This following quotation came to me within the past 3 years, It's the closest example I've found anywhere that agrees with my conclusion, about an intelligence other than our own that exists and has attempted to make its self known, through a pattern that is very commonly experienced in this time slot, especially. My experience is not similar to Anne Barings except at the pattern level, the form. The content is quite different. Her visionary experiences began early in her life, mine began when I was nearly 50 and have continued when a new vein of 'thought' was initiated fully in 1984. It was a new world to me but it talked to me in a unique form. This is taken from one of her lectures:
Unexplored Dimensions of Consciousness and the Visionary Experience:
Parmeneides, Dante, and Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead.
Copyright © Anne Baring
Parmeneides, Dante, and Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead.
Copyright © Anne Baring
"So to end, I am absolutely certain through my own experience and my long study of visionary experience that a wider, deeper consciousness than our own is trying to reach us, trying to make itself known to us.
It has been doing so for millennia. Parmeneides, Dante and Jung are three individuals who have acted as conduits for this consciousness.
As long as this universal dimension of consciousness is denied existence and dissociated from our own, it will act in the manner of an unconscious autonomous complex, influencing us without our awareness in all kinds of ways. As long as we believe that consciousness originates in the brain, we will never reach what we are capable of becoming — people who, like these three remarkable men, are in conscious communion with metaphysical reality.
ABOUT ME About me, the author: I've had some professional therapy and counseling since 1983. I began to read books the first psychiatrist had in his office, (authored by William Glasser) and that triggered an ongoing pattern of reading nonfictional books on topics that were all new to me. I had neurological tests done in 1984 at Harborview in Seattle, and was seeing Dr. Robert Waters, a psychiatrist who ordered them.
By that point in time I'd become convinced I'd had brain damage as a result of an accident. I'd also been told I had 'severe menopausal syndrome' after a complete hysterectomy. I was not my usual normal and I was feeling very uncomfortable in my body, my mind was a belt of thought about a dream I'd had. I could not sleep because of the 'non-stop thinking'. I rarely dream. Thought about the dream was my first complaint, but in therapy that was, to my surprise ignored. Nobody ever asked about the dream or the stream of thought it produced.
ABOUT ME About me, the author: I've had some professional therapy and counseling since 1983. I began to read books the first psychiatrist had in his office, (authored by William Glasser) and that triggered an ongoing pattern of reading nonfictional books on topics that were all new to me. I had neurological tests done in 1984 at Harborview in Seattle, and was seeing Dr. Robert Waters, a psychiatrist who ordered them.
By that point in time I'd become convinced I'd had brain damage as a result of an accident. I'd also been told I had 'severe menopausal syndrome' after a complete hysterectomy. I was not my usual normal and I was feeling very uncomfortable in my body, my mind was a belt of thought about a dream I'd had. I could not sleep because of the 'non-stop thinking'. I rarely dream. Thought about the dream was my first complaint, but in therapy that was, to my surprise ignored. Nobody ever asked about the dream or the stream of thought it produced.
That was a fact that I didn't talk about to the professionals, I noticed that I could not initiate conversations or get answers to questions I had wanted to ask. I felt stifled, prevented, blocked which was exactly how I felt about the square dance caller in the dream.I couldn't talk to him but I had a powerful desire to talk to him. I noticed as time passed and much happened in my life that I could not initiate and maintain a conversation with my husband either.
The neurological test was an all day test. I was blindfolded in several tests and had to perform simple tasks with each hand. Other tests required doing something as rapidly as I could with each hand. Some required looking at a kind of television screen (this was in 1983 keep that in mind) and interpreting what I saw. That one took some time, because I couldn't do what I was supposed to do although I tried and my head felt like it would burst. Overall the tests seemed to be similar to intelligence tests I'd particularly enjoyed when I was a student in grade school, finding patterns, identifying sequences etc.
The results of the tests were interpreted to me and I was told that my
handedness had changed. My left hand was dominate now, I've been right handed
all my life and even then I wrote normally with my right hand. But my left hand
had rapidly done tests that my right hand struggled to do, or could not do. My
I.Q was high but I was also told that I did not have the problem solving skills
that are expected of that level. I remember hearing Dr. Waters say that and it
seemed I'd heard the same words before sometime in my life. It was
probably a deja vu event, which I will define as hearing something or seeing
something that is already present in some form in my mind/body/thought echoed
back to me from the exterior world.
