How Ouspenskys' writing about ‘Re-currence’ and Emanuel Swedenborgs' short doctrine of ‘Remains’ relate to a process of
individual life personalization that is presently diagnosed as various kinds of pathological thinking and behaviors.
An event
happened in 1984 in which time two
advanced and challenge square dance clubs were trying to introduce higher
levels to the reluctant mainstream dancers. All gender roles are removed at
higher levels. I was unaware of Jung or
his ideas and knew nothing about philosophy
or ….anything psychological, history or philosophy..
Many authors begin a
book by telling about an event that happened when the author was very young
that became a lifelong influence. This document is about my experience with that
Influence, which is an intelligence, and how I became aware of Its attempt to
make Its self distinct. The use of an impersonal pronoun, ‘it’, in one memory
of an event that happened when I was about 9 years old, set in motion an idea
that is in my opinion embedded in my body, I am that idea materially.
P.D. Ouspensky in
his wonderful book, A New Model
of the Universe wrote in the
first paragraph of the Introduction:
“There exist moments
in life, separated by long intervals of time, but linked together by their
inner content and by a certain singular sensation peculiar to them. Several
such moments always recur to my mind together and I feel then that it is these
that have determined the chief trend of my life.”
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C. G. Jung described
a few incidents that happened when he was less than 10 years old that in my
opinion were his ‘remains’, installed
early in life for the processes of life long experiences of
individuation/regeneration/Fourth Way (Ouspensky/Gurdjieff and authors they
influenced, i.e. Rodney Collin, Maurice Nicoll, etc.).
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Emanuel Swedenborg’s
Doctrine of Remains was written in the language of his time:
“The Doctrine
of Remains” from Emanuel Swedenborg
“Remains” are not
only the goods and truths that a man has learned from the Lord’s Word from
infancy and has thus impressed on his memory, but they are also all the states
thence derived such as states of innocence from infancy…..…These states
together with the goods and truths impressed on the memory are called remains,
which are preserved in man by the Lord and are stored up entirely without his
knowledge, in his internal man. …That there are remains and that they are
stored up in a man in his interior rational is wholly unknown to man; and this
is because he supposes that nothing flows in, but that everything is natural to
him and born with him, thus that it is all in him when an infant, when yet the
real case is altogether different. Remains are treated of in many parts of the
Word and by them are signified those states by which man becomes a man and this
from the Lord alone.”
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Isaac Newton wrote
that if a future event is described hundreds or thousands of years before it
occurs, the event when it happens will be evidence that proves the existence of
Divine Providence and not human foresight.
He was writing about the messiah who was expected to come to be the king
of the Jewish people. Isaac Newton had an experience that gave him an idea, it
has been recorded that it happened when he saw an apple fall. When Jesus was born he was not the kind of
king that was expected but C. G. Jung wrote that he believed a pattern was
installed in the mind of men. He was correct, the pattern has become well
known, but not as a natural process of life that establishes relationship with
the Intelligence that I became aware of in real life experiences. I noticed the pattern when I was less than a
teenager. It was always a man that began to proselytize that ‘the end is near’
but he knew the way to be saved.
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“Is there some way the past can communicate
with the future?” Winston asked in Orwell’s 1984.
The past may not really
exist. The future may not really exist
except as an idea that is useful and necessary to the human being in a
body. How can events that seem to have
happened in the past prove we, or some other Intelligence does have apparent foresight
into the future?
By describing what
the individual is doing ‘now’ and naming in some personal code, that
individual.
I’ve had several ‘mindquakes’, huge masses of information that used
my history, my marital bond, and real world events to produce valid proof that
every moment of my physical and mental past can be retrieved and assembled as a
kind of thought content that related to my physical location at any moment.
An
event happened in 2000 when I attended the 50th alumni gathering of
my class in 1950 that I could not have created or foreseen. I can’t doubt such
proof that foresight other than my own drives individuals and the lives of the
human race.
I experienced events
when I was less than 10 years old that were clearly intended to have meaning in
the future. I believe Swedenborgs’ Doctrine of Remains and
Ouspensky’s ‘re-occurring memories’ are applicable to those events.
My first memory and
my first thought occurred when I was a few months past my second birthday. It
was a vivid snapshot of what I was looking at, a thought that occurred in my
mind and how I felt. “I am in a cold
place.” I had awareness of where I was. The memory re-occurred into my mind
after I was in my twenties as best I can remember until I wondered to myself
why that memory of a moment in my life, complete in every detail was
regenerated in my mind for no reason I could see. There were a few similar
memories, each different in content but I didn’t notice them until I was in my
twenties and later, as best I can date awareness and curiosity about them.
In an opposite way an
event that happened when I was 13 years old vanished from memory until 1984
when it was retrieved, complete in every detail just as I had experienced it: what I felt and a thought that occurred into
my mind. I had not thought about that
event even once although it was extremely unusual and different from anything I
experienced until 1984. I had ridden my bicycle to my favorite field. I was laying in the grass enjoying the hot
summer sun when suddenly the sky above looked like blue bowl and I felt smaller
than a speck of dust, on a huge ball hanging in space, surrounded by so much
space that it hurt ‘in the pit of my stomach’. A thought occurred into my
mind: “All humans think, thought is the
common denominator of humans. Thought must do something and we must be ‘in
something’ or ‘on something.” The memory was about ‘thought’ and I had not
mentioned the event because I didn’t remember it until it was retrieved.
Another event happened
when I was about 9 years old that introduced the words and the idea: “when it came it did not come as
it was expected to come.” The words came
into my mind after my Sunday school
teacher told her version of the Christmas story. She explained why Mary and
Joseph were in Bethlehem and why the expected messiah was born in the lowest of
all places, adding that ‘when it came it did not come as it was expected to
come, it came in the lowest of all places.” I noticed the use of an impersonal
word, ‘it’ which seemed inappropriate rather than the masculine ‘he’. A thought
occurred in my mind: “The Messiah was
not an ‘it’, she should have said ‘he’, not ‘it’.” and that became part of the
event. The words my teacher had said and the additional thought that occurred
spontaneously apparently from me, a self-generated thought became a unit in the re-generated event. I didn’t
wonder about their retrieval in my mind until decades later.
The memory of that
event was one of a few similar events that happened when I was less than 10
years old, that re-occurred in my mind until I became curious enough to wonder
to myself, why does that moment in my past regenerate in my mind exactly as it happened? As time passed and I lived my life, the
inappropriate pronoun, ‘it’ related to other events although I didn’t see a
connection between them. A long string of different events that I’ll describe
more fully were in my future. That event linked to future events and others scheduled
to happen later in my life. Other important events vanished from memory after
they happened but obviously they were stored in memory because they were
retrieved in minute detail complete with my feeling content later in my life.
