My mother had visits sometimes from Gypsies at the front door selling the clothes-pegs and the lavender, and the things Gypsies sell. I and my younger brother, Peter, were at my grandmother’s house at the time. And the Gypsy said to my mother, "You have two sons. The older one will be very famous, and will do some very unusual work. The younger one will give you some problems." And that was exactly true. My younger brother had many health problems and was quite sickly and had difficult time. Then she predicted that my mother would have another baby, and my sister was then later born, etc., etc.

So, there were several people who predicted things. I was on a vacation at the age of 11 or 12, I think in Great Yarmouth—it was on the east coast of England. And I was digging in the sand with my bucket and spade, you know, making sand castles. And this little lady in a canvas chair called me over. She said, "Little boy, little boy, I would like to speak to you. When you grow up, you’re going to have some very strange things happen to you. You’re going to see things that other people don’t see, and hear things that other people don’t hear. You must’t think you’re mad. You may think you are mad, but you are not mad. I am telling you about this, and in the future you will think of my words, that I have told you of this," she said. And her husband was asleep in the chair with a newspaper over his face not listening to anything she was talking to me. And it seems like she was trying to tell me that I would have some psychic ability.

T: Who was that lady?
B: I don’t know who she was. She said she was a medium. I didn’t know what a "medium" was. She said, "You may not understand this, but I am a medium, and I have to tell you about this. You have lights floating around over your head." She told me I had spirit lights around me. And so, that’s what she could see.

When I was about 17, I was at grammar school in England. And my grandfather’s second wife died of cancer. I was very fond of her—her name was Mary. And I was very upset when she died, because my grandmother had died from tuberculosis just after I was born. And then my grandfather later married his housekeeper, who was a nice lady, and this nice lady also died in 1955 or '56, I think it was.

And I remember feeling very distressed about this, and going to the Spiritualist Church in Huntingdon in England. And it was in Huntingdon Spiritualist Church that I met quite a number of people, and they were kind to me and helped me to understand this whole subject. There I first met Mr. Robert Copley, whose wife, Anne Copley, was what is called a "trumpet medium." She could go into a deep trance, sitting in a chair. They had a shed in the garden, like a garden sanctuary. And they would turn out the lights, and Anne would sit in a small chair with curtains around her. When I first was invited to sit with Anne Copley, I could hear her actually snoring during the first fifteen minutes. She was breathing deeply and heavily in the dark. On the floor in front of us—I sat with my father’s sister, my Aunt Doreen with some other people in the dark—were luminous megaphones, painted with luminous paint. They were lying on their end, sticking up from the floor. And as we began to sing some hymns like "Jerusalem," "Abide with Me," and some of the Christian hymns we sang, and said a prayer, suddenly, the luminous trumpet flew up in the air and it turned on its side, and the voices began coming through the trumpet at us. There was a man named Johnny from London, and he was there. We also had a Red Indian, American Indian guide, who spoke with a heavy accent and gave the spiritual blessings. And at one point, my father's brother, Frank Hurst, came through and spoke to me. Frank had died at the age 19 in a motorcycle accident. His motorcycle hit a patch of ice on the road and it threw him off, and his head hit a telegraph pole and he was killed instantly. But he came through and he spoke to me, "It’s Frank," you know, and he gave me a message. At that time I was working in London. And that week I had not had any breakfast before going to work. And no one knew that. And he said, "Brian, you must eat breakfast in the morning. You didn’t eat breakfast every day last week." And he said, "This is Frank. I will help you, and I’m fine now." That was my first contact, with my dead uncle, you see, my Aunt Doreen’s brother. My Aunt Doreen sat next to me in the séance room.

T: I think your position of a mediator between the worlds takes some diplomacy, patience and communication skills. Do you have some background in communication skills?
B: I was a drama student in London, and I studied with the London Guild Hall School of Music and Drama. I actually performed parts in "The Three Sisters" by Chekhov, and I did Ibsen and Strindberg and Oscar Wilde, and all these—Noel Coward—and I played parts on the stage at the London Guild Hall School. I took part in some British movies. I did some bit parts in a movie with Spike Milligan escaping from a concentration camp, which was all filmed at Pinewood Studios in the north of London. And there I had to jump from a truck carrying a rifle, for which they paid me one pound danger money plus the daily fee for the film extra. And I also did some bit parts on the television for the BBC producers’ training school where we were just required as drama students to run through a simple script to train the cameramen and train the crew in the studio. And it was not very important, but it was an early experience. I needed this, though, to gain confidence, because I was a shy person, not able to communicate very well with people.

