An Autistic Savant's Life Lessons For All Of Us with Jes Kerzen EP 373

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Hey there, welcome to another episode of Grief 2 Growth. And whether you're joining us for the first time or you're a returning listener, I'm your host, Brian D Smith. And today we have a truly enlightening conversation lined up for you. I don't get to read the books of all the guests I have on, but I did read this book because It's fascinating. So joining us today is Jess Curzon. And Jess is a retired teacher whose journey transcends the conventional classroom. Her real education began not with textbooks and tests, but with a remarkable encounter with Asher. And Asher was a 6-year-old autistic boy when he became her teacher, her guide. And Asher is now the co-author of her transformative book. It's called A Mind Beyond Words. Their story delves into pre-life agreements, spiritual dimensions, and the profound lessons that can come from the most unexpected teachers. All the things we'd love to talk about here on Grief 2 Growth. Through her experiences documented on her platform, Asher Tree, which is ashertree.com, Jess explores realms beyond our ordinary perceptions. She shares insights that challenge our understanding of reality, and what it truly means to learn and grow. Today, she's here to take us on a journey that promises to expand our minds and to touch our souls. So as we explore the depths of human and spiritual connections, remember to join us at grief2growth.com/community to continue the conversation there. So with that, let's welcome Jess to the show.

Hello, Brian, and thank you so much for inviting me to your show and for that amazing introduction. That's really appreciated.

Well, thank you for your amazing book and the amazing work that you've done in the field of, of human potential and, and who we are. So, um, I do wanna let people know before we get started that we decided not to show your image in the interview, and that's to protect the privacy of Asher, who's a very private young man. So, I am looking at you. You're a lovely woman, and I thank you for being here today.

Yes, I appreciate that. Thank you. That's very good.

So, um, tell us how you encountered Asher in the first place. How did you guys meet?

Well, I was a school teacher in a specialist class for children with speech and language difficulties, so there were several who had some form of autistic spectrum perception. And there were others who just had problems with the muscles in their mouths and they couldn't speak properly. And Asher was admitted to the class because he fitted both those criteria as a 6-year-old child. And at first I thought, right, here's another one, you know, work with him, I'll teach him how to control the muscles in his mouth, how to speak properly. I've been doing this job for years, I knew what I was up to, and I thought that would be it, then he'd become more able to communicate and he'd be able to go off to a mainstream classroom, which most of my children did. And, uh, after I'd been teaching that particular class for a few weeks, I felt things were going a bit strange and I couldn't really follow what was happening in my classroom, but I didn't seem to have a control of the class. And I felt that it was almost as if someone was sabotaging my lessons. And I thought either I was paranoid or something was wrong with me. So I watched carefully. And because he was the new kid in the class, he was the one I watched particularly. And I could tell he was a very bright little boy. That was obvious right from the get-go. But, uh, And the more I watched Asher, the more I realised, yep, he was the one who was messing up my lessons. He would spread little bits of misinformation. He'd get up to things very, very cleverly so that it was very hard to notice. And eventually I took him aside and I said, "Dad, can you explain why?" 'You're messing all my lessons up.' And you might expect a 6-year-old who's been rumbled for doing something like that to either look a bit scared that they're going to get told off, or to fall about laughing and say, 'Haha, I got you.' But he didn't do either of those things. His face just lit up, and he stared at me, and he said, It's you. I thought it was you. And I had no idea what the child was talking about. So I said, what's me? And then he explained to me the best he could, given his limited language, that he'd been— he planned these tests, as he called them, and he'd been trying them out on adults in his life. Since he was 3 or 4, and he'd been looking for a special person, somebody who would figure out what was going on, figure out what he was doing. And when he found that person, he'd have solved his problem. So I said, okay, so I passed your tests, so, you know, now what? And he said, we made a deal. 'we made a deal that you'd be my helper.' And I said, 'Well, you've only recently come to the class. I don't remember making any deals with you.' And he said, 'No, before I were born,' as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. And I believed him, Brian. I actually thought, this kid is not messing me about. He does remember something that we did before he was born. And from that moment on, I watched that child very, very carefully. And thank goodness I did. So yeah, there was no punishment. There was no telling off. It was just a meeting of souls, I suppose.

So did you believe in pre-birth planning before this, before this moment?

I hadn't really given it a lot of thought, to be honest. I certainly believed there was more to life than just you know, living for however many years and then pushing up daisies. I thought there was definitely something going on. I vaguely thought reincarnation was quite likely, and I was curious. I was prepared to believe it. So yeah, yeah.