I’ve experienced what
I’m writing about, during a span of decades from my first memory to the present
time. I’m going to be 84 in a few weeks.
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“I AM” is an idea that I didn’t know about
until one day in 1981 we were in Roseville, California. I walked through the rows of vendors, not
feeling very well when I turned back to a box of books on the asphalt. I felt
myself lean down to pick up a small tan booklet, imitation suede that was so
old there was no printing on the spine or the cover. I looked inside and read the book was the 10th
printing in 1895 by the Sun Printing Company, there was no author’s name. I
paid the quarter and put the booklet in my pocket. Later I opened it, and read
the first lines, then quickly put it back in my pocket because I felt a real
shock when I read the words: “To you who
reads, I AM come. To you who reads, I AM
speaking.”
I had never read such
words or such ideas as I read in that book which told me that I was an idea,
that I was to make manifest. The word ‘manifest’ was familiar to me as a paper
document related to shipping; other definitions did not come to my mind for a
few years. I watched my minds content which became very different as the idea that had been developing in my life, embedded in normal, to me it was material of normal life involving other people, who acted and spoke as though my story was shared by them, some authors who lived hundreds of years before the book 1984 was written.
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This essay is primarily
about Emanuel Swedenborg’s short Doctrine of remains’ and my experience with
memories of events that happened only once, early in my life, but the memory of
the event flashed into my mind later in life, so persistently that I noticed
them and eventually became curious about them. They were what Emanuel
Swedenborg described as remains. These ‘remains’
are established, he wrote, to be used by the ‘angels’ that are with a person in
the process of regeneration. Because these few memories of events that happened
when I was less than 10 years old re-occurred when I was in my late 20’s and 30s that
implies foresight and purposeful intentions…not mine.
I didn’t ‘think’ all
of the ‘thoughts’ that occurred into my mind in the past but that fact did not
become evident until I was in my 60’s. That was an idea that would never have
occurred to me, it was shown to me. I had to discover that fact as well as
learn how this information was created and conveyed to me. The phenomenon that
F. David Peat wrote about as an interactive force, had other names in the past
but he was correct that it is an interactive force that created a conversation in
an unexpected voice talking to me through the ordinary events in our lives.
Many other individuals were used to create the voice and its contents. They seemed to speak to a level of my thought
and say things that matched that content exactly!
Carl G. Jung wrote
that the first half of life is preparation for the last half of life. That
implies there is foresight in our lives. A few
events happened in his life when he was young that I believe were installed for
later use, they were his ‘remains’. He was very young when the incident
happened in which he saw the giant turd falling onto the church at Basel. He saw a thought before he could think it, he
stopped it for some days, then he permitted it to emerge. (Was that the birth of ‘Holy Shit?’) He was very young when he experienced the
incident where he saw a giant phallus on a throne and heard a female voice (his
mother’s voice) speak: “That is the man eater.” These are a few examples of his early life
experiences that can reasonably be regarded to be ‘remains’. He wrote about a
few ‘coincidences’ but that word never occurred to me until I had read many
books that affected me in my body, for
no reason I could see, one of which contained Swedenborg’s term, ‘double thought’.
Swedenborg had
written about a process of re-generation which I had experienced as a kind of
life review that began when I was in my early fifties, I am 85 now. Its only with hindsight that I
can describe how I became aware of a Purpose at work.
There were changes in
my mind, my body and my thought in real world experiences and situations that
related to early life memories eventually as I lived and worked at Boeing after
1985. The ‘data base’ of my specific
life was used in an internal process that takes place in the external world life
of the individual as preparation for
life after death according to Swedenborg. I don’t know if that is a truth yet.
It’s been written about in different ideas
about human activities and processes that can be experienced as spirituality. Many
individuals describe being controlled and moved by a mechanical controlling
‘other’. Many individuals experience
this ‘other’ in various relationships in their external life without suspecting
the real origin is not ‘terrestrial’. It may be in preparation for life after life
in a body and perhaps life before birth. The individual may be selecting ones’ real
home after death, if Swedenborg was correct about a life after life in a body. It
is a retrieval of memories from the individual past in a subtle form of
non-verbalized, non-articulable thought that creates a life examination, a real
life re-view, literally. Swedenborg
described this as ‘influx’. I experienced it as words that were not articulable
because the location was obviously very deep in my mind, galaxies of inner
space from speech. I wrote to Wilson van Dusen to verify that this
‘pre-thought’ content is like a fragrance of words at first sight. He responded
that I was correct although he seemed unimpressed that I had discovered what I
knew and suspected, he said everyone should know ‘this stuff’.
I had to discover
that deep location when an impulse caused me to try to capture one word and
hold it in memory long enough to write it down. It was a task imposed on me as
a compulsion; it was a process that did not seem to be my decision. (Norman O.
Brown wrote that emotions become conscious by becoming attached to words. I believe the result of that meeting of the
content of one’s emotions with words, circumstances and specific content in the
exterior world is where ‘meaningful coincidences’ are created. )
The word
‘regeneration’ literally means to retrieve something, to replay that something,
to re-view, to literally re-produce that something. This is what David Bohm
wrote was necessary to do when he wrote Wholeness and the Implicate Order: “lift
events and ideas out of their normal contexts and see them and interpret them as
though for the first time”. That is not a simple task.
Memories are a retrieval
and a replay of content from the past. In the re-play of a few re-occurring memories as
I experienced them, I was shown in my life, and was actually told by someone
who had obviously noticed in his own mind that a function and a mechanism of
mind was at work in my mind. “Your mind is playing tricks on you.”, was what he
said one day. (We had a mental bond that I didn’t suspect although I heard
myself describe it one day using my limited knowledge and vocabulary in a
psychiatric session.) This person had experienced this ‘trick’ mechanism that
may be a switch, a ‘me’ or ‘not me’ switch created in my mind, a replay of content that created a ‘second
underlying context’ automatically and instantly usually.
I didn’t decode these incidents, the new meaning and context was a real ‘reflection’ of the original content. Wilson van Dusen helped me to understand this mechanism and what it accomplishes when I wrote to him in 1993. The function selected those events from my past, used that material, literally re-used it to create a personal new context, new meaning and eventually it formed a completely new understanding of that string of events. It created a conversation literally from that abstracted material, a steady flow of event in Time carries this conversation through the human life.