But through astrology, which I studied from the age of 16, I began to find—astrology gave me a tremendous enthusiasm and interest. My birth chart was first done by a Mr. Brown, who came to the local Huntingdon Spiritualist Church. And he told me that I had a very creative chart, that I should do creative work carried out behind the scenes, not in front of the public but behind the scenes. So, maybe trying to be an actor, I was going in a wrong direction. I think I really should have enrolled in an art college, and I probably should have had training at that early age, because I didn’t start painting until I was 50 years at age. I had never painted before, and now I’m producing these photo-realistic kind of paintings, which you see on the walls in my house here. I think that’s what I should have done.

But nevertheless, Spiritualism got me. I went to lectures at the College of Psychic Science, as it was then called, in South Kensington, London. And there I met a lady named April Day. She was, I think, born April the 18^th, and we became very good friends. And she arranged my first meeting at the village of Grays Thurrock in the country of Essex, which is east of London. And there I stood with knees knocking before an audience, or congregation of mostly senior citizens, hoping I would get a message that would make sense. Apparently, the messages did make sense, the people understood, and it gave me confidence to do some more public work. And then for a number of years after that, I served many of the London Spiritualist churches, and the southeast England—the Cambridge Spiritualist Church, the Windsor Spiritualist Church, where Windsor Castle is, and Canterbury in Kent and a number of…. I traveled weekends giving readings to people in these churches. 

In the meantime I was getting invitations from different people for sittings, they wanted to sit. I was living in London at the time. And I met several very important people involved with the Spiritualist movement. I met Mrs. Nora Blackwood, one of London’s top mediums. Nora Blackwood at a meeting told me, she said, "You will be doing the work that I am doing. You will travel widely and be well known, but you’ll never be wealthy." So I said, "OK, thank you." And that doesn’t matter, because I have always put integrity and the creation of goodwill before the making of money. To me, making money is secondary.

T: Only so much money as we need to survive.
B: Yes, yes, that’s right. Did you want to ask anything?

T. How old you were when you met Nora?
B: When I met Nora Blackwood I was still a student at the Guild Hall School of Music and Drama. So I was still only about 20—about 20, 19—I think 19, I was 19.

T: You really started early.
B: Yes, yes. And my first demonstration was when I was about 20, 21. And Nora Blackwood, of course, was one of the great mediums of London. And I also met the famous medium Mrs. Estelle Roberts. Estelle Roberts was the medium for the guide Red Cloud, who was a North American Indian guide. She gave large demonstrations at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Wigmore Hall, and she was one of the top mediums. She was responsible for the British government changing the law. Originally, mediums could be prosecuted under a 1735 Witchcraft Act for pretending to summon up the spirits of the dead, but in the 1951 it was substituted by Fraudulent Mediums Act. [Now a medium could be prosecuted, if charged with proven fraud, not solely for being "a witch"], Spiritualism was given legal recognition in the United Kingdom. And this was largely due to the work of Estelle Roberts, and other mediums also, who persuaded members of parliament that this was a genuine ability, that there was truly communication with the world beyond death, and that this could be demonstrated.

Mrs. Roberts was not only a mental medium like myself, but she was a physical medium. She could go into a deep trance, and there spirit—objects would move about in the room, voices would speak in the air, which is called "independent voice." And she was doing earlier what Leslie Flint later did so well, producing the voices of the dead right in the air in front of you. So there were several of these very talented mediums. Anne Copley also could produce voices through the trumpets as the trumpets flew about the air. (The early medium from Cambridge that I told you about.)

T: When came the feeling of mission, that you really are chosen to do that, that it is not only a way to spend your time, but it is like you have a mission to do that—you have to do that and not something else?
B: Yes, yes, yes. When did my mission…well, I began studying psychology, Jungian psychology, and all that in my early twenties, plus astrology. Astrology gave me much insight into human nature and I was able to find myself accepting people more the way they are, not trying to make them the way I wanted them to be.

