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Heywood, Rosalind - The Infinite Hive - Obeying Orders
Identifier
023063
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Rosalind Heywood – The Infinite Hive
Usually my Orders come in relation to people with whom I am deeply involved, but such involvement does not seem to be essential. One apparently irrational Order came on behalf of a man I knew but slightly. We did have one link, however: we both felt a passionate interest in ESP.
It was during the Second World War. My husband had been sent to the War Office, and when the journey to and from Sunningdale became too unreliable we took a little house in Westminster. Immediately afterwards he was moved to a distant post where I could not follow him. 'What shall I do with this place?' I asked myself, sitting alone in the empty house.
'Is there any good use to which it could be put?’
'Yes,' said Orders promptly. 'Write at once and ask Mr and Mrs Tyrrell to come and live in it.'
I found this preposterous. Mr Tyrrell was an elderly member of the SPR Council. I had only met him a few times at meetings and had once had supper with him and his wife. Early in the war they had been bombed out of their London flat and had gone to a quiet place in the country where he was now peacefully writing a book.
'It would help the book,' said Orders, for him to come to London. That, I thought, was a tiresome attempt to rationalize an absurd impulse: what elderly man could write better in bomb-ridden London than in the country? However, Orders once more defeated reason, and very apologetically I wrote.
The immediate and delighted reply was that my letter had come in the nick of time. The Tyrrells had just been told that their landlord wanted his house back, Mr Tyrrell's book could get no further until he lived near the library of the SPR, and he could not afford to set up house again in London.
I owed a lot to those particular Orders. Not only did the Tyrrells spend three years in our house during which Mr Tyrrell's book, The Personality of Man, was happily finished, but under the guidance of its author I learnt far more than I should ever have done otherwise about the many problems of tracking down ESP.