So how did things go with Asher? You were— you taught him, but, um, typically you would teach a child for a year, I assume, and then they move on to the next class or next teacher or whatever. So how did— how did you make maintain this relationship for so long?

Oh, that's an excellent question. Thank you. Yeah, um, yes, normally I would have a child in my class for maximum of 3 or 4 years before they were ready to go back to mainstream. But very sadly, in Asher's case, something happened to change all that. He was 8 years old, I think, so a couple of years after he joined the class and he was making very good progress with his speech, and it was looking likely that he'd be moving to a mainstream school soon. But very sadly, his mother phoned me one day and said she'd just been for some tests and she had cancer and it was terminal and she only had a few months to live. And so the first thing she said was, "I know you've been thinking about maybe moving Asher on to a different classroom, but this isn't the time." And I agreed with her completely and spoke to my head teacher, and we agreed that he needed all the stability he could possibly have. And so over the next few months, I helped where I could. I'd actually become quite a close friend of Asha's mum. She was a lovely, lovely lady, Nina, and we had become quite good friends. And so I said, well, if you want me to take the kids out at weekends so that you and your partner can have some time together, or if you want me to stay in the house with you, look after you while your husband takes the children out and starts bonding with them as life's going to be in the future. We did all those things, and I also got some one-to-one time with Asha. My lovely head teacher offered to read a class, read the class stories once a week so that I had some one-to-one time to, you know, just talk things through and help him as best I could. And then, oh, right at the very end of her life, when she was in hospice, I got a call from Nina's husband saying, she's asking to speak to you, can you go there after work today? So I rushed off as soon as work had finished, got to the hospice, and she was sitting up in bed. She was coherent, she was She knew she only had a few days to go, but she wanted to talk to me, and she had two things to tell me. The first was she wanted me to get Asher to go and visit her, because he'd been avoiding doing that. He just found it too painful, too difficult. And she said, "Can you ask him just to come in and say goodbye? Because if he doesn't, he's going to feel really bad afterwards, and I don't want him to carry that burden of guilt. So this wasn't for her sake, this was for her child's sake, and that was very typical of her. And the second thing she said— welling up now— the second thing she said was, uh, it's a lot to ask, but you understand Ashi. You've taught him for years. You and he seem to have a very special bond. 'Can I ask you to keep an eye out for him even when he's no longer in your class, even when he's growing up? Because with his autism, with losing a mother at such a young age, he's going to be quite a vulnerable kid, and I think you'd be a wonderful mentor for him.' So I promised at that moment that I would be a lifelong friend to Asher, and And I was very, very happy to do so because I loved the kid to bits by then. He was a lovely little boy. And, uh, so we just have never separated. He's in his early 30s now and we're still very, very close.

That's awesome. So Asher, he became verbal, so he's able to— he can speak and communicate. But when did you unders— when did you learn about his other abilities?

Yeah, they sort of crept up on me gradually. Um, he told me one day, I think you should know that I'm telepathic. And I imagine being a school teacher and having one of your pupils telling you that. Ah, does that mean you can read my mind? And he just beamed, yep. And there was— I discovered that the whole class, even before they could speak, were communicating with each other telepathically, which I'd been teaching children like that for years, and it just hadn't dawned on me that they could do it. But this lot did, and they kind of attuned me to it so that I could start picking it out. And I didn't use it very much with Asher. He, he said afterwards that he didn't really want to focus on the telepathy at that stage because he wanted to move from telepathy, which was his first language, as he put it, to speaking and being able to use his voice because that's what everybody else did and it would make life easier for for it. So yeah, that's how we started.

I have to say, that was, that was a surprise for me in the book when you said that the class, they were communicating telepathically. Because, you know, a lot of times we look at people who are differently abled— I'm not disabled, but abled differently— and we think, oh, they're non-verbal, they're not, they can't communicate. But, uh, you, you share some anecdotes in the book about they communicated very well with each other and with you.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And yeah, they'd been doing it with themselves. Yeah, there was one time when I was watching them when they were still quite tiny and they were playing in the school playground. And I just, as I watched, I thought, this game is not just random. There's actually, you know, they know what they're doing. They're taking part in a creative game that Everybody knows where they should be and what's going to happen next and where they're going. They're not using any words. They're not speaking. There's some laughter and there's a few sound effects, but nothing else. And that's when it dawned on me. They are communicating with each other with their minds. And the thing that dawned on me straight after that was if I mention this to any of the other staff here, I'm probably going to get sacked because they'll think I'm crazy. So I kept it very much to myself.

