September 6, 2009
This blog is about something hidden in every day life. I want to write about what I've learned about my mind, reality and time in my nearly 3/4 of a century on this planet and about what caused me to think about Time the way I do now. It's not the measure of movement in space, at least not merely physical space. It may seem a trival thing, but C. G. Jung wrote that the first half of life is preparation for the second half. That implies there's foresight in our lives. I know there has been foresight in my life and I'm not unusual.
There are family bonds, personal and workplace relationships that create 'events' that the individual, me in this life on this planet, experienced as normal when they occurred. The first 52 years of my life was preparation for a future event primarily because I knew someone who essentially felt trapped in Time, encased in a body. Living in a war zone during the first few years of life created a family mindset that's not uncommon so this isn't about anything extraordinary.
The past of many people creates fear, apprehension, a sense of futility and helplessness about the future. It's difficult not to be specific but in this family it was casual offhand remarks that were of great importance, it was a family belief that we don't know where we came from when we're born and we don't know where we go when we die and it's a waste of time to try to understand why we are here.
I realize belatedly that I had never thought that kind of thought until I was almost 60 years old! A 'strangeness' had come into my life and after 8 years of strangeness, only then, had I wondered to myself what this 'strangeness' was trying to 'tell' me. It overlayed what was outside of my body, the way a transparent sheet of plastic can cover objects, but like a transparent 'thing' it didn't change anything I looked at. Yet something was between me and what was outside of my body. There was a radical change in my mind, it was 'thought' that began after a vivid dream I had late in 1981. Once it began, that particular 'vein' of thought never stopped. Other thought of a different 'kind' began later, but for a few years thought about the dream was where my primary attention was directed. A constant stream of thought about the dream scrolled through my mind day and night, 365/24/7 until about 1986.
Then without my noticing it, thought content that was not about the dream seeped into that stream.
This blog is about something hidden in every day life. I want to write about what I've learned about my mind, reality and time in my nearly 3/4 of a century on this planet and about what caused me to think about Time the way I do now. It's not the measure of movement in space, at least not merely physical space. It may seem a trival thing, but C. G. Jung wrote that the first half of life is preparation for the second half. That implies there's foresight in our lives. I know there has been foresight in my life and I'm not unusual.
There are family bonds, personal and workplace relationships that create 'events' that the individual, me in this life on this planet, experienced as normal when they occurred. The first 52 years of my life was preparation for a future event primarily because I knew someone who essentially felt trapped in Time, encased in a body. Living in a war zone during the first few years of life created a family mindset that's not uncommon so this isn't about anything extraordinary.
The past of many people creates fear, apprehension, a sense of futility and helplessness about the future. It's difficult not to be specific but in this family it was casual offhand remarks that were of great importance, it was a family belief that we don't know where we came from when we're born and we don't know where we go when we die and it's a waste of time to try to understand why we are here.
I realize belatedly that I had never thought that kind of thought until I was almost 60 years old! A 'strangeness' had come into my life and after 8 years of strangeness, only then, had I wondered to myself what this 'strangeness' was trying to 'tell' me. It overlayed what was outside of my body, the way a transparent sheet of plastic can cover objects, but like a transparent 'thing' it didn't change anything I looked at. Yet something was between me and what was outside of my body. There was a radical change in my mind, it was 'thought' that began after a vivid dream I had late in 1981. Once it began, that particular 'vein' of thought never stopped. Other thought of a different 'kind' began later, but for a few years thought about the dream was where my primary attention was directed. A constant stream of thought about the dream scrolled through my mind day and night, 365/24/7 until about 1986.
Then without my noticing it, thought content that was not about the dream seeped into that stream.
Thought itself, is basically the most unexplored region of personal reality.
"New thought' in an 'empty head', a 'thought' less mind is enough to arouse curiosity. It aroused mine when it began, late in 1981 when a kind of 'strange event' began to occur. Such events didn't arouse my curiosity until they kept happening. What I write now is the result of those 'strange' events. The etymology of my name is 'eldritch' which I was told meant 'strange' in ancient Time, somewhere on this planet.
Time on different scales is evidently available through the mind. Too many authors have described their out of body experiences to doubt that. Let me make it clear that I've not had out of body experiences, at least nothing like Robert Monroe or Emanuel Swedenborg described, but I know there are levels in the mind and they don't announce themselves, there's no signage except the effect of how the 'world' outside the body is experienced. There are locations that alter drastically how what's outside of my body looks like, sounds like and very much alter the meaning of what I see and hear. There are levels in the mind that involve vast inner space. There is an "ongoing endeavor in Time", there is a Larger Domain where 'now' can be thousands of years in duration and some events in every day life can 'link' a person to it.
