goddesses of Destiny, who likewise wove the threads of life, measured them, and cut them when a person died. They were called the Norns, who likewise ruled the destiny of the gods and humankind. Urðr (Wyrd), Verðandi and Skuld come out from a hall standing at the Well of Urðr (well of fate) and they draw water from the well and take sand that lies around it, which they pour over Yggdrasill (the tree of life) so that its branches will not rot.

The three Weird Sisters of Macbeth are Saxon Equivalents.

1. It was early in 1938, and this New Zealand vicarage family were coming home, after spending time with my grandparents in picturesque Clovelly in Devon, England, where my grandfather was rector. My father had been priest-in-charge of St Nicholas, Kings Lynne in Norfolk. I had gone to what they called a Dame’s school in a room in the head mistress’ house. We had stayed with my maternal grandmother’s sister, who was married to a stockbroker in Cobham, Surrey.  We visited St Paul’s cathedral, the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s, the foggy cold of London, and the underground trains. We visited an engineer uncle in Queen Anne’s Gate. Such rich experiences for the nine-year-old who had been at a small country school to the north of Christchurch New Zealand.

Now were embarked on the huge RMS Orion with over 700 passengers on our six-week trip home. We visited Toulon, Naples, Pompeii and Port Said, and travelled through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea.  Then it happened:

Mr. Ormorod gave me sixpence!
I never forgot.

I am not quite sure now why it why was so unforgettable.  During the long dreary days of seeing nothing but the horizon, a kindly adult taking in us children, would have been most welcome. Ormorod is an unusual name. It’s a Lancashire name, and is Norse in origin, Orme meaning Serpent, and Rod means Clearing of Road

2. I was a child then, I am middle aged now

The Second World War was to follow, and the Cold War. I had to wait until 1986, 48 years for the sequel.

I was once more in Surrey, this time with my wife. Through Imder, a mutual tourist hospitality arrangement, then current, a lady in Farnham had agreed to host us for a day and a night.

We made our way to her home and knocked on her door. She opened, and when she found who we were she was angry. “You’ve have come on the wrong day, and it is most inconvenient. I’ll have to put you up, but go away for along walk so I can prepare your room. Why don’t you go for long walk, and visit Jonathan Swift’s former home, Manor Park?” Or words to that effect.

When we returned, she was less upset and showed us round her centuries old house, which seemed full of presences. She was a gifted artist and some of works were on the walls. Appropriately, it was there she worked in the basement writing children’s books using automatic writing guided by a spirit.

But, we had indeed come on the wrong day, for she was shortly to quit the house, and that very night she was having a kind of goodbye party for her friends and she was good enough to include us. The guests began to arrive, and for our benefit they introduced themselves.

“My name is Ormorod”, said one.

“I knew a man called Ormorod,” I said excitedly,  “it was more than forty years ago when I was a child. We were in a ship passing through the Red Sea, he was a nice old man and he gave me sixpence.”

“That would have been my grandfather,” he said, “He sometimes travelled through the Red Sea, and he certainly liked children.”

3. On the other side of the world

We are back in New Zealand, in my country parish of Hororata, in North Canterbury. I am back visiting parishioners scattered over hundreds of square kilometres. I decide to call on Rosalie Inch, about ten kilometres from home. She was an artist, and when I called, to my amazement she was painting a picture from a photograph of Ormorod House.

“Why ever are you painting that picture,” I asked.

“I am painting it on commission from a man in Greendale.”

“Might I know his name?” Rosalie tells me.

I phone this man, and say, “I know a man called Ormorod. I was nine years old, and I met him on a ship passing through the Red Sea. He gave me sixpence.”

“That would have been my grandfather,” he said, he often passed that way, and he liked children.”

4. The drunken photographer Ormonroyd.

(See my book, Into the Wider Dream, p. 173)
“ A couple of days later, we were watching on TV a comedy by J.B Priestly. “When we are married”, about three Yorkshire couples engaged in a fierce battle of the sexes, when it appeared that they had not been legally married. They had come together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their marriages. Mr. Orenroyd was there to photograph them for newspaper, but he didn’t have chance. An officious young man comes in and seems to prove that they were not le legally married. Vicious quarrels break out, but finally they are informed that their marriages were legal after all. Amity is restored. Mr. Ormenroyd staggers from his seat, and takes their photo. Immediately after the picture is taken, we find the actors assembled singing harmoniously as a choir.

Others may not agree, but I see this as synchronous with the three previous episodes.

Do the first three episodes constitute true synchronicity? Are they “married to each other?

Are the three couples married to each other? They are indeed, and a tipsy Mr. Ormonroyd celebrates this with his photograph.

I see it as obvious that episodes 1-3 are synchronous, “married”, just the three couples in the play by J B Priestly had obviously been married all the time

Just as we can have a “factoid” so we have an Ormenroyd. (That surname is real and a variant of Ormerod)

***
Such a story seems to demand a learned “scientific” explanation. But none will be possible. Because nothing happened according to the normal laws of cause and effect.

God is Spirit and “John 3:8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”  “God moves in mysterious was, his wonders to perform.”

More about this at another time, but it is to be remarked that there seems to be no religion, no Christian denomination that does NOT have the idea of Predestination as part their official teaching.  It must be true that in all peoples at all time people have strange synchronicities that seem to demand the action of a higher power.

Use of mantic devices, such as the I Ching, astrology attest to such a belief.