Yeah, I think that's— I said that was one of the things I took away from the book, that I, I was really, uh— I mean, so Asher, of course, is, is a special person, but a lot of these children, if not all these children, that are, uh, neurodivergent, that have different, different ways of processing their our first language, from my understanding, is from people that have near-death experiences, etc., is telepathy. And then we come here, we have to learn to be verbal. So it's interesting, actually, was like, okay, you're going to be my helper because you're going to help me with the verbal aspect of, of this life on Earth.

Yeah, but there was much more to it than that because that was just the start of it. That's all he knew at that time, right? Yeah, I mean, I've, I've got a theory that We, we do, as you say, all start off using telepathy. Little babies, they can communicate with their caregivers, their mothers. They, they have a way of letting their mums know when they want feeding or when they would need changing, whatever. And it's not spoken, obviously. And my, my theory, for what it's worth, I haven't got any proof of this, but I think that Children around 1.5, 2 years of age, they start to develop spoken language, and at that point they let the telepathy slip away. But some children choose not to do that. Asher was definitely one of them. He didn't want to drop the telepathy. He wanted to keep the, the telepathy going because he could see the advantage to it that you can. But it didn't help him too much because nobody else could pick out what he was trying to beam to them, if you like, except these other children in the class.

So you and Asher communicated primarily verbally because you were— again, he wanted to learn to use his language, but then after a while it kind of switched back the other way. You started— he started speaking with you telepathically. But I guess maybe before we get to that, you, you guys took a lot of adventures. You took a lot of train adventures. So tell us about, about how those came about.

Yeah, well, as I'd said before, when his mother was ill, I used to take him off on trips. I don't drive. I don't have a driving license. But we happen to live in a town that was about an hour's journey by train to London. And of course, from London, it's our capital, you can get to anywhere else in the country. And so to start off with, I just took him on little trips down to London for a day, and he absolutely loved trains. He became completely obsessed with trains. Yeah, he couldn't get enough of them, and it was always, when are we going on our next train ride? When are we going on another train ride? He planned trips on our underground system, the Tube, and I gave him his own Tube map, and he loved planning the most convoluted, difficult routes you could possibly imagine, not telling me where we were going, just saying, right, we need to change here, we need to go onto this line, and we need to change there, and we need to go onto that line. He'd end up spending an entire day dragging me around on the underground, never getting out again. So yeah, one time I said to him, "Why do we do this? We never go anywhere, we never actually end up any place, we're just sitting on these wretched underground trains all day long." And I mean, he could only have been a little kid, primary school age, 10 maybe, and he just turned and looked at me and said, Don't you understand? It's the journeys that matter, not where we're going. And I thought, yeah, you're not just talking about train rides, are you? Yeah, just grinned and carried on.

Yeah, that is— that, I thought that was so profound, that the point in the book about it's not about— it's not about where we end up, it's about the the, the journey and, and the convoluteness of it. Because we are so driven in our lives to go from point A to point B, and, and we— until we get to point B, nothing else matters. Um, he was teaching these things in some very, uh, inventive ways.

Yeah, yeah. He's always had that gift for just making such profound things, right, from being a small child, such profound ideas, and he puts them in such simple terms. And that's what I love about working with Asher. He's just always got easy little analogy that anybody could understand. Yeah, some really profound stuff comes out.

Yeah. And there's some, some, again, some great lessons in the book about manifestation that the little demonstration did for you of that I thought was really, was really interesting. Um, these, these concepts that we struggle with so much that he puts in such a, a simple way that we can, we can understand.

Yeah, because to him it is simple. He's, he's always known where he's come from. He's always known why he's here. He's always understood what we're supposed to be doing. And yeah, to him it's just easy stuff. The hard stuff is finding words to put it into.

Mm-hmm. Well, I guess that's where you come in. So when did you guys start, um, I guess collaborating on this project? How did that come about? Time for a real quick break. Make sure you like and subscribe. Liking the video will show it to more people on YouTube, and subscribing will make sure you get access to all my great content in the future. And now back to the video. Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief? Most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up, so you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry a loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it: the community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing— listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there.

It was a bit of a stop-start thing. I quite a long time before, when he was in his teens, I was saying to him, look, we ought to put this in a book, needs to go in a book. I was speaking to a lady who channeled some elders, and they actually told— these spirit guides said to me during this conversation, you will write a book, and you will explain what's been going on between the two of you. I remember saying that to Asher, saying, I've been told by these spirit guides that we need to write a book. And he turned around as a very truckulent 16-year-old, said, I forbid you to write my life story. Uh, okay, so step back. But I kept making notes, I kept keeping records. I've got a huge file on my computer. And then when he was an adult, when he was in his 20s, we stopped working verbally—his choice. He did not want to write emails, he didn't want to speak, he didn't didn't want to have that sort of communication with me, still won't, but he started talking to me telepathically. And once I'd mastered that, once I could actually respond to him and we could have a two-way conversation purely through our minds, he then said, 'You're right, it does need to go in a book.' And now I don't have to search around for the words, then that's your job. So I'll put thoughts into your mind and you can wordize them. That's the thing that came through to wordize them. So that was my job. Yeah, it's really interesting.