An excellent word to
use to describe that abstracted content is ‘echo’, although the reflected content
was batched, into a unit; it occurred in
a super-flash of time and in the
reflection this effect was not easy to see. It happens so rapidly it was almost
impossible to identify because the retrieved content is batched; there is no
space between the words, the content is compressed into a single unit in
ordinary time. P. D. Ouspensky described how he experienced some mental states
in which the space between words was so vast that he couldn’t remember the
previous word. Also for a span af about 9 years, I experienced the batched content was turned
around towards me and is directed towards the person as though another person
spoke the content. Wilson van Dusens’ books, The Presence of Other Worlds and
The Natural Depths of Man had given me helpful information before I read
anything Swedenborg had written. Discovering an event that happened in my own
mind was a task that seems to me to have been already well planned when I was
born in1932.
I couldn’t describe
what I had experienced in 1984, but I was driven to do that. (Later I read
the story in Genesis about Adam having
to name what was brought before him . I
felt this might be a reference to the compulsion that drove me to “name
everything, describe what you see.”) I had to discover that event as though it
happened in different galaxy, remote from the moment it had happened, in an
area in my unexplored thought world. I became aware of vast distances and
different levels in my mind that produced content, not dreams but other thought
and effects that alter everything. The distance was marked by a kind of
visibility of inner content but no ability to speak it, write it down.
One day I remember reading about a musician that heard the entire piece he was going to play as a single unit of ‘round sound’, a gestalt when he prepared for a concert. That was a clew in a book I would normally not choose to read.
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Early in the 1980’s I had a very great change
in my mind and I was trying to understand and describe what had changed in my
mind because I had a strong impulse, to
‘write about your life, describe what you see’. I had no words to use, but eventually I
recognized they seemed to come to me as though they knew where I was. I didn’t know the words I needed so they came
in books I chanced to notice and surprisingly through people I knew and met at
work or in other situations.
That idea of a
‘gestalt’ gave me a clew about what had
happened in my mind in 1984. I named it a mind-quake when I had the second and
third events in 1989 and only then I had to recognize the real source of my
experiences was not my family or people we knew or anything visible in itself
on this planet. Evidence that points to this invisible intelligence come to me
through many things I did but had not decided to do myself. I lost personal
volition and became an observer of my own body and its inner content. A drama
began to emerge while two small groups of individuals tried to introduce
challenge level square dancing to the reluctant mainstream dancers in clubs we
belonged to.
I felt a powerful
motor that drove me to describe what I saw in my own mind and in my life. It began in one relationship with a real
person that I felt a need to get to know, he was a stranger so I didn’t
understand such a strong need because it was not a romantic interest. I was puzzled about why I began to feel a deep
sense of grief that was excruciatingly painful in my body about something I saw
in that one man’s relationships to the people in his life at that point in
time. (This strange attraction caused me to lose control of my body but I
observed and listened to this body as though I was both actor and audience
beginning in 1984 to the present time. I’ve had 3 major mindquakes after 1989.)
Something new was beginning
to be taught by this man and another man, the operated their own square dance
groups. They were both introducing a new level of square-dancing above the mainstream level.
That situation was an essential circumstance; it was a perfect setting for the
event that happened in 1984.
I’ll give examples because events happened to me many times before I realized
for certain what a mechanism in my mind was doing with words I heard only one specific person say, the one square
dance caller whom I felt I needed to know. I don’t remember the exact date when
one evening he suddenly seemed to know andrespond to what I was thinking about,
wondering about but had never said anything to anyone about! I had to learn slowly and painfully from
therapists I went to, that this kind of event where I heard a person or an
object use words that seemed to be a response to my unspoken thought and inner
content, is a commonly experienced symptom known as ‘thought broadcasting’.
I believe the sense
of being ‘talked to’ by an other, a real other is the activity of a pattern.
My mind had a
mechanism at work: reflecting the
content back to me so that I heard it the way I had normally heard people, not
objects that use words such as books, radios, television, movies, just people,
real people. That was a confusing kind of event, to begin to hear objects that
use words the same way I’d heard people.
As time passed and I
began to become familiar with the accumulation of new content, a new
understanding emerged. It was created
from a real echo of content but a new personal context and meaning emerged
automatically in the ‘reflected content’. New information was created re-using
old information… I will describe as best
I can the slow process at work, it built an understanding that was new to me,
paralleling my normal understanding. This new understanding was confusing to me
because both seemed plausible.
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My first thought
occurred when I was not yet 2 and a half: “I am in a cold place.” The memory of
that thought, what I was looking at, what I was hearing and feeling re-occurred
into my mind for no reason I could see until I noticed it and became
somewhat curious about the retrieval and
replay of that event into my mind. I was
in my second and third decade when I wondered to myself about this repetition
of one moment in my toddlerhood. What I saw and what I felt was the retrieved
memory. It was a vivid photograph of what I was looking at, a light bulb
hanging above me, but it included the thought, “I am in a cold place.”, the
wind blowing outside, but also and this is the strange fact, knowledge of where
I was: laying on a bed where my new baby
sister was laying, and we were in an old
garage that had been converted into living quarters in 1934. My parents rented this garage and in 1989 I
found it the day before it was to be destroyed. I talked to the woman who had
rented it to my parents when she was very aged but she remembered my parents
and many other people that I’d forgotten.
This was only one of my
reoccurring memories, each was different in content that emerged into my mind. I
was in my 60’s when I first realized these memories marked the depths of a level in my mind into
which I saw and from which I ‘heard’ mental content. This was proof that what I
thought, what I felt, and what I saw in the physical world had been recorded in
some great data base for later use and evidence that my physical body could be
located precisely and accurately. That idea evolved very slowly.
Many authors, Douglas Hofstadter is one modern example,
began their book with an example of a memory of an incident that happened when
they were very young that was important to his future. Carl G. Jung wrote (in MDR) that at the age of 6 through his 11th
year he was intensely focused on the desire to solve the mystery of the human
personality. He experienced a few incidents during that span of time that were
significant only later in his life.
Emanuel Swedenborg
wrote that from the age of 4 through his 10th year he was intensely focused on
religious matters.
C. G. Jung described a few incidents in his Memories,
Dreams, Reflections that happened when he was less than 11 years old, i.e., the
thought that he didn’t want to think, that he finally allowed to emerge when he
had the vision of the giant turd falling from the sky onto the Church of Basel;
and the vision of a giant phallus and his mothers’ voice.
I believe the above paragraphs refer to a few memories of
especially significant events that happened when I was young, up to the age of
about 13 years old although most of them happened when I was 9 years old. Some were photographs of the moment, complete
in every detail: how I felt, what I
thought and in a few events, comments on what I was looking at, very brief
words such as ‘common denominator’ which was one of the re-occurring memories.
One was the memory of a movie serial I saw when I was very young, the words of
the title and the plot of the serial occurred as a unit, ‘missing link’. This
was the name of an old movie serial. The
Missing Link in which a female scientist was looking for the link between man
and ape in a jungle setting.
