I didn't realize this was the kind of coincidence that describes to me a detail about my life, one I didn't know myself, until the pattern had repeated often enough to be noticed, then understood. Many events had to occur and the content is very specific in each event but the common theme was that each event described a detail of what was happening 'now' in my life. This kind of coincidence as I had to find out also, is currently not recognized to be a 'symptom' of a process of individuation (Jung's term); re-generation (Swedenborg's term); the 4th Way (Ouspensky's term, the path of personal development that's lived in the ordinary life. ) It was a personal discovery to learn that this life path was experienced in ancient times from which arose ideas of fate, destiny, karma, Fortune, a 'god within', that are carried forwards in Time, in history somewhat 'like' a signal, at least that's how I think of it now. I believe it is the pattern that C. G. Jung identified in his time as 'inherent in all men'.
The book was one I just happened to notice because it had a lovely sky blue jacket. I saw only the spine, as clean as any new book. That made it hard to miss in a tall stack of used books. The Weaver of Dreams by Myrtle Reed was an old book. The cover was bright, the top edge was gilt and in perfect condtion as though it had just been printed although the book had been published in 1911. On page 175 begins a conversation between characters in the book that caused me to feel an unusual body response. I'd name it a shock now but then it was just 'wierd', unexplainable. I was in an unsual situation when I read this the book, the situation was an ingredient, the necessary ingredient for 'getting the message' eventually, that the event conveyed to me. It was about a situation I was involved in at that time.
"I don't believe you can live with other people and not absorb something from their ways of thinking and manner of expressing themselves. Moreover Aunt Cynthia has a very penetrating personality."
"All strong natures have." Chandler answered. "Some people are shaped wholly by their environment, as plastic material conforms to the receptacle in which it is placed. Others mould their environment to meet the demands of individuality."
"Can it be done?" asked Judith, thoughtfully.
"Always, if one is strong enough. From mysterious sources we draw to ourselves that which we require or expect. If a tree may lift into it's trunk the materials for sap and fibre, and if the moon may control the tides why should not thought which is the most wonderful and powerful of forces bring harmony into one's daily life, if not the absolute control of circumstances."
This was the first time I felt an effect in my body, merely from reading words. What I described when I began the post with this event, was this content, the first of its kind that I really felt when it happened. This kind of content from which a conversation was created was aimed towards me. It's a fact that no one else will ever understand this kind of conversation unless specific content, of which this incident is just one example (and the content was assembled over a long period of time) is put under the 'scope'. It's a well known pattern. The incident informed me about a detail in my life exactly and literally when I understood more about the kind of synchronization that created the conversation.
It was fragmented content, bits of information that assembled a new understanding and context that emerged in my mind, parallel to my 'normal' understanding. That's a surprising fact about 'meaning full coincidences'. In the beginning it seemed as though my unspoken inner content was known to even objects that use words, such as books, televisions, radios. What a shock! What a new experience! What I read affected my body in a different way than I'd ever experienced!
It seems like 'mind reading' but I believe there's another explanation. It's something that looks like non-verbal communication but isn't that either. There are psychiatric names for this kind of experience but I'd no knowledge of them and even knowledge of them is not enough information to understand what it's like when it begins and continues. Bits and pieces have to accumulate, then be assembled by the mind itself.
I don't believe the process of assembly differed greatly from how an author of a non-fiction work, such as the bibliography in Harold Searles Selected Essays on Schizophrenia or any similar work was assembled. At this point I'll explain why I mention this book because its an example also: I read an essay on the Internet that had a biblography that included a mention of an article: 'Driving the other person crazy', by Harold Searles. I searched for the article and found it was in a book that cost $79.50 so I put the urge to read it aside. A short time later I'm in Borders Books, waiting to check out when I notice a rack of books, marked down 75% . Laying on top is a book, Selected Essays on Schizophrenia by Harold Searles. Of course I bought it and have read it. He described one aspect of his relationship to his patients that interested me very much: They seemed to read him psychologically and accurately, because he noticed they acted out some aspect of his own nature at the moment, but did this in a symbolic way unknown to themselves. This was one factor that C. G. Jung made note of, that at depth level, a well part of his patients seemed to speak in kind of code or symbolic form that the individual could not hear and or understand themselves. This is an important fact to keep in mind, that a use of 'codes', symbolisms that were unknown to the person that was the patient were picked up by the therapist. That points towards a connection between patient and therapist as well as what the therapist knows. Not many therapists know as much as Mr. Searles did.
These fictional people created by a female that ultimately ended her own life spoke about two kinds of people; about 'mysterious forces'; about thought; about what we require; or expect (??) and about a force bringing harmony into one's life. The part about absolute control of circumstances is possibility. I personally believe all thought does not do anything, some may seem to. There's a variety of thought levels that are unconnected and there are depths that are so far from speech that no author other than Emanuel Swedenborg made reference to them and he had to experience that himself. Certain thought and inner content that isn't words can seem to affect the world outside the body, that seems obvious to the individual, when this kind of 'event' happens for an extended period of time. There are levels in the mind, as we now realize there are levels in personality and in 'understanding'.
I felt how my body reacted to the printed words in the conversation, that memory created a beginning point of me, noticing my own body as though 'I' was not connected to it.
For a few years it seemed to me I was dying but I've lived too long since 1983 (?) for that to be true. Life as a near death experience may be part of nature too. The process of becoming 'twice born' is probably in our genes by this point in time.
It doesn't always happen in a blinding flash of ecstastic influx. It's necessary to see one's self, know what one is doing, and to the degree it's possible, know why one is 'doing' in the body whatever I am witnessing to from a detached perspective, that is not 'astral projection' or anything like it. I've read a lot of Swedenborg and found much verifiable information about the mind is embedded in his writings. Last week I found this which reminded me of the movie Contact and the trip Ellen Arroway seemed to have taken in the machine. I'd underlined it in Arcana Coelestia, paragraph #10763 in "A Sixth Earth In the Starry Heaven" .
"Once more I was conducted to another earth that was in the universe outside our solar world and this also by means of changes of state continued for about twelve hours. The company with me there were a number of spirits and angels from our earth, with whom I conversed on the way or during the progression. I was carried sometimes obliquely upwards and sometimes obliquely downward, continually towards the south. In two places only did I see spirits and in one I spoke to them."
The trip Ellen Arroway took in Contact was different than how it was in the book, but in many ways the 'changes of state' that we now realize are experienced by people who don't take drugs, who don't meditate may be that they are in such states, now. I don't believe everything I read in books about the mind unless the author is like Colin Wilson, or Joseph Campbell, aware of the ideas that have been cast into the 'shadow world' of the irrational part of mind.
Possibly there was in my understanding, some glimmer of how the mind works in some reality other than 'normal' only partly from having read books, I'd had my own experiences and realized the mind can insert or delete some content of it's own. Because I'd read all of Robert Monroes' books about his journies out of his body(!!) and read Joseph Chilton Pearces' wonderful description of an event that happened to him in The Bond Of Power, there was enough information about the mind to begin understanding my own. He wrote about the 'insight' realm without a religious foundation, but I wouldn't eliminate religion from that realm. Also and more to the point, physically I was working in a location where events began to happen that seemed perfectly timed to synchronize with some mental activity in my own mind.
I've had to learn what I write about on this blog, the hard way, the very most personal way, from experiences of my own. The details are very specific in any life. I don't know how to convey to someone else what an isolated kind of 'space' I lived in after I had a dream late in 1981 and I'm still in that space, isolated from other people but not alone. That's obvious.
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