There's a concept in the book that I really hadn't heard before, um, because as you said, uh, you don't communicate with Asher, uh, verbally anymore. You— it sounds like very, very rarely, I guess, you, uh, text or an email or something, but you guys don't communicate on a regular basis the way that we would communicate, but you're communicating telepathic. And you talk about you're communicating with his telepathic self, is that— if I remember the phrase correctly, is that right?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I didn't know what else to call it, really. I suppose it's a spiritual self, but he has I think the medical term is dissociated, and you know, that's supposed to be a pathology, but he's got these two aspects to him. There's the ordinary everyday physical bloke who— he's got a job, he goes to work each day, and he comes home and he sits in his room. And as far as I know, that's it. He doesn't seem to go anywhere, he doesn't seem to mix with people. He, he does communicate to me by text once a week. I'll say, 'Hi, how was your week?' and I'll get, 'Fine.' 'Are you okay?' 'Yes.' But it's only ever a single word. Wow. Um, yeah, so I still write him little texts, but I don't get a response to anything apart from just a one word a week to let you know he's still there, basically, in the physical. But every evening almost, we have these long, convoluted, wonderful discussions about metaphysics and what he sees and what he calls the realms, this dimension that he's able to travel out of body and move into. And it's, uh, pretty magical.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting because even describes— you describe how the telepathy works, how you guys kind of, I guess, meet in a space that it's, it's not a physical space. It's hard for us in our language because we think of things in space and time, and these are things not limited by space or time. But you're, you're communicating with, as you call him again, his telepathic self. Uh, that he's, I guess, dissociated with. And just Asher lives his, his physical life here, but it's kind of like, I just, I'll let that part handle the, the books and stuff. Yeah.

And he won't let the two sides mix, you know. If I'll send him a text saying, hey, you know, we've sold so many books last week, not interested, doesn't want to know. In fact, I'm not even sure that physically. He's read the book. Oh wow, wow. But he knows everything about it telepathically, and he's totally engrossed in it. And yeah, he actually told me last week, telepathically obviously, that I said, how do you feel about the book being out there? And he said it feels— or he He sent me the feeling of being able to look out over every single person who read it and being able to connect with that person and pick up their feelings. And every time they were seeing something where they went, "Oh yeah," or, "Oh, that's interesting," or, "Oh," you know, he was able— is able to pick that up. So And that's the level at which he's responding to having a book out there, which is quite magical.

Yeah, so, um, yeah, that's really interesting. I'm just, I'm just kind of even picture this because I, again, never really heard of anything quite like this where, you know, the, the physical Asher is dissociated from the, the telepathic or the spiritual aspect of him that's doing this work and getting this book out and everything. It's like the other part is kind of like, okay, well, you go live your life and, and just live like a regular guy, and then, and I'll handle this. So that was a new concept to me. That one is one of those aha moments for me.

Yeah, no, I don't know if I've got the toughest job, but, uh, well, maybe he's got the toughest job because he's got the whole of some other dimension to explore and and bring all that information down to a level that I can pick it up and understand it.

Well, it actually— I was gonna say I didn't hear— I hadn't heard this concept before. But there's a series of books by a woman named Frances Key, and they're called The Team. And her mother, passed in spirit, her mother channels the books back to her. And she does talk about this concept of like, only a small part of us incarnates. And the biggest part of us is in the spiritual realms, as Asher calls them, Um, so yeah, it's kind of— it's, it's like with him, it's— he's in contact, or you're in contact with that part of him, it sounds like.

Yeah, yeah, that is the way he explains it as well. He said we only do have— he said you've got a light body, which he said if you imagine it as a great beam of light that goes right down deep into the depths of the earth and in the other direction goes right up as far as you can go. And he said, if that's a sort of light frequency, that's you, the whole of you. And the physical self is some little tiny bit somewhere on that spectrum. And he said, we're the visible light spectrum, we're just the sort of red through to violet bits that we can see, but all the sort of infrared and ultraviolet and all the things way beyond in either direction. They're not part of the physical body. They're all part of the light body.