Example event:
In 1996 I worked for a company, The Boeing Commercial Aircraft Company, that was initiating a program to encourage better relationships in the workplace and a better understanding of how the business world operates. I registered for a class in Personal Communication and was surprised to read on the first page that what I was going to learn in the course had been written in the oldest known fragments, the Kagemni fragments. It was estimated to have been written 2400 years b.c. I wondered why I didn't know already information that was nearly 4500 years old then answered my own question: my family of origin was not often concerned about courtesy, about not offending anyone so I had very little exposure to 'The art of hearing, listening and excellent discourse".
It's about time I learn those rules, I thought, then I reached for my calculator.
4500 years = 1,620,000 days (360 days a year)
1,620,000 days = 38,880,000 hours
38,880,000 hours = 2,332,800,000 minutes
2,332,800,000 minutes = 139,968,000,000 seconds
1 second = 1 hertz
A hertz is a very short span of time.
More professionally stated: A second is the unit of time equal to the duration of 9, 192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyper-fine levels of the ground state of the cesisum-133 atom.
My first computer operated at a mind boggling speed of 44 mhz in 1987. My thinking about time in my non-professional, less than mathematical mindset began when I got my first computer and the word 'hertz' came at me. As computers evolved so did my experience and understanding with 'hertz', what it's relationship to Time seems to me now to be. My present computer would have seemed impossible only 20 years ago. The speed is steadily increasing, expanding the space between one second and the next one. I've not found any expert that explains that kind of distance and it's relationship to how we experience it, except as 'stress' which is pressure to process more information in the same 24 hour span. The space between one second and the next seems to expand infinitely and I'm aware that not much more than a hundred years ago it was not necessary to know anything but the hour.
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. Alfred Korzybski wrote that man is a time binder, we store experience in our memory so that the next generation builds on what the previous generation learned. The question I have now is: "How does the next generation 'learn'? What kind of feed back exists between generations? My grandchildren seem born already at computer speeds I've barely managed to integrate into my expanded 'reality' as I experienced it. I can't watch television and also read the scrolling bars that divide my attention!
After three quarters of a century I can honestly write that I understand my first thought on this planet, it occurred when I was two and a half years old. I was laying on a bed , the wind whistled through cracks in my home, which was a one car garage converted to an apartment in 1934. Directly over head was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. My first thought occurred into my mind: "I am in a cold place."
Nothing very profound at age two and a half, but the image of the light bulb above me, the feeling of being cold, the thought, the exact content of the moment re-occurred into my mind even when I was in my fourth decade. I wondered why that memory haunted me much later at some point in my fourth decade. I had been alive about 14,600 days then. My first thought was a photograph of what was in front of me, complete with how I felt and a thought that occurred to me, literally it was a complete photograph what was in front of me and what was inside.
I'd like to quote this from The Dynamics of Hope by Ira Progoff to initiate my blog, which is basically about the unique individual relationship to another world, which I named the Larger Domain when I was certain it was real. He has experienced what he described, it could not be described otherwise:
"The fact is that the human being creates the meaning of his existence in the act of living it; afterwards, but only afterwards, he can look back and discover what the meaning of his life is.
In his psychological development, a human being grows by natural stages organically, until with physical maturation he comes to a plateau. He may remain at this plateau functioning within the terms that his culture prescribes and within it's framework he may live out his days more or less contentedly. But if the impulse to further growth is pressing within him, he cannot possibly be content to remain there. Then he may live on this plateau and use it as his base, in order to launch some further movement in his life. This may be in some particular area of his experience, a small area or a large area depending on his capacities. From this plateau he may thrust forward in a creative act of individuality, and with this personal experience of his, a new insight or a new emotion, an act of leadership or an act of love will be brought into the world.
These creative acts of persons are their individual leaps upward and beyond the plateau on which they merely exist biologically and socially as human beings. Often an individual has just one brief moment in which he leaps off the plateau, a brief moment of insight, a vision, a momentary act of dedication or of love, and then he drops back onto the plateau and remains there.
But in that leap he has touched something. That which has transpired was a moment of creation in which something new was brought into the totality of all human existence so that it remains forever afterwards as a fact. Afterwards it is an element in the future experience of individuals in the species.the reality of that creative moment lives on, whether or not it was given tangible form in words or in color or in sound as a poem or a painting or perhaps a melody. The immortality of what has been created does not depend on the outward form it takes, it depends rather on the authenticity of the experience, on it's inward integrity, it's unself conscious spontaneity and on the power that derives from all of these. For in that moment, something elusive and intangible but nontheless real has been brought into the world.
These creative events are meanings that did not exist before they happened; but once they have happened they exist forever."
That's scary, don't you think?
