Jazz Razool kicked off the first day of the 2013 Symposium with a compelling presentation on the ‘awakening process’. Combining his scientific background with his interest in Eastern medicine and spirituality, he is trying to find new ways to help people become more conscious. Jazz recommends that as with our need for vitamins to keep our physical body healthy, we also need our ‘three-a-day’ in the form of ‘support, challenge and reflection,’ which we can obtain by surrounding ourselves with people who can give us these things. If we can clear the energy we lock up in our past and also our future, we can focus it into the present to create tremendous energy for change. Jazz has been working on a related computer app over the past five years that people can be a part of by logging onto his website at: www.energydiamond.com

The theme of raising our consciousness continued with Serena Roney-Dougalwho was our first speaker after lunch. She shared with us the first-hand experience she has gained on her travels to other cultures. The Yogic, Vedic, Tantric and Buddhist philosophical traditions consider consciousness as the origin of the universe, together with energy. Serena showed some fabulous slides from her time in Tibet, and her meetings with some very enlightened people are to be envied. However, it sounds like there definitely needs to be changes to the status of women over there, with Serena telling the audience that women are often thought of as being on the same level as a yak! www.psi-researchcentre.co.uk

Hugh Newman then shared with us his globetrotting experiences and research into the possibility of an energy grid which not only encompasses our Earth but also places beyond, showing how there is evidence of the same phenomenon on other planets. Hugh took us on a journey exploring the incredible geometrical coincidences that abound at certain sacred sites. Are the authorities hiding from us the knowledge that once upon a time a true race of giants inhabited the earth..? Hugh was off to the Bermuda Triangle soon afterwards in the hope of returning with more fascinating findings. www.megalithomania.co.uk/hughnewman.html

John Dalton opened the post-dinner evening proceedings with a musical journey of latino harp pieces. Everyone agreed that they could listen to John all evening. His harp playing was completely mesmerizing, leaving everyone awestruck by his skill of transporting them to a heavenly place. Thank you, John! http://harpjohn.co.uk

No better way to start off the second day of the Symposium than with our MC and regular speaker Andy Thomas, author of The Truth Agenda and his new book Conspiracies. Andy has such skill in making quite complex real world issues seem more accessible and less overwhelming – by using discernment. ‘I can get quite scared by the dark future that some people paint but Andy makes me feel like there is hope’, said one attendee after the talk. Yes, there are many challenges ahead for the New Era but there is a lot of good out there too, and Andy struck the perfect note in his assessment of the opportunities the times ahead will bring. www.truthagenda.org

The Symposium likes to keep a good balance between the material and the spiritual worlds, and our next speaker of the morning, Petrina Holdsworth, managed to combine these two in a very eloquent way. Bringing together her very real world experience as a barrister – and her time as the chairperson of UKIP! – with her current interest in more esoteric topics gave a very rounded presentation as she unfolded her vision of the future and of how governments could change the way they work to present more holistic and lasting solutions to global social and political issues.

The closing treat for the Saturday afternoon was the British premiere of Roy Leraand’s film, Crop Circles: Embrace the Mystery. Edited down from his four-hour prime-time Norwegian TV series, the excerpts we were shown by Roy today were superb, with stunning footage. It is so nice to see a film on crop circles that is so professional and such good quality. Roy was ‘interviewed’ onstage by Andy Thomas to reveal the background behind the film, which is planned for DVD release in 2014. We very much appreciate Roy showing us sneak-previews from the film and look forward to seeing the completed version. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuSujUe9joM

A great friend to the Symposium is Andrew Collins, who was our Saturday night speaker. Andrew, with his endearingly affable style, shared with us some fascinating anecdotal evidence about people’s personal experiences with UFOs and perceived ETs, and how they often experience ‘missing time’. Andrew believes that many UFOs are made of plasma, rather than being solid objects or craft (though he does not deny that this aspect may also exist), and stated that governments were also beginning to conclude that plasma was involved in the phenomenon, despite their denials about its existence. This was a refreshing new twist on an old subject. Andrew then ended with a tantalising epilogue about the incredible discoveries being made at the ancient site of Göbekli Tepe in what was once Mesopotamia, which will be the subject of his next book. www.andrewcollins.com

Our second speaker of the morning, Karen French, posed the fundamental questions of what exactly the process of creation is, and what part does symbolism play in it all. With some beautiful images, Karen helped us to understand how geometry, light and sound create our world, and that shapes and symbols carry genuine power beyond being merely metaphorical. The biblical phrase ‘In the beginning was the word…’ was shown to be more than artistic flair, revealing to us instead perhaps the very fundamentals upon which our universe is created and maintained. www.karenlfrench.com

Our first speaker after lunch was respected astrologer Wendy Stacey. Astrology is a much maligned and misunderstood subject and it is always a battle to get people to realise that there is much more complexity to it than Sun Sign columns in the newspapers. Wendy talked us through how the themes of the Uranus/Pluto conjunction in the mid 1960s are now coming into sharp focus because these two planets have now reached the first major aspect since then. Wendy’s research into the consequences of elected caesarean births is both fascinating and scary for mankind as its popularity increases, for it has started a process whereby the natural mix of diverse astrological character traits in society is being overbalanced by the plethora of daytime births… www.wendystacey.com

Following a beautiful meditation in the nearby Abbey grounds in the late afternoon, our very final speaker of the Symposium, in our special Sunday night slot, gave a powerhouse of a presentation. We were very privileged to have Dr Manjir Samanta-Laughton give her brand new talk for the first time in this country. Although Manjir is a medical doctor, she has also been having mystical experiences since she was 18, giving her rather special insights into the nature of reality. She gave a wealth of information about her new and radical theory on black holes – apparently they are everywhere, from the centres of galaxies to the possibility that there is one at the centre of our own Earth. AND – amazingly – even tiny ones inside all of us! Could a process of miniature holes even explain the seemingly anomalous processes behind the creation of the Shroud of Turin (as discussed by Dr Silverman earlier in the weekend)? Manjir is indeed a true visionary, and a very welcome figure who is trying to pull together the world of the ‘alternative’ with the ever-stretching paradigms being presented by the new physics. What a perfect end to a quite astonishing weekend, which many people felt was one of the best Symposiums yet mounted. (www.paradigmrevolution.com)

We would like to extend a very big thank you to all our attendees and speakers who helped to make the 2013 Symposium such a huge success. 

Report by Helen Sewell, photos by Andy Thomas