Yeah, that was really interesting. And you talk about chakras in that part of the book also, and describe chakras in a way I hadn't heard before. Because we think of them as discrete, you know, red, orange, yellow, blue, green, you know, violet, whatever. And he describes them as more of a spectrum, if I remember correctly. Yeah.

Yeah, no, that, that was new to me as well. I was quite stunned by that because when he started talking about these light frequencies, I said, oh, you're talking about chakras. And he said, yeah, but people just think there's 7 chakras, or however many their belief system says. And he said, you do much better if you think of it in terms of the spectrum, if you think of it as moving from red through sort of orangey-red to deep orange, and then moving into a sort of golden colour, and then eventually to yellow, and so on. And I said, well, what's the advantage of that? And Asha's very simple idea was, if you had a box, a huge box with 100 colouring pencils in it, all those colours, and you only ever use 7 of them, them. Don't you think that would be a bit limiting?

Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah. So, um, in terms of, um, I, I know in the book, like I said, there's, there's a whole lot of lessons in there. There's, there's lessons about like the way that people that are neurodivergent, like the way their brains work, which I think would be really interesting. So I wonder, do you know if, if, as medical science looked at that at all and understood that would you explain in the book?

I think medical science is still a little way behind that. I think there probably are some pioneering people who are starting to look at it, but I've never— I have done, you know, a fair bit of research and tried to find out. But yeah, there's people who are starting to pick up on the spiritual aspect, the multidimensional aspect of autism, but they are in the minority because Most doctors, medical people, are very firmly caught up in us being bodies. And, you know, even our thoughts and our emotions and everything is all somewhere in the body. And Asha says, no, that's, that's just not the way it is.

Yeah, well, that's, that's, uh, you know, it's funny, we were talking before we started recording about, you know, the, the lessons of this, of this book and what people can take away from it, people like in my audience. And it's what I try to tell people all the time. We are not what we appear to be, you know, uh, us neurotypical people. But even these neurodivergent people, you know, in a lot of ways it seems like they're actually more capable than we are, um, because they are connected to the higher realms. But because they're not as connected to the physical we think there's a deficit there, and it's actually quite the opposite in many cases. Yeah.

In fact, that's something I've been discovering since I wrote the book, because I often take copies out and sell them at book fairs and places. So I get to meet people, which I love doing, because I've got the banner up with a picture of sort of what the book's about. And I find loads of people walk past, but certain people every single time I do this are just drawn towards me and they go, hey, you've had somebody with autism who's telepathic. And I'll say, yeah, that's right. You know, I work in— and then it'll be a center for adults with learning difficulties or a school a school for autistic children or a place for non-speaking people. And these people are communicating with me. I've always felt they are. I think every single time I've had one of those stalls, I've had at least 2 people have come up and said something like that. Mm-hmm. And yeah, even people who have no speech at all people who are completely non-speaking do have this capacity. They just need, as Asha says, the one person who can tune into them and pick up their thought patterns.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think we all— we've all had some experience of some sort of telepathy before. We feel like we've known somebody's thoughts, some— we felt like we felt someone looking at us, we'll say, or you think of somebody and the phone rings. And we've all had those things that we just chalk them off to coincidence. And because science, Western materialistic science, ties the mind to the brain and says thoughts aren't even things, right? They say, well, that's, that's impossible. But I think, again, most of us laypeople have a feeling like there's something more. Our thoughts do have an impact in the world. And And, uh, we all— my dog, my dog communicates with me all the time. I can— it's funny because I'll tell my wife, you know, she needs to go out, right? She's like, how do you know? Like, because, you know, she's 10 and I've been around her a long time. I can tell, you know, what she wants. And our dogs can do that. So people, we, um, whatever— well, I know why we, we come. We have to fit in with this world, and we use verbal language, and we, and we, we emphasize that, and So that's what happens, that other part of us, I think, kind of atrophies for a lot of people.

Yeah, I think so. And yeah, there were probably centuries and centuries before people did develop speech in which they were communicating telepathically and picking things up that way. I think speech and certainly written language are very recent change, and it's got good bits, but it's also got lots of good bits. It's got parts that you think, well, if we could all read each other's minds, it would be curtains to most of the politicians, wouldn't it? Yeah, it would cause—

it would be interesting. It would be, uh, it would be very— yeah, but there's so many misunderstandings that come from verbal communication, you know. Yeah, we, we say one thing and the other person hears another thing, and we can't communicate feelings very well through words. So there, there's definitely some limitations. And this is something where— and I've heard a lot of people say this— we can all develop these abilities. We all have them. They may be latent, but we can, we can develop them if we work on them.

