1984, 31 Years Later. Its a Different World

The month of July 2015 has scrolled away and August is streaming through my life. The changes that I've experienced since 1984 have been primarily of two kinds: the physical world changes and the mental world changes. The weather is different, scientific knowledge is different, pictures from deep
space are being transmitted to us, YouTube and Facebook are entrenched in our lives, smart phones and tv's are standard equipment even to an 83 years old female that got lost when digitizing everything really flooded my mental world.

But one change is personally important:  more books have been written about 'synchronicity' or another term that means the same: "meaningful coincidence' and people are talking about 'meaningful coincidences' more openly. Most people seem to connect the word to C. G. Jung's ideas but it was F. David Peats' Synchronicity, The Bridge  Between Mind and Matter that I read and felt aa relationship in his ideas to what I had been experiencing since 1984 and even prior to that year. When I looked for a definition of the word, sometime in the mid 1980's it wasn't in Websters. YouTube didn't exist; libraries used a pocket that had a card on which every person who had read the book had to write their name. And doing a book search to find a certain book could take several months.

July 31 through August 11 in 1984 was  31 years ago.  That's when I had the first 'mindquake', which was a package of information about my life that I had to discover because it was received in a deep level of my mind. Who would naturally consider their own mind had depths and different levels that produce its own thought? Or that there are mechanisms at work that  can retrieve memories systematically and purposefully to create information and identify the person? That was me in this event. Watching what was happening in my mind, even seeing what was happening in my mind was an enormous new situation, seeing my entire body as an object to look at, to listen to as though I was outside of my body yet this was a kind of body-less vision. I believe Goethe described it as 'the eye of the soul'. I had a few years of this kind of image-less self observation, I haven't been able to describe how mechanisms of mind became visible and how many changes occurred.

 During that span of years I worked 26 years at Boeing and retired in 2009. While I worked there  I became aware that my mind was  using what I was doing in my job, to create a conversation and was actively working to help me understand the content of  the event that I named a 'mind-quake' when I realized I had not  created it myself.  It was like an 'upload' of information before computers and computer terms became a component of my life.

Carl Sagan's only fictional book, Contact was literally a book that described to me a pattern that was going to emerge as I went about my life and all the particular situations in my life. Which had become subtly different than  my normal life had been. His book introduced the word 'palimpsest' to me and it was about a message that came in one package that had layers of information. Each level had to be decoded before the next could be located. Life may be a palimpsest for every one and for all of us but that cannot be explained easily.

The book had one sentence in it that I didn't notice the first time I read it, that suggested there are levels in the mind. I had not thought of that myself, it was almost unthinkable that my thoughts were not me thinking them, so that sentence was a suggestion, ignored at first. The book was written from a female perspective and it  mentioned that pi is coded. All of these details were relevant to me, in a particularly unique context that evolved as I lived my life.  I worked where the  pi symbols and the logo PIE was everywhere.

Something new emerged, a certain 'weirdness' that was uncomfortable in my body and was confusing to my mind.  I had a compulsion to 'describe what you see;  name everything you see and write about your life'. Also I became curious about things that had never had my attention, events that happened naturally in my physical life and in my own mind. Until I became curious about different thought that seemed spoken to me the way a person outside my body spoke to me,, my inner content was simple, I was literally empty headed. The  new thought made me curious eventually, and I named it  'plural thought'  after it began to emerge in my mind. I'd been empty headed literally until I had a vivid short dream in the early 1980's, unlike any dream I'd ever had. After that dream thought about one person in the dream. scrolled through my mind. Eventually I wondered about how a dream could produce such a stream of content.

 It focused my attention on one person and a location in my mind. That one person seemed to know what I was thinking at times, because he seemed to answer questions I'd never spoken about to anyone. One evening he introduced a new and difficult square dance movement that he told us we should learn correctly the first time  because its not easy to unlearn something that's been learned wrongly.. He seemed to speak to the group but he looked directly at me briefly as he said: "You've got to get this right the first time."  then he said "What you get used to gets to be normal." Then he introduced the movement which is named "Cast a shadow". The only knowledge I had then about the 'shadow' was a comic book character and a radio show that introduced to me these words: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man? The Shadow knows. The Shadow has the power to blind men's minds so they cannot see him."