“The Spirit bloweth where listeth”. The language of Spirit is in all creativity, poetry, music and all deep human relationships, within the God who is in all and through all.

Michael Cocks edits the journal, The Ground of Faith.
Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr and Into the Wider Dream by Michael Cocks are published by White Crow Books and available from Amazon and other bookstores.

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In the creative spiritual dimension there is no time and space, and all is connected to all else.
The physical dimension has us shackled to a body with all its limitations, as part of the development of our wider spiritual selves..
I see synchronicity as an affirmative scenario affirming a lesson that we are learning.
In Mr Ormorod Gave Me Sixpence, Iam emotionally learning the lesson of the importance of the present moment, and that affirmative experiences persist throughout our lives.
Thank you all for your thhoughts.
The problem we face in our thoughts, is that the languageof spirit is poetry,and that we cannot make definitive stements like x = y

What I have written before is too brief, and omits one idea too important to allow ourselves to misunderstand. No kind of ‘predestination’ controls our actions. The fact that the Great Being who is the WHOLE knows all its lower beings’ futures does not force those smaller beings to act. To know in advance what SOMEONE ELSE is going to do does not force them to do it.

We humans have autonomy, but at the same time we experience limits that have been set upon our actions and thoughts. None of us can visit the summit of Everest by wishing to do so. But within the all-too-obvious limits of what we can do we have free will to perform a contemplated action or not. The fact that all our actions and inactions are known to the Timeless Whole Being does not force us to act in any way. The action is foreknown to that WHOLE-BEING, but not to ourselves. The WHOLE-BEING’S knowledge of OUR ‘future’ does not change the fact that in our lesser degree of knowledge or certainty we are free to make choices as to action. It is our chosen action that is foreknown, though not foreknown by us. Once seen, this realisation is extremely easy to understand, but our everyday language makes it very difficult to convey the notion to anyone not having already ‘seen’ that simple and eventually obvious fact.

Eric Franklin

Dear Karen Herrick, and all other readers,

I’m not sure just what the true understanding of what you have written is, but a point I would make is that a sufficiently more advanced scientific mode of thought than the down-to-the-mundane notion of cause and effect changed the whole scientific scene a century or so ago. Cause and effect is not a scientific law. It is a long-discarded grossly clumsy human attempt to understand the universe. In 1925, when Sir William Barrett left the Earth mode of living, the new outlook was not even part of his own outlook, physicist though he was. Eddington and a few others understood the emerging physics, but Barrett had been concerned more with the physics of human technology rather than with the latest revolutionary ideas in physics, but even he, sending a message back down to us, showed evidence of being aware that he had to set aside one of his new dimensions in order to communicate with Earthlings.

I think I shall have to write the book I referred to in my earlier comment. I wrote half a book with Dr Maureen Lockhart, namely her book The Subtle Energy Body (Inner Traditions 2010) (my name is not on the cover, but I am acknowledged inside it), and my part of it borders upon matters of space and time, and the illusory quality of much of classical physics, but the forthcoming book, if I am granted “time” enough on Earth to write it, will explain a lot more deeply and bring in the relevance of Relativity Theory (which, I do not doubt, Sir William Barrett now understands).

Much more will have to be said in my “future” book,

Eric Frankln

To all readers,

The question whether everything is pre-destined is wrongly conceived. Everything is known by the Great Being who IS the WHOLE, the multiple universe (using the word ‘universe’ as most humans conceive the meaning of that word). From the human minuscule viewpoint and with merely human thought-conception, there is a future that is unknown and unfixed, so if odd things happen that suggest otherwise to humans the usual human thought is to conceive some sort of behind-the-scenes compulsion or force majeure at work. This conception of cause and effect is incorrect. The ‘future’ is not CAUSED. It IS. The whole false idea of ‘future’ is not needed once we realise that what it depends upon is a totally false conception of time. Time as we experience the process of changes that we have misconceived and named ‘time’ does not exist in a universe one dimension higher than the four-dimensional universe which alone we can perceive with our senses. That next-higher universe of five dimensions does not experience our ‘time’ as such, but as space, but is aware of an extra dimension which is its ‘time’. The Being that is the Whole has an infinite number of dimensions and experiences them all, having subsumed its own highest-and-final ‘time’ into one of space. That Being is aware of all the dimensions, and therefore knows all the so-called ‘futures’ of all the smaller universes within Itself in a way we would call ‘simultaneous’. In fact, even at our low level of consciousness there is no such ‘thing’ as simultaneity, as Einstein showed. Like time, simultaneity is a false invention of the human mind to explain and denote human mal-observations that have led us to that false idea. Equally firmly based on the fact of Einsteinian Relativity is the fact of other universes right here around us, but (almost) totally out of communication with our own ‘universe’ of only four dimensions. I could add more, such as the evidence of utterances via a trance medium of Sir William Barrett (as he was when here) to the effect that he could not communicate via the medium with all his own dimensions of being, but had to leave one of them behind when communicating with our fewer-dimensioned world. As I say, much more could be said (I am considering writing a book about it) but the foregoing is difficult enough for most to comprehend, so I shall go and get on with the earth-day’s toil. I have some electric wiring to install at our cottage.

Eric Franklin

I like the idea that psychic phenomenon could come from the law of synchroncity and the idea of predestination with the help of a Higher power rather than the scientific law of cause and effect.  Astrology I also enjoy having my chart read yearly! 

I feel sorry for people who don’t have these beliefs!!  Blessings to all I hope you are all well.  Karen