T: Oh, yes, it was exactly my next question--how do you get rid of judgmentalism, so to speak, yes?
B: Yes, yes. I think astrology helped me, 'cause I think if someone has a very bad Mars-Saturn, Mars-Uranus connection, maybe they can't help it, or maybe they need extra help to overcome this negative planetary configuration. I don't know, but I certainly looked at many charts, and when I was living in London, though -- this would be in 1963, '64 -- I was living in East London, and I was working as a schoolteacher. I decided to try teaching, so I entered the teaching profession. And there I was also sometimes giving sittings at weekends to people at the house. I didn't do much work apart from weekends. I was a weekend medium. I did it on Sundays and Saturdays sometimes, but not during the week because I was teaching school and I was way too tired. But, this lady came to me from Leicester in England, Mrs. Kathleen Henry. Her son was suffering from a mysterious illness, and no one could understand what was wrong with him. Apparently he was employed at, God forbid, an animal research center, so he could have had a connection with all kinds of viruses and things that maybe they were doing research with. I disapprove of these kind of things, but anyway, that's beside the point.

And during the sitting, Dr. Grant, my guide, came through strongly, and he kept saying to me, tell her to get her son checked for bruc-bruc-bruce- what? I couldn't understand this—bru-cel-lo-sis, brucellosis." I said, "What's that?" So, I had to look it up in a dictionary. I didn't know what brucellosis was. And it said it is called "undulant fever," and it is caught by drinking contaminated cow's milk. It is a disease—brucellosis. She went back, and she told her son what had come through, and he was checked for brucellosis and the test confirmed the diagnoses which was given by my spiritual guide, Dr. Grant. 

T: May I ask one question… When you were in India, you met Sai Baba. Does it have some meaning for you? Do these people give some "unseen gift" that makes you better or stronger?
B. […] Bob Copley and I, we managed to get to the ashram. And Sai Baba came out. And I sat on the front row, cross-legged; one man gave me his place. And I sat there. And Sai Baba looked at me, and he came straight across to me, and he asked me to hold out my hand. So I held out my hand and he touched me with his brown fingers. And out of the ends of three of the fingers there oozed all this holy ash, this vibhuti, which is, they call it holy ash, which came out of him. It's symbolic that everything returns to ashes and dust. And it also is a connection with Sai Baba's previous incarnation, when he was Shirdi Baba of Bombay. He was a holy man in his past incarnation who'd lived outside Bombay. People had gone to him, and he'd taken ashes from his fire, and given them the ash, and told them to put small amounts on their tongue, and to use it. And it had produced marvelous healings. And he was known as a Bombay Saint. Shirdi Baba predicted that he would be reborn in south India in a totally different body, I think, eight years later. And then in 1926, on the 23^rd of November, such a Sai Baba was born. And musical instruments played, there were miracles, and all strange things occurred at the time of the baby's birth. You can read about this, I think, in some of the books, like Sai Baba, Man of Miracles by Howard Murphet. The Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose Avenue has a whole section on Sai Baba. You maybe can find it there.

The ash that Sai Baba materialized was fragrant and it had a kind of a sweet taste. I put some on my tongue. And all the Indian people were going scooping into my palm, trying to take the ash. One elderly man said, "You must not give it to other people. Sai Baba has meant this for you." So then, rather guiltily, I closed my hand and started refusing people. I felt bad about it, because I felt it meant to them, it meant so much to receive a little bit of the blessing of Sai Baba.

T: What is awaiting us after our death? What is your concept of the transition? Do we find our way to the right place?
B: I think the human organism has a built-in mechanism for automatically dealing with the situation. We know that the brain produces a hormone that causes a state of euphoria, tranquility, and peacefulness when the person dies. So normal death of old age, or after a terminal illness, the moment of death, we are anesthetized. There is an anesthetic influence, in which the person feels euphoric and peaceful. And the electro-magnetic energy body leaves the physical body, and of course, life after death is electro-magnetic in nature.