WHO AM I?
Who am I? I'm a 74 years old female at this point in Time, 2006. I was born 1-2-32 during the depression to teen aged parents in a small town, Roachdale, Indiana. I work for the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, in Final Assembly. I'm thinking about retiring this year, but I haven't set the date yet. I am divorced, I've two sons and a daughter. By the time I was 13 years old I had come to love classical music from having heard snippets of it as background in cartoons and occasionally in movies but I was very much affected by Roy Acuff, Hank Snow and the Grand Ole Opry music that my dad chose to listen to. My mother did not listen to music basically. I can't remember seeing my mother or dad read a book. My dad read magazines, lots of them and what he read, I read also.
It is important to keep in mind if you manage to read what I've posted, and am attempting to describe, that when I was a very young girl, I read every science fiction pulp magazine my father bought and he probably bought every one that was published.. He bought them then hid them from me for his own personal reasons which I never understood. I had to hunt for them in order to be able to read them. That also is an important detail about my experience in 1984 and afterwards, that I had read so much science fiction but I had to find where he'd hid each magazine. Everything I read and had to imagine as I read those 'fictions' has basically materialized. It is also significant that I read boys books such as The Hardy Boys series and then later Zane Grey's books which put me into a 'strange' category at a very young age. The girls I went to school with read Nancy Drew and such books and although I tried to enjoy them, I could not.
I've grown up at the edge of darkness at sunset because one of my grandparents literally did not have electricity or an inside toilet. Remembering how they lived from sun up to sunset has become a significant part of my understanding about the past. They always had to be home well before dark to milk their cows and get the chickens locked up. Their mindset was close to being primitive, (outdated, obsolete from lack of education/information) and they were from Kentucky. As a tenant farmer he got a place to live, a garden patch and ten dollars cash money on Friday night. They were very poor, were kind, co-operative with each other and were generous with what they had. At night we lived by kerosene lamplight, but it was fun to us. And they were my family. But I didn't know anything about primitive mindsets. They were normal to me.
My other grandmother was a Nazarene whose influence on me was more than my own mother's, much to my surprise. I found that out as I lived my adult life. She lived quietly in the same town my parents lived. Her house was clean, she was a person that I never saw get excited, never heard raise her voice to anyone and I spent as much time with her as I could. She married a man who was an alcoholic (this information was kept from me so I had to find out about that 'disease' later). She reformed him eventually and this was accomplished without anger, without argument or recrimination in a way that may seem hilarious but it worked. I was a witness to how she retrieved him. My mother drove her to the nearest city, Greencastle, Indiana where they hunted him down, and he being a docile man, let himself be led to the car, driven home. He watched as they searched the house for his stash of alcohol, murmuring to himself, not raising his voice.
If I made a mistake my Nazarene grandmother didn't tell me about it, I had to recognize it myself. She laughed a bit when I told her what I'd done wrong. She laughed a bit as she said to me: "I thought you'd figure that out." (There was only one other person in my life that let me 'figure things out my self. A teacher made a lasting impression by not telling me I had lied to her about something. I got away with being a liar. It was a small thing that as a child I wouldn't know she would know I'd lied, but as an adult I would certainly recognize that. That memory was certainly stored away and was retrieved so that I had to think about it! That happened. Recognizing her restraint years later, I felt a deep sense of shame but of very great appreciation. I don't know what I would have said or done if she'd made me confront the truth.)
My point is that my grandmother was one oasis in my life. In her house anger, loud voices, daily punishments, arguments and other 'bad' things did not happen. Not even once. When I told my mother a few years before she died, how much I'd been influenced by her mothers' quietness and calm she was astonished. She did not remember her mother as being calm and quiet, her father was the quiet one. Later she changed her mind. Several times.