That is what the word 'shadow' means to me now and in all things. Jung's definition is not a good description of a diabolical seeming continuum that can create such a individualized story-like event. One evening I noticed that the words 'cast a shadow' re-occurred quietly as thought words into my mind after this one caller chanted them, Then I noticed the re-occurance of those quiet words happened every time this one caller and no other caller used them. Many other callers used the words, but the quiet thought words, as an echo did not emerge from them.

 What  function of mind could 'select' this one man's voice from all of the other square dance callers that said them? The transcendental function has that capacity and attribute. 

On being the 'person' that can 'think' without thinking.

Can a computer make mistakes?  I have to set a context, so this is it: In the late 60's I wanted to get a job but our 3 children were not old enough to be left without adult supervision. So on reading the ads, I noticed that many jobs were   available for experienced key punchers and verifiers and that those jobs were often  second shift, which meant my husband would be home with them. He thought it was a good idea and  IBM cards were of course everywhere then; they were part of every day life. "DO NOT FOLD, SPINDLE OR  MUTILATE"  was on each card.  It was necessary to begin the course at the local Community College by taking Data Processing 101, a 6 month long course which I did take.

Computers were in the first generation then as I found out and there was no magic involved in how they worked. I learned that they were read by machines that  detected empty slots on the cards and translated as 0 or 1!  I completed a 6 month long key punch course, then completed a 6 month long verifier course. (Every punched card had to be re-done for accuracy by the verifier.)
 I was very irritated to learn that the numbers 0, 1, 2 ,3 4, 5,6,7 8, 9,  on the IBM machines were reversed, from how they were arranged on adding machines and the comptometers that I was proficient in using.  The exact opposite from the 10-key adding machine I'd become proficient using, after they replaced comptometers, which as a bookkeeper I'd used as a payroll clerk for 5 years in my first job at Sears. (10-key adding machines were an improvement to me and I'd become very fast and more accurate.) That reversal of numbers didn't make sense but I learned the new reversed order. This was just the first time I noticed 'reversals from what had been normal to me.

My first job was with an air freight company, making IBM cards for each order, and there were piles of paperwork every day. I found out soon that my co-workers were foreign females on welfare which wasn't enough money to live on. Except for one young woman that was like me, Caucasian. She was the fastest and most accurate person in the group, she made no mistakes for days at a time. When I sat next to her, the machine gun-like noise  of her key strokes disoriented me...... for some months. Then one day she stopped punching and grinned at me as she asked: "You're trying to keep up with me, aren't you? You want to be faster than I am,  don't you?" I had begun to want to match her accuracy. It seemed impossible that someone could 'type' so fast and rarely make an error but I felt challenged to try to match her speed and if possible improve my accuracy.  I did progress but never came close to her accuracy.

When my husband was recalled to work, I quit that job until the next time he was laid off or on strike, I found a job so we would have insurance coverage. I was hired by an large insurance company that was just at that point converting from hand posted journalled bookkeeping to computers. It was  a very great change.

A handsome (I really thought he was movie star good-looking )  young programmer was in charge, helping the 3 well into middle aged women I was  hired to work with because I had some computer education. He  had to link their knowledge of the hand posted reports to the many abstracted reports produced by the computer. At the end of the month the top level  supervisors hovered around us waiting for their 'figures' which had to balance exactly to the penny, with one all encompassing report. They needed those 'figures' and quickly so they hovered around in a bothersome way, pacing, looking over our shoulders.
 As time passed I became aware that the woman I worked most closely with had a genius kind of understanding that helped to link the hand posted material to the machine generated output so that it balanced, but that she did that almost magically, not from understanding how she did it. She was eager to learn more and we got along well until one month, the reports that were abstracted from the main journal didn't balance, by a few dollars and cents. The hovering 'suits' (that's what we called the supervisors bosses) were frustrated and  outraged when the error delayed their monthly 'figures'.