The Ouspensky quotation is from the introduction to a book
I’d read before I chanced to re-read it,
only then pausing to wonder what the author was trying to define. But this time
I saw that my attention was drawn to this paragraph at a point when it could
mean something. I had become aware of
certain inner content in my mind that I didn’t produce myself. I had begun to
recognize that my mind was working independently of my conscious self and it
was methodically using memories from my past to communicate with me.
The method was difficult to recognize because I had never
experienced or thought about my mind and inner content, in fact my head had
been empty until about 1982. That changed after a dream that was unlike any I’d
ever had; my head was ‘thought full’ afterwards. I had by then noticed the
re-played memories and become curious about them.
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I had neurological
tests done in 1984 because I knew something was wrong.
I had believed I had
a head injury and I’d been told I had severe post menopausal syndrome but as I
found out later Swedenborg had written long ago: “Only effects, not causes are
perceived on this planet. And he wrote that every thing is tremulations. And
‘fire’ is little mathematical points.” Quantum physics ‘says’ the same thing.
When the results of the test were given to me, I was told my handedness had
reversed, from right handed to left handed. I had never heard or read anything
about right brain or left brain functioning and did not know about it until
several years later.
Everything was
different by then, my body felt different, a subtle change altered every thing out
side of my body and also what I thought, saw, heard and understood in my mind. I
looked carefully to see what was changed but couldn’t see anything different.
Eventually something
I read in a book and a situation that evolved in the physical world caused me
to be certain the change was in my own head. , it actually happened in a square
dance setting in which many other individuals were intensely involved. Emotions
were strong in this situation.
The situation in
square dancing developed when two small groups of individuals were introducing advanced
and challenge levels to the mainstream dancers. Only a few of we mainstream
dancers were struggling to learn the higher level, which removed all gender
roles from the dance. This seemingly simple change outraged the mainstream
dancers and callers.
At the higher level it
was also necessary to learn ‘concept calls’, one of which required learning to
dance with phantoms, people who were imagined, they were not real dancers. I
was anguished because I was unable to track these phantom dancers, but I didn’t
know it had never occurred to me to notice even the formations used in the
dance! When the caller chanted: “In your phantom set up” every dancer had to
notice their location in a formation then add the number of phantoms that the
particular call required and interact with them as though they were real. I
stood rooted in place and felt I caused the dance to fall into chaos.
At some point I read
a reference to a book, A New Era of Thought by Charles Hinton in Petr D.
Ouspenskys’ A New Model of the Universe and I found a copy somewhat easily
which was odd because that was before the Internet. Book searches were time
consuming and often didn’t result in getting the book. It had a diagram of an
experiment that Hinton had designed to ‘subtract himself from what he saw’
outside of his body.
I had already noticed
a thought grow in my mind, that I should ‘subtract my self from what I saw’. Let
me repeat this very important fact: I had already noticed a thought grow from
faintly sensed words to real words in my mind, that I should ‘subtract my self
from what I saw.” This was a new idea to
me.
His diagram was a
matrix arrangement of cubes similar to the Rubik cube but much larger and each
edge joined to a different color. The experiment required him to visualize what
colors were joined when he inserted his perception into any location.
It doesn’t seem accidental that I found the book with the
diagram in the back, because this precise timing has happened so many
times. An example is that I had read
Contact by Carl Sagan at least twice without noticing the several mentions of
pi in it. There are no mentions of pi in
the movie. A kind of blind spot that’s not under my authority seems to open up
at just the right point in Time, so that I ‘see’ what could have been seen
before. Sometimes I wondered why I notice ‘this’ which has come to my attention
only now.
Mixed signals are at least somewhat visible in one’s
mind/body/activities. If there are mixed signals there are signals.
In my past, a person
I knew very intimately in a long term relationship had mentioned to me one day
when I tried to talk to him about a problem we were having, that my mind was
playing tricks on me. I didn’t know what he meant until much later. It became
obvious that he had noticed the same mechanism in his own mind. However as time passed, he forgot much that he said to
me. I remembered things he’d said and done in the past that were important to
me, in the future.
The first time I
noticed an event that was created by that mechanism was when he had been
whistling over and over the music to a popular commercial. I asked if he was
trying to annoy me but he was honestly bothered by it himself because he said:
“I wish it would go away but it just won’t go away and stay away.” The jingle
was “What will you do with all the money you save?” I had never in my life,
even once formed a relationship between a commercial and something relating to
what was happening at the moment, in my life, but this time I heard the words
as though they were being said to me. They were clearly about the problem we
were having, about money.
One memory was a
vivid complete re-play of how I felt as well as what I was doing at a certain
time in my life. I was in school, trying to copy the perfect examples of
letters and numbers in the tablet we used and I couldn’t make a row of nice
letters or numbers. I felt anguished, and was trying so hard, scrunched over
the paper: “I can’t do it. I can’t write like other people!” The thought, the
anguish in my body, the sense of trying so hard to make perfect letters and
numbers was retrieved, complete in every way; a regeneration of the original event. I
relived the moment. .
Most of the original
events happened when I was less than 10 years old. A few happened when I was in
my twenties. A few important future
oriented events happened only once but I had no memory of that event until it
was retrieved much later in life. The important event happened when I was 13 and
I forgot it, never thought about it! That event in particular was retrieved in
1984, the event that had happened when I was about 13 years old and felt isolated
in my body on the Earth. It did not
re-occur later into my mind but it should have. I forgot it had happened until
it was retrieved in 1984 as a preface to my first mind-quake. The memory was complete
in every detail, even a thought that had occurred into my mind.
But this fact is
where I’ve had a lot of personal anguish: My first mindquake was the result of
living with a person who had already had an inner event happen to him. He
described it as ‘sitting under the apple tree with his maker’. As time passed
and we lived our life as a family, his attitude towards that event changed from
being extremely important to being of no importance, not worth talking about
when I realized his experiences were the same pattern I was trying to describe.
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Deep levels of mind
were made evident because I’ve had to travel great mental distances since 1984 in
my own mind. There is space between thought producing levels and hearing my own
speech; seeing my own body do things and say things that I could in a peculiar
way ‘see/hear/understand’ but not relate to until much later. “Now” is not a
fixed point in different levels that are not connected.
I began to hear myself
say things I’d never thought about but these incidents were sprinkled into my
every day life, until after 1984. After 1984 this kind of hearing was my new
normal.
What can make a
certain event memorable, different from other events? If that event re-occurs
in memory often enough over a span of years, that is enough to arouse curiosity
about its re-occurrence.