My home life was not very good but my impression of my life now that I am awake, is that I had at least one real angel as a teacher for the first three years I was in school. Very possibly they were all angels. I can see there was a consistency in how I was treated and how I felt in school, they seemed to take care of me; that makes me believe they knew my future,. Certain events happened when I was very young because of their apparent 'foreknowledge' of what was going to be required in my future. Little daily things, such as having the same teacher for 3 years; such as the teacher that told her version of the Christmas story; such as the first male teacher I had, who told us mathematics operated by fixed rules, that what's on one side of the '=' sign is the same as what's on the other side but the arrangement is different. Such seemingly insignificant events were critically important later in life.
One of my grandmother's last name was Risk, she was a Nazarene when I was young. These details are relevant to my experience in 1984 and afterwards although it's one embarrassingly trivial seeming relationship to Einstein's equation that her name was Risk. The relevance is from Albert Einstein's famous remark when a 'flaw' was found in his famous equation, 'Nonsense, God does not play dice!'. The name 'risk' is connected to my own experience that 'God' or whatever 'it' is that has been experienced and named as 'God' does in a manner of speaking, take risks, i.e. play games, rolling the 'dice' in a certain way that has caused an idea to be carried forwards constantly in Time and will eventually be understood. When I was well into my 60's and had learned a lot about symbols, literalness and the several patterns associated with a process of individualizing the individual life, I noticed the letters and symbols in Einstein's equation E=mc2 can be arranged so that it reads literally =2 c me. I had become convinced by then that 'God' has taken Risks, at least one of us.
To be even more explicit, it may be that the symptoms of depression and mania are connected strangely together in this 'game' of life.
There's a children's game where something is hidden and everyone tries to find it. The person who knows where the thing is hidden advises the hunters whether they are near or far from it by saying: "You're hot" or 'You are ice cold.' depending on whether the person is moving towards it or away from it. I have recently begun to believe that the near inertia of severely painful depression such as I felt in the very early 1980's worked to change my habits. Then alongside the inertia that made me feel so sluggish, a new kind of 'motor' drove my body, assuming control of my activities and passivities. I felt 'cold' in my 'normal' activities, everything that had been easy to do was difficult or impossible to do. There was an extra energy that motivated me to do things I never had done, or even thought about. I think of it as 'heat'. I was 'hot' in the new activities that somehow I did not feel I was 'willing' or 'wanting to happen'. I saw myself in a new way, not with a body but it was so new to me I couldn't name it for a decade as 'self observation'.
I believed a terrible blow on my head had caused brain damage, and I'd read that the brain can repair itself. In my simple minded way, this seemed to explain why I felt 'controlled' and felt forced to do things that normally were the opposite of what I would have done. The result was actually losing choice as well as personal volition. I saw and heard myself in a different way for several years, between 1982 and 1989, then slowly I began to believe I was understanding that I was being 'talked to', in a totally unsuspected form of language. This was quite confusing, painful and puzzling. That particular way of hearing and of seeing my self has altered in the nearly 3 decades since 1980, as though a kind of 'continuum' was being experienced, precisely timed always with events in the real world. The shape of this continuum is like the moebius band with a half twist, so that if one idea moves around it, the contentof the idea becomes its opposite. I made my first moebius band when I was about 9 years old after reading a definition in a dictionary or encyclopedia.
When 1984 approached, I had lived with and observed unknowingly, another person move along this 'continuum of changes' for nearly 30 years prior to 1984. Offhand remarks that were made to me repetitiously, very repetitiously, as well as other remarks that ought to have seemed very unusual were the only clues I had that this 'continuum' was shaping the life I lived when my mind was changed. I had neurological tests done in 1984 that were interpreted to me. My handedness had changed from right to left handed but the content of my habits also reversed. That took some time to realize.
I can name easily many experiences that for years I could not isolate, because everything seemed connected, nothing was separate. When I felt most nearly 'inert' there was a kind of 're-assigning' of my every day activities such that I began to do many things automatically, seeing myself do them as though I was watching another person. Occasionally I said things that I'd not thought about or planned to say, hearing myself say them but not being curious at that point in time, at the strange loss of volition. The 'loss of volition' in speech and body activity was something I had to discover and that requires noticing a certain kind of 'event' then learning to understand the 'message' in such events. They were being brought about by my own body at times, but more often there were many other people involved to the degree it cannot be said I was anything other than an observer and a kind of recorder of what a group of people we knew were doing. My attention was not my own, and eventually I noticed that the thing really began to explain itself. That included describing to me what I was doing physically in a way that was startling and almost hilarious when the first such 'event' happened. That event was a 'singularity', in the most real usage of the word. It was the first time I noticed that a long period of personal experience had built towards a single event in which the precise timing and utterly perfect interface of physical events with my 'mental world knowledge' was unmistakable. I carried a book to a safety meeting. It was a book I'd begun to read after not being able to get interested in it over a period of years, but I had not thrown it away either....
