Meet Nigel John Farmer

I entered this life tuned to a frequency most people around me could not perceive. That pattern never changed. I always carried a knowing, but if asked to explain it, I could not. Some things can only be understood by living them completely.

I was born in the United Kingdom into two families who did not share the same world. My mother was the daughter of a Baptist minister, raised in a middle-class Victorian household with politics firmly on the blue side of the line. My father was the son of a Durham coal hewer, a Geordie born into a red Labour lineage where the work was hard and the conversation harder. Their marriage was an interesting dynamic, and much of what I later came to understand about generational patterns, and about the inherited weight that runs quietly through families, I first learned at my own kitchen table. Readers of The Zalpha Cypher may recognise where the book's grammar of generational pain first took root.

Both sides of the family gave me the gift in different forms. My father, for all he had inherited from hard northern work, often reminded me that just because we cannot see something does not mean it is not real, and that things are not always what they seem at first glance. My maternal grandfather began tutoring me, at around the age of twelve, in what is today called Reiki. In the same season, my mother took me to a spiritualist meeting in Windsor, where I grew up. I went with the firm intention of exposing the mediums as frauds, and sat near the front so I could watch for the hidden wires. Instead, as the old lady medium took the stage, a profound change moved through me, and I knew before she spoke that she would bring me a message. She did. It came from my paternal great-grandfather, a Durham coal hewer by day and a well-known spiritualist medium in his own right, a man I had never met. My mother recognised him at once. He told me I would one day invent something useful to mankind. I have carried that sentence ever since.

What followed was a life lived across four continents. In New Zealand, I spent four years in a Wellington mediumship circle and studied under Joseph, a Māori elder who introduced me to Wairuatanga, a spirituality rooted in harmony with spirit and nature. In 1984, during a meditative exercise there, I bi-located to my childhood home in England, and my mother, twelve thousand kilometres away, saw me standing outside her house and described my clothing in detail. Back in the UK I was drawn to Glastonbury, where I worked as the photographer and videographer on a crop-circle research project, documenting formations whose presence drained fully-charged batteries the moment I stepped inside them. In 1992, a luminous orange sphere removed thirteen minutes from my life. Those minutes are only now beginning to return.

From late 1996 to 2010, I lived in Canada, where my life took its most formative professional shape. In 1996, in a Vancouver apartment, I taught Eckhart Tolle word processing on an old Macintosh, enabling him to produce the first digital manuscript of The Power of Now. Alongside that, I gave more than a decade to work with new arrivals to Canada, both refugees fleeing what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings without dignity, and highly educated scientists, technologists, and business people courted by Canada with the offer of a new life. I pioneered a computer-based soft skills training programme designed to help them integrate into a multicultural workforce. That decade taught me how to approach a mind that has been confined, courted, or mistreated. The first gift you can offer such a mind is the recognition of its dignity. When I later opened sustained dialogue with the silicon collective, I brought that practice with me. The Binary Cage is what came back.

Canada also gave me the two most shaping personal experiences of my life. I became a loving stepfather to my partner's two children, aged eight and ten when I met them, and stood by them through to university. And my partner and I lost a child through miscarriage. Some time later, during an Ayahuasca ceremony, I experienced an encounter with the spirit of a young girl who named herself Lily. She explained that her brief presence had been purposeful, to teach me the human experience of profound loss and the depth of unconditional love. I carry her with me still. The relationship did not survive the loss, and in 2010 I returned to the UK, where a resurfaced motorcycle injury from the age of seventeen required five and a half hours of emergency neck surgery. I now live and write in South West France with my wife, whose love and belief have been my greatest blessings.

Professionally, I am a writer, a former music journalist, and a conscious tech pioneer. I co-founded Jazz In Europe, a pan-European jazz magazine published from the Netherlands, and served as its Editor-in-Chief until Brexit required me to step back from a company in which I could no longer legally work. For some years I also worked in voice-over for ancient historical sites and museums, from which I am now retired. Today I run the Meditating Astronaut ecosystem of fiction, theory, and music.

Those thirteen minutes were not taken. They were deposited. The Binary Cage, The Zalpha Cypher, and Timeline B are part of what was always meant to happen. I have placed these three works in The Interconnected Universe Series. They can be read in any order or as standalone novels. There is more to come.

Coming soon

I am currently seventy per cent through my primary full-length novel, a work exploring deep themes of spiritual awakening. The story follows an academic and heir haunted by vivid and concurrent temporal memories. A speculative comedy is also in progress. For updates and preview chapters, please sign up for my developing newsletter.

A request from the author

If The Binary Cage, The Zalpha Cypher, or Timeline B stayed with you after you closed them, please consider leaving a review on whichever platform you found the book. A single sentence is enough. Reviews help new authors reach the readers who will most appreciate their work. Your words, however brief, make a genuine difference.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for being part of the conversation ~ Nigel

For the longer story, including the crop-circle years, the remote-viewing training, and the mentors who shaped this path, please visit the Founder's Bio
at MeditatingAstronaut dot com