This is a strange story that might not be believable if it were not for my rather extreme sensitivity to external thoughts and feelings. Anyway, here we go:

A while back I had my hair very long, in a pony-tail. I was wandering into Birmingham town centre one Saturday, and I was stopped by some police. They asked to search my bag, and took all my details on a form. I didn't mind too much -- but I was curious about what was going on, and I asked them what it was all about. It seems that there was going to be a huge demonstration by "anti-capitalists" later that day, and it was obvious that they had stopped me because of my suspicious hair style. Perhaps they had not been trained to detect the difference between a pony-tail and crusty-style dreadlocks.

In any case, they had pulled me into the situation, stopping me as a suspected anti-capitalist, so I thought, "Well, I might as well swing with this and see what this demonstration is all about." So, later that day I arrived to find a seething mass of police officers (200 or more), and about ten hippy-style demonstrators who entertained themselves by running around the city centre, causing immense movements of police in response. The whole situation was ludicrous, and the police were in constant and severe danger of looking very foolish.

As a fairly sensitive person, I could feel what the police were doing on an energetic level in the places that they occupied -- they were creating an energetic force which pushed down on everyone from above. Even the expression "a heavy police presence" reveals that people do generally have a semi-conscious understanding of this pressure. If ever in my life I've had a direct experience of the force of oppression in the pure abstract (i.e. without physical violence), then this was it.

Given the significant lack of anti-capitalists, this seemed well over the top, and I felt the need to reclaim some of the public space that was being occupied. In particular, the square in front of the library is normally quite a nice place to sit and watch people go by. So I stood there on the steps and I started spinning up earth energy from below the ground in a huge spiral to break the oppressive force bearing down on everyone in that square. The hippy protestors were elsewhere at this time, so it was just me, hundreds of police and many innocent passers-by.

As the energy broke through and the feeling of the square started to return to something more like normal, it was clear that the police had sensed what I had done and were not feeling comfortable about this. I saw a flash of a camara from one of the police vehicles, and a policeman with a walkie-talkie came up to peer across at me briefly before dashing off. They then ran a squad of police officers right past where I was standing. If they were hoping to intimidate me, they failed. As far as I know, manipulating the energy of a public space for the better is not illegal, if the law even recognises the existence of 'energy' in this sense, which I doubt.

Having done my bit, I wandered off home. They now had all my details on file as a suspected anti-capitalist, and I had confirmed and reinforced my anti-establishment status by breaking the oppressive energetic force being generated by the huge police presence in that square. My photo might even have gone down in another file as a 'dangerous person', perhaps even as an organizer. I really must congratulate the police on a good day's work -- I had absolutely no interest in political activity before this point, and within a few hours I had been converted into an extremist!

Probably anyone less sensitive would not have picked all this up, nor reacted in quite the same way, but I am different. My manifestation energy is quite strong -- patterns projected onto me, if they stick, end up being manifested into reality by the force of my own internal energy. It is not that I choose to do these things, just that they kind of happen to me.

So, it was not too long after this that I became involved in the Campaign for Digital Rights, initially demonstrating outside the American Embassy about the plight of Dmitry Sklyarov (the Russian cryptographer arrested in the States under the DMCA for revealing weaknesses in Adobe's shoddy eBook protection), and then taking up the issue of corrupt audio CDs, driving forwards a nationwide day of leafletting and generating a fair amount of attention from the media.

And to think how all this came about from a simple police mistake in judging the suspiciousness of my hair style ...

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