In 1984 a 'window in Time' was opened but it was a window that required a new kind of perception to identify it and although the new perception came directly through a family situation that I didn't suspect or know anything about, there were other people whose life interfaced perfectly with mine after about 1975.
The period between 1980 and 1984 was a long moment it seems to me now, a period of time that cannot be called 4 years, it was a long moment during which time many changes occurred in my body and mind along with a reversal of certain habits. The changes made life very difficult for me in ways I had to learn about, every detail of my life was affected after about 1983 but prior to that, the 'effect' was sporadic. The word 'effect' as I use it means I noticed something and felt 'strange' at the moment, but I didn't think about what caused me to feel 'strange' until a 'batch' or a kind of 'string of events' occurred. Then another effect caused me to really begin to wonder about what I was seeing and hearing and to try to understand it.
It was not difficult to discern within a period of about a year that another kind of 'role reversal' happened, then I began to understand what made it nearly impossible for me to choose to read anything fictional. I felt that my body was not my own, I realize now I felt detached, in a somewhat living comatose state of mind, but alert.
Until about 1983, I read very little other than fictions and I read them almost rabidly. The event that caused me to begin to read non-fictions, not willingly or because I was interested was a seemingly simple circumstance: I had begun to see a psychiatrist and in a session I noticed a book, Reality Therapy by a William Glasser. When I asked what it was about he asked if I'd like to read it so with unexpected difficulty I read it. My head felt as though it would burst at times and ordinarily I would have put the book aside but for some reason I felt compelled to read it. The words seemed to fall into a black hole, a term I remembered having read when I was in my mid twenties, One, Two, Three Infinity by George Gamow. It was about Einstein's theories, written for the layman and my new husband had just finished reading it. I could easily read every word in it but I noticed I couldn't understand anything in the book. This seemed mildly odd, to be able to read easily but not understand what I'd read. I had noticed that in the past, Shakespeare and poetry meant nothing to me.
When I returned that book he told me he had another by the same author and offered me the loan of it so I read it, with the same troubling effects on my body but the same somehow insistent urge to read it anyway. I did pause over one paragraph for some time, "Every behavior aberration is the result of an inability to take the responsibility or an evasion of responsibility to satisfy the needs of the organism." This was the first time I'd read any reference to the body as an 'organism'. When I returned that book he offered me another book, titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by an Oliver Sachs of whom I'd not heard. I took the book home and read a few pages then returned it unread because it seemed utterly absurd, beyond anything interesting or possible.
About 7 years later I read the book, because I had become aware from experiences in my actual real world life, that the idea in the first incident Dr. Sachs wrote was not only not absurd, or uninteresting, it was more than possible for a man to perceive his wife as a 'hat' that he donned, figuratively to some degree, but literally also. The literal sense itself had begun to become evident to me by 1988-89 and that is probably the most important attribute of my experiences prior to 1984.
My body had become somehow visible in a way I can barely hope to describe and the activities in my mind had also become strangely visible although I realized after several years that what I was 'looking at/listening to' in my mind was literally inexpressible. I could not speak a word of that content to myself or anyone else. My body was 'in the scene' but strangely, and I could not describe then, anything that I am writing about now, because I believe I was looking 'at' depths content, material that was literally deep in a separate place, a different memory unconnected to words that could be written or spoken at the time. I had an impulse that caused me to work, make an ongoing effort to capture one word and remember it long enough to write it down! Writing that content was possible before I could relate to what I wrote, or what I experienced in that level of mind!
My body did things I could see I didn't choose to do, but I watched and listened to everything it did, without any sense of concern for several years! I heard words come out of my mouth a few times in the early 1980's that I didn't even realize were quite odd and seemingly meaningless things for me to say.
