Life is a palimpsest or: How I learned a new way to understand synchronized events.

Apollo speaks

in  lines 659 -666 of the Euminedes about an immaculate conception:  a woman born fully grown from a mans head: "I will explain this, too, and see how correctly I will speak. The mother of what is called her child is not the parent, but (she is) the nurse of the newly-sown embryo. The one who mounts is the parent, whereas she, as a stranger for a stranger, [660] preserves the young plant, if the god does not harm it. And I will show you proof of what I say: a father might exist without a mother. A witness is here at hand, the child of Olympian Zeus, Athena, who was not nursed in the darkness of a womb, [665] and she is such a child as no goddess could give birth .

The Internet didn't exist  in 1980 when Mt. St. Helens erupted 60 miles away from my home. That eruption happened May 18, at 8:32 a.m.
 I  remember I  wasn't feeling like my normal self when my best friend  called to tell me the mountain had erupted. She had a view directly down the valley but it wasn't necessary to call because the sky was dark suddenly.

 Nine years later on May 18, 1989, I was in Chicago, visiting the Museum of Science and Industry where  I bought a printout of the news of the year, month and day I was born. The news  of the year was basically about quantum physics; the discovery of the function of neurons in the brain; and surface chemistries. I'd begun to read books authored by Paul Davies, David Bohm and other authors about a topic that was strange for a 57 years old female, with only a high school education, who had read only fictions for nearly 6 decades, about quantum physics.

Science fictions were only fictions but I'd read every pulp magazine my father read when I was less that 16 years old. He had hid them so I had to find them, read them when he wasn't around (at night under a blanket with a flashlight, or by light from a street light when he took the flashlight away) and put them back. I don't know why he hid them, I don't remember  ever asking him why. We were not friends.

 The paper informed me I'd been alive 20, 956 days.   I'd never thought about  counting the days I'd lived until that moment. But I noticed the numbers 256 again....that number had begun to come to  my attention in many places, it had made me wonder why by then. My mind ignored the 9, its a habit I've had for years after learning about 'casting out 9's' when I was a bookkeeper and other experiences I had when I was about  9 years old. An impulse had caused me to discover a pattern in the times tables but that was just the beginning of the habit, other events and life situations built from that impulse. Casting out nines has other names as I found out. (2 + 9 = 11= 2) so the 9 changes nothing. Its a way to find transpositions, i.e., numbers twisted around;  I learned that when bookkeeping was done by handpost on ledgers. The difference in twisted numbers is always divisible by 9.  I'm explaining that I add numbers across automatically so in 20, 956,  9's don't change anything,  the number 9 was somehow not there to see.

It would never have occurred to me to believe the literal event, the eruption of a nearby mountain blowing her dusty inner contents out to  cover the area that was in her wind path corresponded with an emerging eruption of inner contents in myself, as well as in the lives of some  people I knew then,  and as years and decades passed, I've witnessed that the change eventually darkened the planet.

What two small groups of individuals  were doing physically was learning to square dance at higher levels, not leaving the mainstream level but adding a more complex level of interaction: gender roles and positions were removed from the higher level.  The majority of mainstream dancers did not welcome All Position Dancing, because all gender was removed. A fun hobby is changed into a  complicated dance that has the basic attributes of quantum physics, the I Ching, chess, checkers and psychological concepts, i.e., the interaction of opposites.

The events, viewed from hindsight, beginning that day in 1980 until this morning in 2014 was almost a perfect literal representation at the time it happened that described in a new language what we were doing physically.  It represented what was happening in the location where events were already being lived, on a kind of stage where a drama had been prepared long ago, to be enacted, physically and materially. This is  a language that taught itself because I learned from no person, an invisible process was initiated in my mind, and it seemed to me, in other minds that knew the script, knew their part in the drama,  before I did.  In 1984 we were in a state of high emotions, I felt them in my situation, other individuals felt the emotional charges in their own situation but most unexpected and unexplainable event emerged as time passed:  the words they spoke and what they did physically seemed to merge into my unspoken thoughts!

When July 31 through August 11, 1984 scrolled through our lives and what we were doing was literally introducing higher levels to the mainstream,  several individuals interacted as though they had  knowledge of what I was thinking. One person in particular seemed to answer questions I had never spoken about to anyone, using the same words that ordinarily were said in teaching advanced and challenge levels of square-dancing.

It was summer of 1985, I'd been working for Boeing since February 11, 1985 that  I read Contact, by Carl Sagan. The book introduced me to the word: palimpsest and other ideas. It was written from the female perspective!

I'd already begun to change:  I'd been in an accident and had a complete hysterectomy, so for a few years those apparent causes explained the changes in my body and seemed to explain a few changes in my thought. I'd noticed several changes in my  'thought content' by 1984, but also I was noticing certain habits I've had most of my life. Yet it seemed odd to me that only then, that I wondered about why I noticed these details. Why be curious about habits I'd had for decades? Why had I always doodled piles of figure 8's ? Why was I noticing license plates and trying to make sense of the numbers, it was bothersome and ridiculous.  Until one day I bought an automobile that was tabbed:  ETW 651 and I saw that my mind produced Extra Terrestrial Woman 651 fas easily as BYOB translates to Bring Your Own Bottle,  much to my amusement.

