Tolle had little memory of what happened after powerful feelings overcame him. He woke up into a new world. His depression vanished. For next five months, he lived in a state of uninterrupted bliss. While it diminished somewhat in intensity, for another two years, he sat on park benches in a state of most intense joy. He felt that what he experienced was a form of enlightenment, of union with eternal, somewhat similar to experiences of Buddha. He quoted Buddha's definition of enlightenment as "the end of suffering". Tolle became a respected teacher, with dedicated followers in Europe, North America and India. His book, The Power of Now, was on New York Times best seller list.

Both Tolle and Buddha reportedly experienced a sudden release from intense pain of powerful negative emotions. Their joy was understandable. Across history, there were many stories of intense rapture of sages, associated with a sudden release from emotions of fear, dread, guilt or anger. In most cases, these were sudden happenings, when such emotions just dropped away and person felt an intense sense of freedom. But, actually, getting rid of negative emotions could be very practical and down to earth. The mind perceives, recognizes events and then interprets those events as emotions. Emotions are just a set of nerve impulses, which fire when you recognize an event.

The bizarre story of Hexham Heads had been in back of my mind for a number of years and exerted an increasing fascination as I became involved in concept of energy encoding and storage in stone which were to lead to my involvement with Dragon Project, an ad-hoc group of scientists and others interested in testing idea that stone circles are associated with anomalous energy, over period 1977-83 and experiments at Rollright Stones described in my book, Circles of Silence.

I had first encountered story of heads in Reader’s Digest compendium Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain in 1973. In Introduction to this popular work there was a lengthy aside by well known Celtic scholar, Dr Anne Ross, then of University of Southampton, where she described her startling and very unpleasant experience with two Celtic carved stone heads, found in garden of a council home in Hexham, Northumberland, which she had received for description and identification year before.

Carved stone heads are well known from many Celtic sites throughout Europe and are easily recognized through their distinctive features. Generally they date from either Iron Age, before Romans overwhelmed Britain, or Romano-British period…

In her own account Anne Ross described how, one night shortly after their arrival, she woke up suddenly at 2 a.m. feeling chilled and extremely frightened. At instant of awakening she saw a tall, jet black wolf-headed figure standing against faint white of open door. It then moved out into corridor and she felt an irresistible urge to follow it.

This she did, seeing and hearing figure clearly as it made its way down darkened staircase and along corridor towards kitchen. Anne Ross described figure vividly, reporting not only its blackness and tallness but also its distinct part animal, part human appearance.