But I remembered those 'odd, apparently meaningless things' and later wondered why I had said them. (These events happened in a limited way, only certain people and situations brought them out.)
It is likely (I can see this now but at the time it would not have been possible to 'see' ) that an instinct (a pattern) to search for and to know the 'truth' was 'initialized'. The 'role reversal' began in an every day relationship with a real person, whose 'change of life' had the effect of 'initializing' this pattern. It was a change that reversed 'mountains into molehills' almost instantly. Everything that had been 'monumentally important and significant' was reduced to such triviality that it was not necessary to be concerned about anything. A 'worry' filled mind became 'thought-less' and an other 'thought' -less' mind became 'thought full', literally, not symbolically. The unit of life is a male and a female, so 1 + 1 = 1 in this 'shared mindset' which I believe occurs frequently without anyone noticing the 'roots' and the effects of such a change.
There are certain facts about my earliest years that link with something I read in Paul Davies book, Other Worlds in 1986: "What is to happen in the future determines what happened in the past." In the same book, he mentioned 'the importance of an observer', but I didn't read that until 1986, so the idea I grew up and lived with in a particularly visible way is what shaped the few important memories of events that happened my earliest years.: These few events created a memory that re-occurred afterwards, flashing into my mind at odd moments so that eventually I noticed them and wondered about them. They were aimed towards the future, and the name of the 'idea' I was given in the first 'mindquake' was headed by the words: , "the importance of an observer".
Fictions that my father read were critical elements in my life after 1984. I believe he bought them all, then hid them from me for some reason, I've never known why. I used to hear people say that any fiction was 'escape material' but in 2004 I cannot see any fiction in the pulp magazines that were filled with the product of the authors so called 'imaginations'. They were violent adventures, a bit sexy which may account for why my father hid them from me, but I have witnessed the slow process of materialization into every day life of much of what I read in those 'fantasy world' stories. In the early 1980's I was trying to type on an old manual typewriter, agonizing and isolated in my misery because I could not type one line that I could read.
Three years later neurological tests were done that resulted in my becoming aware that my handedness had changed from right to left. When I got home, I picked up a pen to see if I could write with my left hand and was astonished to see my hand write my maiden name in reverse as fluidly as I would have done correctly with my right hand. The change of handedness was evidence of a change, one that literally caused me to see 'in reverse' in a certain way but my mind had changed, my body had changed, everything seemed different to me. My first computer was an amazingly inexpensive package, complete with a printer for 350 dollars.
WHO AM I?
Who am I? I'm a 74 years old female at this point in Time, 2006. I was born 1-2-32 during the depression to teen aged parents in a small town, Roachdale, Indiana. I work for the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, in Final Assembly. I'm thinking about retiring this year, but I haven't set the date yet. I am divorced, I've two sons and a daughter. By the time I was 13 years old I had come to love classical music from having heard snippets of it as background in cartoons and occasionally in movies but I was very much affected by Roy Acuff, Hank Snow and the Grand Ole Opry music that my dad chose to listen to. My mother did not listen to music basically. I can't remember seeing my mother or dad read a book. My dad read magazines, lots of them and what he read, I read also.
It is important to keep in mind if you manage to read what I've posted, and am attempting to describe, that when I was a very young girl, I read every science fiction pulp magazine my father bought and he probably bought every one that was published.. He bought them then hid them from me for his own personal reasons which I never understood. I had to hunt for them in order to be able to read them. That also is an important detail about my experience in 1984 and afterwards, that I had read so much science fiction but I had to find where he'd hid each magazine. Everything I read and had to imagine as I read those 'fictions' has basically materialized. It is also significant that I read boys books such as The Hardy Boys series and then later Zane Grey's books which put me into a 'strange' category at a very young age. The girls I went to school with read Nancy Drew and such books and although I tried to enjoy them, I could not.