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In 1989 I located the
one car garage where my first memory was photographed into my memory bank. My husband and I talked to the woman that had
rented the garage to my parents at that time. The garage was overgrown with
weeds and when I asked if I could have the carved panels from the door she
laughed: “Take the whole garage if you want it because it’s going to be
bulldozed down tomorrow.”
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It has been my experience that a life review
was created in fragments, by retrieving certain memories when the content was
similar in some way to what I was doing in my life at that moment as I lived in
the material world.
What I was doing was
at times described in this way as though a person was telling me it could see
me and knew the most intimate content of my mind.
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I read the short Doctrine of Remains that Swedenborg wrote sometime in the 1990’s but
by then I’d read a lot of his writings and had recognized other authors who may
have experienced ‘remains’ themselves, but who had no knowledge of Swedenborg
or his interpretations of the stories in the bible. When I read certain books, I began to
understand what my mind was somehow purposefully doing, working to tell me
something. I felt a response in my body when I read that Douglas Hofstadter
began his Pulitzer Prize winning book with a story about how he became
fascinated by ‘three-ness’ when he was barely beyond a toddler.
Different names and
concepts are used in psychiatric definitions for many ideas about the
mind; about thought that is not self-generated;
I had to notice and become curious about ‘influx’ that is not yet words that can ‘fall’
into speech; about different levels of understanding in the mind that Emanuel
Swedenborg described literally, and accurately in his time. One such word is
‘regeneration’, used in a very broad context. His language was of his time. Psychiatry
and psychology in modern time uses another language that considers but does not
eliminate the personal, the ‘subjective’, the irrational. However he accurately
described a process of regeneration, a preparation for life after death
although I’ve experienced this process in life, in every day circumstances and
I don’t believe I’m unusual.
I watched a movie last night, in which one of
his ideas, i.e., the plot was the ordeal of an individual confronting the
authority of the ‘powers that be’ as it affects the female (and a helper male) on
the path of discovering one’s true self: it was a book in a currently popular series for young adults by
Veronica Roth: Divergence!
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I’ve had several
‘mindquakes’, the first one happened in 1984. I will describe it later but it
was ‘like’ an earthquake in many attributes. It exposed two fault lines,
neither off which had any relationship to my real life, they were the lives of
Eve and Greek goddesses, written about but not as real history. I had two large ones in 1989, a few
months apart, as well as smaller events between 1984 and 1989. Overall after
1989 they informed me in a specific form
that I had learned to understand and get new to me information from unwilled activities in my own
mind; information that I had not known although most that was new to me was well known and written about in books I’d
not yet read.
That’s a big problem,
almost unimaginably important because of
what a person ‘understands’, using the word ‘understanding’ in Swedenborg’s
contexts. A few of my remains are impulse
generated events that happened in my life when I was less than 10 years old. I
had developed habits from the impulse, that were as natural as breathing by the
time I chanced to notice Petr Beckmann’s book, The History of Pi in 1989 when I
passed through the library and decided
to read it. The pi symbol was used by my
employer, the Boeing Corporation.
Many important people
had been dead hundreds of years before I was born when I read their ideas with
a new eye and ear when I was in my 5th and 6th decade.
“Behold, I make all
things new.” There are methods of interpretation that I didn’t know about when
a hidden world began to function in the situations and locations where I and
other individuals lived in the late 1970’s.
Let me give an example of what I mean: Almost
20 years ago I was looking at a flower, a white peony that had streaks of
magenta in its creamy ivory center. I leaned down to smell it but my body
leaped backwards suddenly and I was afraid. But of what? I thought for a moment
then I saw something move on the flower. It crept up from the underside: a
spider with creamy ivory legs, a pure white pearl shaped body that had magenta
parenthesis shaped markings on its back. It was exactly the colors of the
flower. I had not seen it myself, but
obviously a part of me had seen it and re-acted instantly.
A thought emerged into my mind: “It was
invisible until it moved, because it was embedded within something that is its
own color.” The words generated by that event affected me in a slightly
different way than ‘normal’ thought. They remained in my mind and were used
later in a different context. I had to recognize the words were about different
content producing levels in the mind and that content is inserted, it’s received from an other.
It is one kind of influx, embedded in my
thought but it’s from another
intelligence. It was invisible because it was embedded but it began to move
early in the 1980s. I named it the Larger Domain sometime in 1988. It is experienced as ones’ own ‘thought’ because that content is embedded in its own ‘kind’. The
words were re-used in a different context than a spider embedded on a flower
that was the same color. This was one of several similar incidents that happened to
make me aware of one important fact: I don’t create all of my inner content.
One other relevant event was a sentence
embedded in Carl Sagans’ book, Contact: Ellen Arroway has just been
told the signal that’s been picked up is not ‘local’, it may be extra
terrestrials sending it: “In her mind
she thought she heard one joyous shout amidst a clamor of other voices.” I had
a feeling close to being a shock. There are several similar incidents on this
‘string’ that fed me the idea that was and is embedded in my mind, it’s the only one I know really, there is
embedded one thought producing level
that ‘speaks’ its content in a variety of ways. I don’t dream the kind of
dreams or visions that many people seem to have so this is different than
trying to get meaning from dreams.
Subtle differences
about thought have been described by Wilson van Dusen in his Presence of Other
Worlds, and The Natural Depths of Man. I wrote to him in 1993 to ask him
several questions about what Swedenborg
meant when he wrote about ‘thought that is not yet real words’, thought that is
near speech that can fall into words’, about influx’; some symptoms of certain mental disorders that have
been named as mental illness symptoms; and Carl Jungs’ ideas about meaningful
coincidences. His reply validated my hunches. I have the letter in which he
confirmed the mechanism I’d noticed can create ‘self reference’ among other
effects. This function almost certainly creates many problems to individuals
who don’t notice their inner content and changes in life that occur or should occur naturally. I believe it creates self observation and new
information and much more.
I’ve discovered since
then that most of my life, and particularly after 1984, I experienced thought
that I could ‘see’ but not relate to immediately. Memories of those events were
retrieved later and only then did I wonder about why I’d said and done what I’d
observed my body do and say. That was a
fact until about 1988. By then I’d experienced a steady flow of confusing new
to me inner content, but I’d become aware that events that had happened early
in my life were being ‘used’ as reference points.
The fact that nobody
knows but me and the other is that these few memories re-occurred into my mind,
their individual re-occurrences marked them.
Overall, I
experienced a kind of voice telling me what I was doing, It was created by a
mechanism that probably explains paranoia, which I believe is the reverse of
metanoia moving in mental space on a
moebius-like continuum that operates in my mind. There’s a point on the
simplest moebius band where direction changes into its opposite. The upside
becomes the downside, the back becomes the front. I made my first moebius band
when I was 9 years old after reading a
definition in a dictionary. The impulse caused me to make a moebius
band. I wondered what could be the use of such a thing then the impulse to cut
the band around its center , once then again caused me to discover its hidden
secret: two bands were joined by a knot but were separate because the knot
could not be undone. It represented the diabolical situation where one thing
can seem to be two different things, the thing turned against itself, much like
our immune system which in many diseases doesn’t recognize its ‘ self’.