Why did my mind seem to have developed the habit, to spontaneously add numbers across, it seemed to happen automatically now especially:  seeing the sum instantly (13 = 4; 35 = 8;  271 = 10 = 1 because  9's ' don't change anything or are just place holders. In a string like this: 999992 the numbers sum to 47, which is then 11, which is  summed to 2, the remainder if you divide 999992 by 9.

The times table of 9's is an example; 9, 18, 27, 36, 45 and then the numerals turn around:  54, 63, 72, 81, 90... forever. The product sums to 9.   But I'd had almost 5 decades of experience in which that information had been acquired. And more important to me, was the fact that I knew where the rule originated, I was about 9 years old when a thought occurred into my mind, to add the double numbers across when I struggled to learn the 'times tables'. No person told me to do that, it was a thought that occurred into my mind, a thought that I responded to immediately and from that impulse I discovered patterns in each times table.  That impulse was a thought, only a thought, or so it seems, that "I" ? thought when I was about 9 years old.

This is a lesson in the simplest most basic school, life itself.

My future flashed before my eye...

There was a point in Time when my future did begin to flash before an eye, although its not the two eyes of my body that saw and remembered afterwards what was relayed to me then, about my psychologically defined life. Be patient and non-judgemental please and read this  quotation from Silvano Arieti's obituary, it  may help understand what I mean about the psychologically defined mindset: "In 1975 he won a National Book Award for ''Interpretation of Schizophrenia,'' a work that emphasized the psychological origins of the disease, and developed methods for doctors to understand the schizophrenic's mind.   

    

The following year, his book ''Creativity: The Magic Synthesis'' outlined an elaborate theory for understanding what goes on in the act of creativity.  He also studied Roots of Judaism.  Where Dr. Sigmund Freud had defined a ''primary'' mental process of the disordered, unconcious mind, and a ''secondary'' process of logical, integrated thought, Dr. Arieti argued there was a ''tertiary'' process in which primary and secondary were combined to bring about an accepted artistic representation. 

      

In his later years, Dr. Arieti, who was born in Pisa, Italy, also became interested in the moral roots of Judaism. He wrote ''The Parnas,'' a short book about Giuseppe Pardo Roques, the leader of the Jewish community in Pisa at the start of World War II, and about Mr. Roques's mental illness." That illness had made Arieti want to understand the mind of that man. He, the  Parnas had an obsessional  fear of                dogs, and he would not leave the house, even when the town was being invaded  by Mussollini's 'dogs', in World War 2, he remained behind."  

 

This happened in my life but its a highly condensed  version: I (and other people as I found out later) had begun to be curious about the relationship between a  couple we knew and saw frequently because they seemed to be almost one person, which  seemed strange to me. While cleaning our van I found a roll of film under the seat, didn't know how long it had been there but I took it to be developed. A week or so later I went to their house for coffee. She was excited because it was her birthday and her husband had given her not one card but two!  I looked at the cards, sharing her delight as best I could because I must have envied her. After I left I picked up the film and looked at the pictures, which had been taken several months before when we were on vacation.

One picture was nearly identical to one of the cards my friend had gotten from her husband. A woman running through sunset tinged surf, wearing a sweater over her bathing suit, waving to someone; the picture and the card were so close to being identical that I felt strange for a few minutes. But then I forgot about the event until another and then another perfectly timed event happened. A string of similar precisely timed events built up and only then a degree of curiosity gripped my attention enough to wonder how even one such event could happen in a lifetime.

It was not my real life of course, it was building a story from what was really happening, using this as material.  As I had to find out over a span of decades because, the psychological method is a mode of interpretation that Sigmund Freud is credited for writing down but I knew nothing about the psychologically sensed mode of interpretation. It was the same 'kind' of material that he must have  experienced and tried to understand.
I read a lot and many events happened so I became informed that this mode was for a period of time, the accepted mode of getting meaning. However I didn't know that either until I found out there are other names for personal interpretation, one is 'psychosis', 'delusional thinking'.

 It was only when I read some of Freud's writings that I realized that he'd experienced in his life a pattern that individualized his thought and his lifes' events and it was close to  Silvano Arieti's explanation of how the  creative mind works.   According to Theodore  Reik, who was devoted to Freud,   Freud only wrote down what milkmaids had always known. But that's not actually true as I've learned to understand my own mind and 'see' with that inner eye, how it works to create information that I didn't know, its more than acquiring  'wisdom': "Dr. Arieti argued there was a ''tertiary'' process in which primary and secondary were combined to bring about an accepted artistic representation." There may be a fourth process that links the literal mindset in a particular way to the  primary, secondary and tertiary process that can explain paranoia, which Gregory Bateson wrote, was 'like' knowledge.  






 "Time" has layers in which certain ideas were commonly accepted then were later rejected and replaced with 'new' ideas. The old ideas do not die easily, they are experienced as long as someone lives them, in my opinion, the past is still present.

 It's the 'eye of the soul' (probably) that I didn't know was either part of 'me' or it seems that way because the timing makes it 'seem' a foresight other than my own  had been preparing a future where foresight, not mine, had to be established.