I've grown up at the edge of darkness at sunset because one of my grandparents literally did not have electricity or an inside toilet. Remembering how they lived from sun up to sunset has become a significant part of my understanding about the past. They always had to be home well before dark to milk their cows and get the chickens locked up. Their mindset was close to being primitive, (outdated, obsolete from lack of education/information) and they were from Kentucky. As a tenant farmer he got a place to live, a garden patch and ten dollars cash money on Friday night. They were very poor, were kind, co-operative with each other and were generous with what they had. At night we lived by kerosene lamplight, but it was fun to us. And they were my family. But I didn't know anything about primitive mindsets. They were normal to me.
My other grandmother was a Nazarene whose influence on me was more than my own mother's, much to my surprise. I found that out as I lived my adult life. She lived quietly in the same town my parents lived. Her house was clean, she was a person that I never saw get excited, never heard raise her voice to anyone and I spent as much time with her as I could. She married a man who was an alcoholic (this information was kept from me so I had to find out about that 'disease' later). She reformed him eventually and this was accomplished without anger, without argument or recrimination in a way that may seem hilarious but it worked. I was a witness to how she retrieved him. My mother drove her to the nearest city, Greencastle, Indiana where they hunted him down, and he being a docile man, let himself be led to the car, driven home. He watched as they searched the house for his stash of alcohol, murmuring to himself, not raising his voice.
If I made a mistake my Nazarene grandmother didn't tell me about it, I had to recognize it myself. She laughed a bit when I told her what I'd done wrong. She laughed a bit as she said to me: "I thought you'd figure that out." (There was only one other person in my life that let me 'figure things out my self. A teacher made a lasting impression by not telling me I had lied to her about something. I got away with being a liar. It was a small thing that as a child I wouldn't know she would know I'd lied, but as an adult I would certainly recognize that. That memory was certainly stored away and was retrieved so that I had to think about it! That happened. Recognizing her restraint years later, I felt a deep sense of shame but of very great appreciation. I don't know what I would have said or done if she'd made me confront the truth.)
My point is that my grandmother was one oasis in my life. In her house anger, loud voices, daily punishments, arguments and other 'bad' things did not happen. Not even once. When I told my mother a few years before she died, how much I'd been influenced by her mothers' quietness and calm she was astonished. She did not remember her mother as being calm and quiet, her father was the quiet one. Later she changed her mind. Several times.
My home life was not very good but my impression of my life now that I am awake, is that I had at least one real angel as a teacher for the first three years I was in school. Very possibly they were all angels. I can see there was a consistency in how I was treated and how I felt in school, they seemed to take care of me; that makes me believe they knew my future,. Certain events happened when I was very young because of their apparent 'foreknowledge' of what was going to be required in my future. Little daily things, such as having the same teacher for 3 years; such as the teacher that told her version of the Christmas story; such as the first male teacher I had, who told us mathematics operated by fixed rules, that what's on one side of the '=' sign is the same as what's on the other side but the arrangement is different. Such seemingly insignificant events were critically important later in life.
One of my grandmother's last name was Risk, she was a Nazarene when I was young. These details are relevant to my experience in 1984 and afterwards although it's one embarrassingly trivial seeming relationship to Einstein's equation that her name was Risk. The relevance is from Albert Einstein's famous remark when a 'flaw' was found in his famous equation, 'Nonsense, God does not play dice!'. The name 'risk' is connected to my own experience that 'God' or whatever 'it' is that has been experienced and named as 'God' does in a manner of speaking, take risks, i.e. play games, rolling the 'dice' in a certain way that has caused an idea to be carried forwards constantly in Time and will eventually be understood. When I was well into my 60's and had learned a lot about symbols, literalness and the several patterns associated with a process of individualizing the individual life, I noticed the letters and symbols in Einstein's equation E=mc2 can be arranged so that it reads literally =2 c me. I had become convinced by then that 'God' has taken Risks, at least one of us.
To be even more explicit, it may be that the symptoms of depression and mania are connected strangely together in this 'game' of life.
There's a children's game where something is hidden and everyone tries to find it. The person who knows where the thing is hidden advises the hunters whether they are near or far from it by saying: "You're hot" or 'You are ice cold.' depending on whether the person is moving towards it or away from it. I have recently begun to believe that the near inertia of severely painful depression such as I felt in the very early 1980's worked to change my habits. Then alongside the inertia that made me feel so sluggish, a new kind of 'motor' drove my body, assuming control of my activities and passivities. I felt 'cold' in my 'normal' activities, everything that had been easy to do was difficult or impossible to do. There was an extra energy that motivated me to do things I never had done, or even thought about. I think of it as 'heat'. I was 'hot' in the new activities that somehow I did not feel I was 'willing' or 'wanting to happen'. I saw myself in a new way, not with a body but it was so new to me I couldn't name it for a decade as 'self observation'.