 The programmer was the only person that understood enough to trace the many reports to  the final report and he was as frustrated as they were. One day I overheard him trying to explain what he was doing  to an assembly of top level supervisors and I heard myself interrupt: "The only explanation is the computer isn't adding accurately." It was a statement that I had not thought about, the words came from my mouth thought-less-ly.

That made everyone laugh but as days passed and the error wasn't located, I began to think the only way to prove it was to use a 10-key adding machine, produce a tape and match the items on it to the items on the final report, which was a big pile, not a few pages. Against my bosses wishes I began to use my 10-key to enter the items on the final report and that took a few hours to do, the tape filled a wastebasket when I finished. My final figure was only a few dollars different so I had to find that difference.

The task of matching the items on the tape to the numbers on the report was left to me to do, and the atmosphere was hostile so I felt pressured but determined.  Within only a few minutes I'd located an error and corrected it, after which  my tape differed from the main journal  by the exact difference we needed to locate. That changed the atmosphere from hostility to a more tolerable distrust of the idea that the computer had not added correctly. The programmer and I worked to compare my tape to the journal and at the end the only difference was again the exact difference we needed. The  computer had for  some reason produced the wrong amount.  The same problem occurred the next month and the next month, but nobody ever figured out why it happened.  That was barely enough to restore me to some semblance of reasonable but I left that job in a stressful mindset.

 My next job was in a county government office, and by then the second generation of computers were entering the workplace. A situation developed that caused me to be assigned to the medical billing office, just when a new manager was appointed and then dismissed so that we didn't have a boss.  The group I worked with had no management and I was the only person that had bookkeeping  and computer experience so we decided to keep going with what knowledge we had. It was in this job that I witnessed how a few people who have authority  can operate as though they are kings, with unlimited power to make decisions that affect others drastically, to a life changing degree.

Computers were so different then but 0,1, was still the basis of   how information was input, used and stored. Now the computer is being developed that can 'think' like we humans think. Can that be accomplished? I remember when I heard my self say, "The computer must not be adding correctly." and nobody believed me.

THE WORLD WITHIN

"The psychic life is in 'higher space' and it's point of communication with the visible world at a given moment is through the brain." Maurice Nicoll, page 117 from Living Time and Integration of the Life.

Richard Tarnas makes a remark in his Cosmos and Psyche: ”Accompanying the more profound occurrences of synchronicity was a dawning intuition …… that the individual was herself or himself not only embedded in a larger ground of meaning and purpose, but also in some sense (is) a focus of it."


" What happened in the past is dependent on what is to happen in the future." Paul Davies, Other Worlds  

 The past is prologue. Norman O. Brown.  

"Somebody said that it couldn't be done, at least no one ever has done it."

IN 1932, Los Angeles hosted the Olympic game, that's the year I was born. Then 52 years later, Los Angeles hosted the Olympic games in July 31-August 11, 1984. A few weeks before the games opened this incident happened: I was sewing, the television was on but I wasn't listening to it until suddenly I heard the words: "The second world is here and in the second world all the rules are changed." as though the volume of the television had been turned up. I looked at the television. It was an advertisement for a new automobile, the Infiniti I believe. "How ridiculous!" I thought to myself. "Advertisements don't have to make sense. A 'new world' in a new car?", then I went back to my sewing and my thinking, (which had been about a few unusual events that had recently happened in a square dance group we belonged to.)

But the words in the advertisement didn't leave my thought. They began to be regenerated, re-occurring for no reason I could see for several days. Then over a span of time that I can't be certain about I noticed that memories of a few incidents that had happened in the past year came to mind along with those words in the automobile advertisement.

(One incident came to mind but a few others followed it: I had met the man who had bought our house a few years ago. He was so changed that I barely recognized him. He had looked at me and said something that made me feel confused: "You've gone through re-birth haven't you?" I didn't answer or ask what he meant. He'd had plans when he bought our house, to marry his girlfriend, have a baby and live happily in the house after turning it into a duplex, so they could afford the house. Everything went as he'd planned until he had been caught in the tenants' bed. His wife divorced him and would not let him see his child. He was grief stricken and genuinely in anguish.

He was skeletally thin, but so was I. It takes one to know one?