It also represented Swedenborg’s concept of
the goods of truth and the falsities of evil. Quantum physics at the quark
level involves the lattice of moebius bands to explain the confinement of
quarks, which sum to 0, 1 and in some interactions, 2.
Symptoms that I didn’t
know were commonly experienced by others happened to me and those symptoms created
the voice effect. These symptoms are basically regarded as
pathological thinking and of mental
illnesses.
My intent is to form
a connection to those symptoms and ‘re-generation’ not only as a process of
life but to a mechanism in the mind that
literally ‘echoes back certain content’, automatically creating a new context
for the reflected content. This is
artificial intelligence but not the kind Alan Turing developed. The content was a ‘re-use’ of what I had
thought or was seeing, reading and hearing. This thought is a reflection in a
literal sense.
It has created a real
life re-view, limited somewhat of course to what I can understand but it’s not like the NDE’s that are reported now.
I read about theosophy, went to AA
meetings, went to investigations into Near Death Events, and worked at Boeing
where the biggest change in building airplanes was just beginning when I was
transferred to Final Assembly. The New Generation 737X body had a single tube
shaped body, not the two sections that had previously formed the 737.
This mechanism can
create a life review and create real new information in one specific persons’
mind. That implies that persons’
location and activities are known.
I believe the idea of
‘karma’, can be explained in a different way by this process and its mechanisms
that create moments of “I’ve been here before, I’ve done this before.” i.e, déjà vu and ‘meaningful coincidences’,
different names for the same kind of event. The inner content meets its exact
content somewhere in the exterior world, the inner is already there, waiting, a
sense of already knowing was felt so often I almost lost my bearings. The sense of seeing a life review,
of being shown the content of my past was in the background, behind the steady
flow of what seemed to emerge spontaneously without my will or intents. I had
to notice that attribute of the flow of events.
I’m writing about a
different kind of event, one that arises spontaneously from real world
activities. It’s been described as an ‘interactive force’ at work by F. David
Peat and it was his book that introduced the word ‘synchronicity’ to me, only after I
had become aware that certain symptoms
of mental disorders are or can be the result of experiencing individuation/regeneration
events. Mr. Peat did not connect his ideas to or mention an individuation
process.
I knew almost nothing
about C. G. Jung when I read Peat’s book; especially his idea about the ‘shadow’
as he interpreted it. I’ve had experiences in my life in which the ‘shadow’ was
attached to a very different idea. And
it was important that I’d no knowledge of Jung’s ideas because the ‘shadow’ as
I understand it now is related to an old comic book character, a radio show and
then a movie:
“Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of
mean? The Shadow knows. The Shadow has the power to blind men’s mind so they
cannot see him.”
“Cast a
shadow..” I had begun to be an an avid challenge level square
dancer when one caller, and only one from many that I knew, chanted the name of
a square dance movement named ‘cast a shadow’. He was the man I felt such a strong need to
get to know; he was the man in the dream which initiated the never ending
stream of thought about the dream. One evening I noticed a quiet voiced thought
occurred, it repeated those words after he chanted them. Then afterwards this happened every time this
caller chanted those words. Eventually I became curious about my re-hearing of
those few words. I’m certain I didn’t notice the quiet thought words spoken in
my mind the first time they occurred. This was a highly selective mechanism, a
detail that took some few years to be certain was happening.
It was not easy to
discover that my inner content was not my own productions but is a kind of
output from another source, input to me. Information is revealed and conveyed
to me, sometimes literally. Other times by retrieving memories from my past
that in some way related to what I was doing and thinking at that moment. I had
to discover that relationship.
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I noticed a continual
link to the life of Theodore Reik and his books as time passed. It lead me to
his Fragment of a Great Confession eventually. In that book he described an
event similar to what I’d experienced, a ‘double thought’ that he recognized
and described. That’s a term Emanuel Swedenborg used in his writings.
I’ve mentioned that Jung
experienced several incidents early in his life that I believe are ‘remains’
but he didn’t recognize then although according to Ellenberger, he did ‘devour’
some of Swedenborg’s writings. The incident that comes to my mind happened when
he saw a giant turd fall onto the Church at Basil. (‘Holy Shit’ perhaps was
illustrated or being re-presented?) He ‘saw’ a thought in his mind and
prevented ‘thinking’ it until he permitted it to occur.
I have written to
Wilson van Dusen about my experiences and he verified that what I’d come to
understand was correct. He was surprised that I didn’t know already what I had
learned so painfully and in such a confusing material world experience! I have his letter but it seems to
me he didn’t fully relate to the fact that I had discovered privately, from
experiences of my own what he seemed to believe everyone already knew. Or
should know.
The ‘meaningful
coincidences’ that so many individuals experience and the ‘psychosis’ that many
experience are the same kind of event. I’d been told by a Jungian therapist
that I called one day that ‘thought broadcasting and another symptom, ideas of
reference’ and other symptoms are the meaningful coincidences’ that Jung
somewhat wrote about. This therapist had experienced those symptoms himself.
His name is Dr. William Levy. I asked him why he’d not published what he knew
and he told me (1988) that ‘nobody WANTS to know this stuff’. A thought occurred into my mind that he earns
his living from what individuals like me did not ‘want’ to know.
I had formed my own
name for what he named ‘ideas of reference’ and other so called symptoms of
mental disease, and he told me it was accurate and appropriate: they were
‘second underlying contexts’.
I’d lost volition
basically over my body but I ‘saw’ in a new way my own body. I
believe that now but then I had no words to use. In this situation it was as though I and
everyone in our life at that point were actors in a movie. I was the only person in the audience
however. I had to discover that fact. Other
people told me what my life story contained, they read some content that must
be 0, 1 in our bodies, non-verbal communication seemingly, but only in
appearances.
The script unfolded
in activities we (two groups of challenge level square dancers who were
introducing advanced and challenge levels to the extremely reluctant local
mainstream clubs) shared or seemed
share, because in my mind my unspoken thoughts were or seemed to be known and
responded to. That was confusing for a few years.
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My marital ‘bond’ was
in a horrible condition then, but other events that were not seemingly
connected to my personal life began to capture and hold my attention. Then in
1984 when the Los Angeles Olympic games were being played I had the first
mindquake. Under the guise of the advent of the games, I’d begun to hear the
advertisements in a new to me way, as though objects that use words were
speaking directly to me!