I believed a terrible blow on my head had caused brain damage, and I'd read that the brain can repair itself. In my simple minded way, this seemed to explain why I felt 'controlled' and felt forced to do things that normally were the opposite of what I would have done. The result was actually losing choice as well as personal volition. I saw and heard myself in a different way for several years, between 1982 and 1989, then slowly I began to believe I was understanding that I was being 'talked to', in a totally unsuspected form of language. This was quite confusing, painful and puzzling. That particular way of hearing and of seeing my self has altered in the nearly 3 decades since 1980, as though a kind of 'continuum' was being experienced, precisely timed always with events in the real world. The shape of this continuum is like the moebius band with a half twist, so that if one idea moves around it, the contentof the idea becomes its opposite. I made my first moebius band when I was about 9 years old after reading a definition in a dictionary or encyclopedia.
When 1984 approached, I had lived with and observed unknowingly, another person move along this 'continuum of changes' for nearly 30 years prior to 1984. Offhand remarks that were made to me repetitiously, very repetitiously, as well as other remarks that ought to have seemed very unusual were the only clues I had that this 'continuum' was shaping the life I lived when my mind was changed. I had neurological tests done in 1984 that were interpreted to me. My handedness had changed from right to left handed but the content of my habits also reversed. That took some time to realize.
I can name easily many experiences that for years I could not isolate, because everything seemed connected, nothing was separate. When I felt most nearly 'inert' there was a kind of 're-assigning' of my every day activities such that I began to do many things automatically, seeing myself do them as though I was watching another person. Occasionally I said things that I'd not thought about or planned to say, hearing myself say them but not being curious at that point in time, at the strange loss of volition. The 'loss of volition' in speech and body activity was something I had to discover and that requires noticing a certain kind of 'event' then learning to understand the 'message' in such events. They were being brought about by my own body at times, but more often there were many other people involved to the degree it cannot be said I was anything other than an observer and a kind of recorder of what a group of people we knew were doing. My attention was not my own, and eventually I noticed that the thing really began to explain itself. That included describing to me what I was doing physically in a way that was startling and almost hilarious when the first such 'event' happened. That event was a 'singularity', in the most real usage of the word. It was the first time I noticed that a long period of personal experience had built towards a single event in which the precise timing and utterly perfect interface of physical events with my 'mental world knowledge' was unmistakable. I carried a book to a safety meeting. It was a book I'd begun to read after not being able to get interested in it over a period of years, but I had not thrown it away either....
In 1984 a 'window in Time' was opened but it was a window that required a new kind of perception to identify it and although the new perception came directly through a family situation that I didn't suspect or know anything about, there were other people whose life interfaced perfectly with mine after about 1975.
The period between 1980 and 1984 was a long moment it seems to me now, a period of time that cannot be called 4 years, it was a long moment during which time many changes occurred in my body and mind along with a reversal of certain habits. The changes made life very difficult for me in ways I had to learn about, every detail of my life was affected after about 1983 but prior to that, the 'effect' was sporadic. The word 'effect' as I use it means I noticed something and felt 'strange' at the moment, but I didn't think about what caused me to feel 'strange' until a 'batch' or a kind of 'string of events' occurred. Then another effect caused me to really begin to wonder about what I was seeing and hearing and to try to understand it.
It was not difficult to discern within a period of about a year that another kind of 'role reversal' happened, then I began to understand what made it nearly impossible for me to choose to read anything fictional. I felt that my body was not my own, I realize now I felt detached, in a somewhat living comatose state of mind, but alert.