Well, I mean, I'm proof of that. I was the most ordinary, obstinate person. I was nobody special, and I went through 40-odd years of my life without any experiences of that sort. But the journey I've been on since has been amazing, and it is down to belief. It took me years to believe that I was actually picking up what I was picking up from Asha. You know, it makes it sound easy when I said, oh, I've written this book called The Mind Beyond Words, and it tells you, you know, all about these wonderful conversations we have. But actually, I spent a huge part of that time thinking, well, I felt like I got this message from him, but it's just wishful thinking, isn't it? I can't. Right, right.

Well, um, I think that again, we all kind of doubt ourselves in that way. Um, I, I know a lot of people who are mediums, for example, and they talk to people across the and when you, when you just go through mediumship training— I've done a little bit of it— you know, when I do get something right, a hit, I'm like, well, that was just my imagination, or that was just a good guess. And so for you with Asher, again, I think it's really important we bring this point forward. It's not like one day you just said, okay, actually, we're going to sit down and write this book together. It took years for you to develop this, and not— maybe not develop it, but to believe in it, to trust it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's the trust that is the hardest bit. And I still, I mean, if I'm absolutely honest, I still have times where I think, yeah, I'm not getting this, I'm just not getting anything tonight. And I'm not, you know, and then when we do reconnect, I say, what went wrong? And he said, you were doubting.

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's talk, if you could, I'm going to talk about the manifestation part. Um, and I'm not sure if that's the phrase you use in the book, I think it was. But the thing on the train with the water bottle, I thought that was really cool because I struggle with the idea of manifestation. And so explain to people what Asher taught you.

Okay, so this was back when Asher was in his teens and we were on one of our many train journeys. And he was trying to explain this whole concept of how everybody was connected, everything was connected, and that we could change our world just by the power of intention. And we're sitting on this train ride in one of those seats that has a table in between them, and we're opposite each other. And he'd got a bottle of water, plastic water bottle with him. And he looked down at the table, looked at this water bottle and said, okay, try this. He said, how could you move this bottle of water across to your side of the table? 'And I looked at the water bottle.' And so this is me being pupil and him being the teacher, I have to emphasize. 'So I looked at the water bottle and it was nearly full, and I said, well, it's too heavy to blow, and this table is bolted to the carriage, so I can't shift it by moving the table.' I said, 'You're thinking of something along different lines, aren't you?' And he said, yeah, it's easy. He said, just see it where you want it to be. And I think that was before all the sort of manifestation bestsellers came in. I don't think I'd heard this idea before. See it where you want it to be. So there's both of us sitting there on a train staring fixedly at the other side of the table, imagining that water bottle having moved from there to there, and me thinking, water bottles do not migrate across tables, this just does not happen. Then a few minutes later, the door of the carriage opened and the guard came in. I don't know if it's the same on trains in the States, but we have guards who come along, check your tickets sometime during the journey. So guard came up, asked to see my ticket, and gave it to him, and he checked it, asked to see Ash's, checked that. He was there seconds, absolute seconds. During that time, for no reason that I could possibly discern, this guard picked up the water bottle and moved it to exactly the spot we'd been looking at, and then walked on to the next people. And I just sat there staring at this waterfall, and Asha had a sort of 'told you so' grin on his face. Yeah, it just blew my mind completely. I spent the rest of that day trying to come to terms with that. He just carried on as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Yeah, I, I love that story. That it really struck me because the lesson that I got from that is like, okay, we think about, again, logical steps. So if I have to make this happen, I could pick it up, I could do this. And I think the lesson was, don't worry about how— that's, that's not really up to you. It's see the, see the outcome. And was that the lesson?

See the outcome and let life join up the dots. That was Ash's way of explaining it. So you have this situation, you want that situation, just focus on what you want to happen. Life joins up the dots. And again, if we can believe it, I guess we can do it.

Yeah, well, that's, that's the thing, is believing it. And I love, like I said, that illustration was so wild because, you know, Who could envision? No one's going to think, oh, we'll have the guard come in and move the water bottle.

Um, oh no, it's— yeah, it— yeah, it was totally— it was an incredible day altogether because later on in the day, on the trip back from wherever we'd been, uh, I was trying to get him to go to the buffet and I was trying to encourage him because of his shyness and his autism to sort of do everyday tasks. So I said, okay, we're both starving, you go down to the buffet and buy us a snack, a drink. And he turned around and looked down the carriage and he said, no, there's a huge queue there, I'm not going now, wait till the queues— I'll just get rid of the queue, something like that. And so he just sat there, and a few minutes later he said, okay, I'll get them now, and got up and walked down the carriage and then came back with a couple of toasted sandwiches and stuff. I said, duh, Hugh disappeared ever so quickly, how did that happen? Was that something like what you did with the water bottle? Same, same thing really. So he could get rid of— and he's told me later on in his life that he still uses that everyday life. He hates queuing up, he hates being amongst a load of people. So if he's got to go to the post office, say, he will just visualize people moving away, not being around, and then be able to walk straight in there. Do what he needs to.