What is a ‘mindquake’?
Memories of an event that happened when
I was 13 years old was the first content of the first mindquqke. What followed
was masses of memories retrieved that told a story about my marriage. It opened
up two fault lines in my history as a woman, but they had nothing to do with me
as an individual, it was a psychological interpretation beginning with Eve. The
result was like a movie, but it happened in a condition Swedenborg described in
Conjugal Love, two individuals functioning as one.
I had recognized this
myself; in very naïve words I described it and was told I had
‘remarkable insight’ long before I
understood this binary unit (1 + 1 = 1) had formed in me, a new mind.
I saw my mind at work, in a way I later read about in a book
by Theodore Reik (Fragment of a
Great Confession in a chapter titled In
Small Packages. He is replaying in his mind a bridge game, reconstructing the
sequences of the game, using words commonly associated with bridge. He notices
his mind seems to be stuck on certain words, and a hidden meaning emerges that
relates not to the bridge game but to his relation with his wife. He dismisses
those points as ‘magical thinking’! They were actually details about his life
being ‘said back’ or’echoed’ to him.
The book is about his secret obsession in his teen years, with Goethe. When Reik was 18, he’d
read everything Goethe had written but he kept that obsession to himself, for
no reason he understood. He experienced other ‘remains’ that I can identify
when he was about 9 years old. (The Creation of Woman was the result of one
such event.) He ‘heard himself blurt out something he’d not thought about and
had no intent to say, just the way I experienced in my life a spontaneous
eruption of words and actions.
The words and ideas connected to all levels of square
dancing are what I experienced in a similar way to the way words became ‘stuck’
in Theodore Reik’s mind.
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Examples of my remains:
My first memory at age 2 and a half was vivid photograph of
what was in front of me, a thought that emerged: “I am in a cold place.”, and
an impression of where I was, laying: on a bed with a new sister; in a garage that had been converted to a home,
in 1934. I found that garage in 1989, a day before it was to be demolished!
A memory of a Sunday school teacher who told her version of
the birth of Jesus that produced a thought in my mind and a response to the
thought. All aspects of that event re-occurred as a unit, flashing into my mind
at times for years, for no reason I could see..
The memory of the plot of a movie serial, The Missing Link
that I saw when I was about 8 or 9. It was about a woman scientist leading an
exploration to find the missing link between man and ape. Only the two words
“missing link” and the memory of the plotoccurred into my mind.
The development of a memory, it evolved gradually throughout
my first 25 years, of a thought about Beethoven, Einstein and Mark Twain, that
‘bore first fruit’ in 1988. A most
astonishing event happened over a span of
almost 5 decades!
An example from a book:
I’ve mentioned that Theodore Reik described an event that
happened when he was 9 years old, in which he ‘heard himself say’ something
he’d not thought about or intended to say that later resulted in his book, The
Creation of Woman. It’s about the two versions of the creation of Eve, in
Genesis. He is listening to his grandfather and elderly friends discuss and reason
in the Jewish form when Reik hears himself suggest the second version is a reversal, it’s the
‘second birth of Adam’ into the world of men, out of the world of the mother.
It’s not about Eve it’s a reversal of gender.
In the introduction
to Douglas Hofstadter’s prize winning book, Godel, Escher and Bach, the author
tells about his first memory at age 3, that triggered a life-long endeavor.
Many books begin with a similar idea; an incident that happened at a very young
age cemented into the authors’ mind and influenced that person in adult life.
These were significant events that happened really only once
but afterwards the event flashed rapidly into my mind. Some were complete in
every detail, including a thought I’d had in that event. This was a thought that I didn’t tell anyone about and didn’t think
about myself until I was more than 50 years old. It was about a secret about
the insane basically that I had observed as it was created in my mind in the
late 1970s.
There are several ways to describe my ‘re-occurring
memories’ but I need to use my limited
knowledge of computers and terms and a few ideas that I’d learned when I took
data processing courses in the late 1960’s. That’s when the first generation of
computers was just giving way to the second generation. Programming was somewhat introduced, I
learned that addresses and slots had to be named to receive data, much like
post office boxes are named and numbered. The memories were simplistic but if
I’d not learned at least that much about computers, well I wouldn’t be writing
this.
The re-occuring memories were retrieved obviously from a
location in a memory that contained them, a slot in which they had been stored
away because they had to be retrieved as a packet. The packet was opened; the
complete event was then regenerated rapidly in my mind, in a flash as a unit.
They did not stand out as different for almost 6 decades,
because they were embedded in ‘thought’ and I was basically thought less until
I was in my early 50s. At mid life a great change in my family occurred, but
other aspects of our lives began to enfold my new thought filled minds’
content. That was nearly overwhelmingly new and confusing for at least 5 years,
between 1984 and 1989.
Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings came to my attention during
that time, the first mention that I remember
reading contained the words ‘double thought’. I paused briefly to wonder
what he meant. It was years later that I
saw this as a remarkable ‘coincidence’ because I was experiencing the effect
that created the sense that turned my thought and whatever content was selected, highlighted
so to speak before I knew computers and software had that capability. My
attention was directed, not purposed by my intents.
Wilson van Dusens’ Presence of Other Worlds came to my
attention after I’d read Paul Davies book, Other Worlds. The titles of the two
books had an unusual connection to my thoughts at that time, but that
connection has continued, even now in 2013 (2015 today) through the strange experiences
described in certain fictions that were written for teen agers! I had a
Twilight based mindquake 4 years after I read those books, it was different.
I’ve had several ‘mindquakes’. They are batches of memories and ‘new to me’ information
that triggered me to think about something implied but not directly stated
anywhere. I was told to ‘think about the ‘whole thing’, think about the
implications of the ‘whole thing’ in 1989, one day when I tried to rest a few
minutes in a toilet cubicle at work. That’s where Martin Luther was when he received
his revelation! (Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown, The Excremental Vision)
I don’t have the kind of dreams other people seem to report.
“Seeing” ones’ inner content when there’s so much activity, can be distressing
and that’s a fact I had to learn, seeing the strange shapes that were produced
in my own mind, not ‘things’ but somehow ‘shapes’ that made no sense and I felt
a terrible grief for years.
My mind became connected to other minds in a way that Swedenborg
mentioned in his book Conjugal Love. Which
I had not read and didn’t know existed but some psychiatric texts do mention
conditions such as ‘folie aux duex’ and other names for basically the same
psychological bonds.
John Bradshaw has described this inter-generational family
connection in his talks, Family Secrets, but I found it is also in the Bible in
Jeremiah and in other places.
The ideas of quantum physics, family chemistries and bonds
are very much in the news today, but the surprise is that they are written in
the bible too. The idea of ‘instruction’ and the form in
which ‘instruction’ can occur is also in the Bible. Jesus described it in
detail.