We are electrical beings. After all, the brain is electrical, and everything—when people die on the operating table during surgery, they give them electrical shocks to the heart to bring them back, don't they? See, it's all electrical. So, I think, the nature of life after death is electrical. And that is why very often when you get thunderstorms or other electrical disturbances in the atmosphere, you can't get results at séances. The spirits are not able to get through the electrical disturbance in the atmosphere to come to the medium. So, when I see these movies showing the mediums sitting around the table with thunder and lightning, I want to laugh my head off. They don't know their psychic facts. Because no self-respecting medium would want to hold a séance in a thunderstorm. I find thunderstorms—and when you get those high winds here, called the Santa Ana winds, which blow very much, they produce positive electrical ionization. And it seems that positive ionization is not good for psychic work. I like to have negative ionization, which you find with waterfalls, the ocean, near rivers and streams, in the countryside, and I have a negative ionizer up on the shelf there, which is going all the time in this room to create a local  atmosphere conductive to this work. I hope it helps, does it? This should give you a nice, clear recording. I guess you'd make a transcript, will you?

T: Of course, yes, and ... Do we have to do hard work over there?
B: Hard work—not in the sense that people on earth are caught into sweatshops and factories. Not in that sense, no. In fact, it is heaven, because you can really do what you want to do; you can follow your interests. And if you're interested in learning, or you're interested in philosophy, or in art, or music—a lot of spirits get tremendous kick out of learning to play musical instruments, and being involved with listening to music. And apparently music over there is performed publicly in large arenas, rather like giant versions of the Hollywood Bowl. Apparently the people can see beautiful colors, and have beautiful visual effects as they hear the music. Apparently the music itself creates its gorgeous artistic colors and effects in the atmosphere above the arena where people are watching. At Sea World in San Diego, the Sparkletts Water Company does a visual display of water rising up with music, and there you can see a crude version of a color display as the music plays. All I can say is that —I also knew the automatic writing medium Grace Rosher. Did I ever tell you about her?

T: Once you mentioned that.
B: Yes, the lady who was able to receive information in the spirit's own handwriting -- amazing, amazing. Well, she did not hold the pen. She rested the pen on her hand. And Gordon Burdick [her fiancé who died before their wedding], he's spirit  was able to prove that he was writing it, and she was not writing it. [Showing photos] And I visited her for tea. And of course, their books give wonderful descriptions of the next world.

T: How long have you doing this work here, in the United States?
B: A long time, 16 years... California to me is a place of intense extremes. There is extreme violence, brutality, coarseness, and primitive behavior here. And there is extreme spirituality, beauty, and enlightenment here, also. And we  have these two extreme contrasts, side by side, in this unusual melting pot called California. So, certainly I know, in my 16 years of  doing this work here, I have convinced thousands of skeptics of the reality of this power, and of the reality of communication with deceased loved ones. I think I have knocked a big dent in the skepticism of many of the scientific community. And I've been visited by many doctors, scientists, psychologists, therapists, schoolteachers, college lecturers, lawyers, judges -- well, I would think people in almost every profession have been to me at some time or another and have got results of some kind, providing they are willing to do the preparation, and put out photographs of their loved ones, and write notes telling the loved ones the date, the time, and the place where the séance will be held, inviting the loved ones to come through and give them a message that can be evidential or proof that it is that person, then usually someone will try and come through.

However, if a person is sometimes very negative, skeptical, or very sort of -- sometimes they themselves will create a jamming. They will jam whatever I'm trying to get through. They will create a disturbance which makes it not possible for me to work for them, so I fail. I also fail more frequently to contact people who have died of long distressing illnesses like cancer, because to some extent, when they pass over, they may rest for a period of time, sometimes several months of earthly time, in rare cases a few years of earthly time. They will be unconscious or asleep resting. And during the resting period they go through a review of their life. They see images of their childhood, their adolescence, and their maturity, and in a sense, all of us after death judge ourselves. Judgment is self-judgment. There is nobody up there telling you, "whack, whack, whack, you go to hell fire and burn," you know. That is nonsense. In fact, the Catholic Church has not got a right at all. And the Catholic Church has, in fact, terrorized and terrified many people. I feel it's very unfair that priests should not be allowed to marry. If they want to marry, they should be allowed to marry, and women should be allowed to enter the priesthood also. When they make those changes, I will have a little more time for them. But I think at the present time they're not fair.
[...]

T: And you consider the number of people you had sittings with to be in the thousands, yes?  
B: Oh, I've sat with thousands. And of course, every month I get a crowd of people here at the house, so in a year... I never really count. I lost count...many years ago.