So how is your, your 25-year relationship with Asher, and ongoing, how has it changed the way that you view life and the purpose of why we're here and all that stuff?

Oh, just completely changed it out of all recognition. I mean, I would never in one lifetime have got the information that I've got without Asher there to show me. It's just been incredible. I firmly believe all the stuff that he's telling me. I have— everything he says makes sense, and I feel almost as if I'm remembering it. I didn't know I knew it, but when he'll say, this is how something works, 'Oh yeah, yeah, of course it is. That's how something works.' So I think, and I think other people will probably feel that at some points in the book, there will be things where you think, 'That just feels right at gut level. That feels the way things are.' So yeah, it's completely changed my life, enriched it hugely. So very, very different attitude to what I would have had if I carried on the other way.

And there are things in your life, like even before you met Asher, the— just the way you ended up teaching, uh, we call them special needs children here, but the way you ended up teaching those children, that, that was like a ser— or an event or series of events that happened that to me indicate some sort of plan.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there was. Asher calls it, um, subtle light navigation system. In England, we, we call GPS the sat nav, satellite navigation, and he calls it subtle light navigation. And he says it's just like GPS. You tell yourself in spirit the kind of things you want to experience in this lifetime and For some people it'll be trauma, it'll be difficult things, it'll be loss, it'll be grief perhaps, it'll be winning the lottery, whatever. You decide in spirit before you're born what you want life to give you the opportunity to do, but how you deal with it, that's entirely your choice. So you might say, okay, in spirit, I would like to have a life where I keep getting illnesses, I keep getting ill, no matter what happens, I'm always ill again until I figure out a way to change that. So life will deliver all these illnesses, and it's down to us to figure out what we're going to do about that, for example.

Yeah, well, you know, and I think about, um, you mentioned Asher's mother's passing, which is, you know, as you said, a sad event or a terrible event. But if that hadn't happened, you know, your relationship with Asher, do you think it would have continued?

Probably not, not with the same degree. I'm not saying I replaced his mother, no way. Nobody can replace his mother, but the relationship between us. We were kind of thrown together by this awful circumstance, and he needed far more support than most of the children that I taught.

Um, and I think it goes to even children being born, um, differently abled, whether it's autism or whether it's a physical thing or whatever it is. You know, a lot of times we look at that and we say, that's, oh, that's a terrible thing, that's a tragedy. And it's interesting because as I've talked to parents of children that have special needs for whatever they are, they almost always say it's, it's a big blessing. You know, there's something that we get out of it that we— so it, it helps us. I think the book, the examples you give in the book help us to see that this is not random. This was, you know, this wasn't an accident. This wasn't a mistake. It's not a mistake that Asher was born autistic.

Yeah, uh, it's not, it's not a mistake that anyone's born autistic, and it's not down to, you know, the various reasons that people say, oh, it must have been a vaccine, or it must have been this, or it must have been that. If a person has chosen to embody with that set of challenges— and they are challenges in a neurotypical world, the challenge is because we make it so, because our world is completely geared to neurotypical people, and it's very hard for somebody with autism say to fit into it. But no, they've definitely chosen to be that way. I think often so that they can focus on other things. It's not that every one of them is going to be spiritually gifted, psychically gifted the way Asha is, but you get people who are mathematical geniuses. They, they don't deal with the sort of everyday stuff, the washing your socks and they're going to the supermarket and all of that, but they will sit and, you know, do amazing maths or amazing artwork or whatever because they can fix on whatever it was they wanted to bring through in this lifetime.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, um, the, the book again is awesome, and I think— I know Asher's still teaching you. Is there a second book coming?