Today the word ‘coincidences’ or ‘synchronicities’ in my
opinion is about how ‘instruction’ occurs and one’s ‘remains’ are used as proof
that this is ‘not me thinking’, it is
‘divine providence’ at work.
Synchronization
between thought, certain thought and what’s happening outside of my body has
caused me to develop a new understanding, the old understanding was replaced.
“Behold I make all things new.” is in the Bible.
I noticed my remains throughout the first 4+ decades of my
life with the barest degree of attention, without curiosity and this very slight degree became
obvious over a period of decades. I was
in my forties when I began to wonder to myself why those ‘ghost memories
trekked along the backroads of my mind’ for no reason I could understand.
Both of the
quotations I began this post with were written by different men who lived in
different times. I did not notice either
quotation the first time I read it in their respective books. Only later was I
curious enough to pause and wonder what the author meant, when I chanced to re-read
the books that contained them
Noticing something
specific in a book I’ve read once, but not noticed at first reading is almost
common now. There is a remarkable element of precise timing involved. When I
can understand what I didn’t notice in the past, then an interest leads me to
re-read a book at a point when I can not only understand it, I can notice the
precise timing. I had to discover that; it was one critically important fact that I
had to notice myself. There was no sign anywhere that told me to ‘NOTICE THE
TIMING IS PERFECT”. I had to notice that aspect myself.
The timing could not be explained when this happened:
Law
and Order
One evening a few years ago, I went to bed with a book to
read during commercials of a program I liked. The book had been in a box
of books in my garage but I’d not read it. I noticed it one day and took it
into the house, intending to read it sometime.
The book was so interesting I didn’t give much attention to
the television show when it ended and a different show began, a show I never
watch, the Law and Order series. I
don’t like the way they profile of the ‘perpetrator’ in the style of an almost prophetic insight and certainty. And the misuse of
psychiatric ideas and terms in the
show is absurd imo. I was absorbed in the book, not listening to the
television when suddenly the words being spoken on the television caused me to
glance up. I heard: “Do you recognize
anyone?”
The screen showed a page in a high school year book on
which a young girl’s senior picture was prominent, they were talking about her.
But that’s not what I saw. At very first glance I saw a name I thought I
recognized below a picture adjoining hers of another senior in the class:
Andrew Samuels.
It was only a glimpse so I wasn't certain but the book
I was reading at that moment was The Plural Psyche by Andrew Samuels.
He's a well-known (but not to me) Jungian author. What a surprise this
was when I remembered how long I’d owned the book but had not read
it even after I'd brought it into the house. How odd that on this particular
night I decided to read it!
But was it really Andrew Samuels? Probably not, I decided
and gave no more thought to the incident.
However within a few weeks that particular show was in
progress several times when I browsed the television! It just happened to
be on when I flipped channels, not once but several times. So I was able
to prove to myself that I had not read the name incorrectly. It was Andrew
Samuels.
I’ve not seen it after I captured the scene with my
camcorder, although I recently bought the 13th season. Episode 2, Law and
Order: Shangrila was about Fiona Reid. Isn't it odd that a search on the name
of a fictional character in one episode in a series actually finds
that name on the Internet?
Consider what has happened: I had just begun to
read a book I'd owned for some time, the night of that showing of
an episode that was several years old. It was very odd, even
extraordinarily unusual to happen that the show just seemed to be there
so many times when I wasn’t looking for it. (The same thing happened when
the movie Amadeus which I hated, kept showing up until I re-viewed it, but
that’s another long story.)
Now consider this fact about that incident: I wasn't
watching the show. I was reading my book
until the question was asked by a character on the show: “Do you recognize anyone?” I
looked up and recognized someone; the author of a book I was reading at the
moment, who had the same name.
I felt that the question had been asked by someone talking
to me, conversationally, borrowing the words and re-using them literally to ask
me a question. It’s an artificially created
voice but it talked’ to me!. I used to feel very strange when I
experienced this kind of 'voice', it was a real shock for more than a few years.
The source of the ‘voice’, used what I was hearing to create its own
voice, interrupting my reading.
That kind of
coincidence is not new to me but it took a long time and many events happened
before I thought of them as a voice speaking directly to me, using (or
re-using) the content of what I was doing at the moment. It obviously
knows me, everything about me. It wants something.
But wait, there’s more:
the first page of The Plural Psyche had interested me especially because
the author mentioned that any author writes about the essential events that are
happening in the time they are living, as well as what they are doing
themselves, whether they know it or not.
Few artists or authors or those who read their books
have that degree of self knowledge. Theodore Reik wrote Fragment of a
Great Confession about Goethe’s love for a
young girl but did not recognize until he was elderly himself that he
had woven his own love story into his version of Goethes’ romance.
In fact
in a chapter titled In Small Packages Reik described how his ruminations
of a bridge game developed a ‘double bottom’, a ‘secret meaning’ when certain
words normally used to talk about bridge games occurred, then lingered in his
thought. He recognized they triggered
thoughts about his relationship to his wife and how her frail heart had affected
their life. The words that developed a ‘secret meaning’ were in my opinion
highlighted by a mechanism of mind that created information relevant and
significant to him by reflecting back the selected, abstracted content to build a conversation.
This kind of event was not nature at work, it was a function
of his mind/brain/body that used the
words, to ‘talk’ to him. The mechanism
created a kind of re-view literally of a circumstance in his life. The
word ‘re-generated’ is a good word to
use for how this mechanism functioned.
The concepts that I had to learn when I left mainstream level square dancing were used to begin a conversation that used the names of square dancing at advanced and challenge levels. When technology brought computers into the mainstream home the language forced every one to learn the words attribute, object, and understand them in a different way.
When this event happened I’d come to understand that
myself. I’d experienced that people
actually say more than they realize and at times they say a lot they don’t
remember, perhaps don’t even hear themselves say, in normal
conversations. I’d learned that too.
Fragment of A Great Confession was intended to be about a
romance between Goethe and a young girl but in his elder years Reik recognized
the details of his own relationship to his wife had formed the structure of the
book! I’d thought it very odd that Theodore Reik wrote an entire book about
another person but had not recognized he was telling his own life story. He was
a psychiatrist. Doesn’t a psychiatrist know that as matter of fact?
Reik is a special influence in my life plot, he has written
books unlike anything authored by Freud or Jungian influenced authors. By the
age of 18, Reik had read everything Goethe had written, but had kept his
obsession a secret for reasons he didn’t understand himself. Why would he be
ashamed to admit he had an obsession like that? He wondered belatedly in life
about that, but he’d also written that he could not learn from his own or
others experience.