"You've gone through re-birth, haven't you?" was vaguely associated in my thought with those unusually well timed events. I had begun to wonder if I was thinking some of my own thought content before this string of events happened. A  kind of thought that was new to me had begun, it addressed me as though it was spoken by some other person.  The events had happened and I'd barely thought about them until a few accumulated. It was the timing that marked them as unusual.

Several incidents now puzzled me because they were retrieved and batched along with the strange fact that I'd not thought about them after each event happened. Now the words in the advertisement seemed to link up with those few events which had been unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. The words 'The second world is here and in the second world all the rules are changed.' and those events were inked up in my mind. Very gradually I began to sense that I was in a 'second world where all the rules are changed."

I'd had a neurological test done because I believed I'd had brain damage. Everything seemed different but when I looked carefully, nothing looked different. The tests resulted in my being told my handedness had changed from right to left. I found I could write in reverse with my left hand as fluently as I could with my right hand. My mind was different, my body felt wretched; I wasn't sleeping at all; I couldn't remember what I read; I was getting lost when I went to familiar places. At night lights seemed eyelike, pinpoints of light that were just lights when I looked carefully. I looked carefully.

It was not easy to realize that a kind of self observation had begun: I was seeing my own body as though I was audience as well as an actor in my life. The change was in my mind obviously, was subtle and it overlaid everything for a several years after 1984.

Less than a year later I was working at Boeing when a line from a poem I'd memorized after reading it only twice when I was in high school began to haunt me, re-occurring in my mind as I went about my job. "At least no one ever has done it." linked up eventually with an idea that had begun to lurk in my mind in the late 1970's.

My mind had produced a thought assembled from two books I'd read. In Thornton Wilders' The Bridge of San Luis Rey there's a conversation in a chapter titled, Perhaps An Intention in which an old abbess made a remark that had caused me to pause over it when I read it the first time. It's on page 137, "..and the insane? How do they treat them now? I watch them sometimes and it seems to me there is a secret about it, just out of sight, just around the corner....."

I remember thinking this was an odd question, it seemed out of context and somehow unusual to insert in the conversation.

The other book was Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End which I'd read when it came out. It had affected me in a way that no other book I've ever read has done. This time when I re-read Childhood's End, I felt again the effect it had on me originally. Several unusual situations developed when I was re-reading Childhood's End: I noticed that at a certain point I read a sentence on page 181, in the chapter titled The Last Generation but had omitted one word. Then noticing the omission, I paused to wonder why I had not read that word!

That sentence is embedded in a chapter titled The Last Generation in a paragraph that is a part of a conversation between an alien and a man that stowed away on a spaceship and is on the aliens' planet. The alien speaks: "All through that century the human race was drawing slowly nearer to the abyss never even suspecting it's existence. Across that abyss, there is only one bridge. Few ....... unaided have ever found it. Some have turned back while there was still time, avoiding both the danger and the achievement. That would never have been your fate or your fortune. Your race was too vital for that. It would have plunged into ruin and taken others with it, for you would never have found the bridge."

Then I noticed that I had not read what was on the page which was: "Few races unaided have ever found it." I'd read 'Few unaided have ever found it." Why was the word 'races' omitted? Somehow I could not read the word 'races' in that one sentence! I was more puzzled by why I wondered to myself about this not too unusual fact, I scan read usually.

It was then I felt a faint sense that within my mind there was another reader, a presence of some kind behind my own eyes. It had been faintly sensed as I'd read, I'd felt it as a sense of a 'poised, waiting, even searching' eye, expecting something and it had recognized what it was looking for in this material: "...it is an abyss across which few....unaided have ever found their way."
But somehow the word 'races' was not part of what it recognized. I was watching my mind at work, without knowing consciously that at the moment my attention had been re-focused to a new world, my inner world. In that world, thought of a new kind had been scrolling through my mind for nearly 2 years, about a dream I'd had.

The television had never seemed to say something that made me think about my life, until this incident happened. Why was my attention suddenly shifted, at just that moment in Time? Just exactly at the point when I was thinking about a few unusual events that had happened in the past few months? Other incidents had happened that now were joined together and I was slightly curious finally, watching what I had given no attention to before:  the content in my mind.