Yeah, several people have asked that, and I've asked Asher, and he said, yeah, there is another one coming because we need to shift the education system from just dealing with materialism and dealing with teaching children the stuff that AI can do anyway and could do faster and better, to giving a much more creative, open experience to teach, to enable children to learn critical thinking or to master critical thinking, to master creativity, to master getting along with others. And yeah, maybe even telepathy, who knows. So he'd like to see that change. He'd like to see the medical system change, again away from the materialistic human being as machine idea to a much more all-encompassing concept. Because it knocked him sick when he was told at 16 that he had Asperger's syndrome. The doctor said to him, you know, oh, well, this, you know, you'll have problems with this, you'll have difficulties with that, this and go wrong, and that'll be hard for you, and you won't be able to do this. And then he asked Asher if he had anything else. I mean, he was a 16-year-old kid, he was very nervous and shy anyway, and to suddenly be given— he wasn't aware of the autism until he had this diagnosis at 16. And when the doctor said to him, is there anything else you've noticed about yourself what makes you different from the other children at school, for example? And being a very honest young man, he said, well, yeah, I see things sometimes. I have kind of visions, and I just know things in my mind that nobody's taught me. I just have them there. And the doctor turned around and said, oh yes, hallucinations. Yes, it's delusional. So just ignore all that if you can and just put that aside. 'Concentrate on behaving like a normal person as much as you can, and that will make life easier for you.' For months after that, Asher wouldn't accept any of the things that he knew. He wouldn't accept any of his abilities, his psychic skills. He just was trying to behave like a normal person, like a normal kid. He turned around to me and said, 'Well, if you believe all that rubbish I've been telling you, then you must be delusional as well.' You know, it's just because of my aspect.

That's heartbreaking. That's, that's really heartbreaking. And I guess it's— and then this is speculation on my part, but I wonder if that's what the physical Asher is doing now, is just wanting to be normal. Just, yeah, like, I'm gonna set this aside. I just want to live a normal life. And that's— it's terrible that we don't allow people to celebrate their differences and, and realize how much we could learn from people like Asher. Yeah, I know.

And it's awful that those people are made to feel like they're second-rate citizens. They don't have what the rest of us have got. They're not as good as us. And it's just such a waste. And he's said to me many times, "There are so many like me." who just have chosen to ignore all of that stuff and ignore all the things that they know and the things that they suspect because they're trying so hard to fit in, to mask and be like neurotypical people.

It is tragic. It is. And, and I, I know, um, well, I hear a lot of people saying that more people are coming in into the world now with, with memories, more connection to the other side. To help us, you know. And then we are, again, we're saying, okay, there's something wrong with you, you're delusional, um, you know, that's, that's impossible. And, but I do, and I, I appreciate you putting the book out and you putting yourself out here because I think this message, I know this message is needed. We need to understand people like Asher, but also people like us, who, who we are. And that we're not, we're not accidents, and we are so much more than we think we are, and our lives are planned, and somebody does care, the universe cares. And these things that happen, you know, a lot of them we plan ourselves because we want to learn these lessons.

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm certain there is a plan to it all, and I agree there are more and more people who are showing up who are differently ordered, not disordered, and have these ways of being that challenge the stereotype, that challenge this way of thinking. You know, how do doctors and medical people who are calling it a disorder explain the fact that they have— these others have abilities that they themselves don't have?

They kind of brush that under the carpet. Yeah, it's interesting because we were talking about— I mean, we— I've seen people that, um, have memories, they can remember every— everything that ever happened to them, you know. Um, people that can do, like you said, math, people that can play instruments. And we, we take those people, we elevate them, but we don't— the other people that are able, like, like Asher with the telepathic, and, and they could probably teach us some more because Asher does go to these realms, which we didn't really get a chance to talk about, but these other, these other dimensions. And there's a lot to learn there that people that are exploring that could teach us.

Yeah, yes, that's right. And I think the more of them we listen to, the more we're going to learn, and the more we're going to evolve and reach where they are at. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Jess, thank you so much for doing this today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Anything else you'd like to share with the audience before we before we wrap up for today?

Oh, I think we've covered so much, haven't we? It's, uh, yeah, it's been a lovely chat. I've really enjoyed talking to you. And, uh, yeah, if people want to find out more, the book's called A Mind Beyond Words by Jessica. And it's—

yeah, the website's ashertree.com, is that correct? Yes, there's information on, on the website as well. So again, thank you so much for doing this, for putting it out there. Telepathically tell Asher I said thank you too.

Oh, I will. Yeah, he'll have tuned in at some level.

Probably here right now. All right. Well, Jess, you have a great rest of your day. And you.

Thanks so much, Brian. Lovely to talk to you.

Hi there, I'm really excited to tell you about my latest ebook. It's 4 Lessons That You Can Learn From the Near-Death Experience Without Going Through All the Trouble of Dying to Learn Them. I've been studying NDEs for several years now. I am completely convinced that not only are they 100% real, but that there's some very universal wisdom that we can get from the near-death experience. And I've distilled that down in this book into 4 short lessons. And I've also given you all the reasons why I believe that NDEs are absolutely real. So go to www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons to pick it up for free. Www.grief2growth.com/NDElessons. I hope you enjoy it.