Until about 1983, I read very little other than fictions and I read them almost rabidly. The event that caused me to begin to read non-fictions, not willingly or because I was interested was a seemingly simple circumstance: I had begun to see a psychiatrist and in a session I noticed a book, Reality Therapy by a William Glasser. When I asked what it was about he asked if I'd like to read it so with unexpected difficulty I read it. My head felt as though it would burst at times and ordinarily I would have put the book aside but for some reason I felt compelled to read it. The words seemed to fall into a black hole, a term I remembered having read when I was in my mid twenties, One, Two, Three Infinity by George Gamow. It was about Einstein's theories, written for the layman and my new husband had just finished reading it. I could easily read every word in it but I noticed I couldn't understand anything in the book. This seemed mildly odd, to be able to read easily but not understand what I'd read. I had noticed that in the past, Shakespeare and poetry meant nothing to me.
When I returned that book he told me he had another by the same author and offered me the loan of it so I read it, with the same troubling effects on my body but the same somehow insistent urge to read it anyway. I did pause over one paragraph for some time, "Every behavior aberration is the result of an inability to take the responsibility or an evasion of responsibility to satisfy the needs of the organism." This was the first time I'd read any reference to the body as an 'organism'. When I returned that book he offered me another book, titled The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by an Oliver Sachs of whom I'd not heard. I took the book home and read a few pages then returned it unread because it seemed utterly absurd, beyond anything interesting or possible.
About 7 years later I read the book, because I had become aware from experiences in my actual real world life, that the idea in the first incident Dr. Sachs wrote was not only not absurd, or uninteresting, it was more than possible for a man to perceive his wife as a 'hat' that he donned, figuratively to some degree, but literally also. The literal sense itself had begun to become evident to me by 1988-89 and that is probably the most important attribute of my experiences prior to 1984.
My body had become somehow visible in a way I can barely hope to describe and the activities in my mind had also become strangely visible although I realized after several years that what I was 'looking at/listening to' in my mind was literally inexpressible. I could not speak a word of that content to myself or anyone else. My body was 'in the scene' but strangely, and I could not describe then, anything that I am writing about now, because I believe I was looking 'at' depths content, material that was literally deep in a separate place, a different memory unconnected to words that could be written or spoken at the time. I had an impulse that caused me to work, make an ongoing effort to capture one word and remember it long enough to write it down! Writing that content was possible before I could relate to what I wrote, or what I experienced in that level of mind!
My body did things I could see I didn't choose to do, but I watched and listened to everything it did, without any sense of concern for several years! I heard words come out of my mouth a few times in the early 1980's that I didn't even realize were quite odd and seemingly meaningless things for me to say.
But I remembered those 'odd, apparently meaningless things' and later wondered why I had said them. (These events happened in a limited way, only certain people and situations brought them out.)
It is likely (I can see this now but at the time it would not have been possible to 'see' ) that an instinct (a pattern) to search for and to know the 'truth' was 'initialized'. The 'role reversal' began in an every day relationship with a real person, whose 'change of life' had the effect of 'initializing' this pattern. It was a change that reversed 'mountains into molehills' almost instantly. Everything that had been 'monumentally important and significant' was reduced to such triviality that it was not necessary to be concerned about anything. A 'worry' filled mind became 'thought-less' and an other 'thought' -less' mind became 'thought full', literally, not symbolically. The unit of life is a male and a female, so 1 + 1 = 1 in this 'shared mindset' which I believe occurs frequently without anyone noticing the 'roots' and the effects of such a change.
There are certain facts about my earliest years that link with something I read in Paul Davies book, Other Worlds in 1986: "What is to happen in the future determines what happened in the past." In the same book, he mentioned 'the importance of an observer', but I didn't read that until 1986, so the idea I grew up and lived with in a particularly visible way is what shaped the few important memories of events that happened my earliest years.: These few events created a memory that re-occurred afterwards, flashing into my mind at odd moments so that eventually I noticed them and wondered about them. They were aimed towards the future, and the name of the 'idea' I was given in the first 'mindquake' was headed by the words: , "the importance of an observer".
Fictions that my father read were critical elements in my life after 1984. I believe he bought them all, then hid them from me for some reason, I've never known why. I used to hear people say that any fiction was 'escape material' but in 2004 I cannot see any fiction in the pulp magazines that were filled with the product of the authors so called 'imaginations'. They were violent adventures, a bit sexy which may account for why my father hid them from me, but I have witnessed the slow process of materialization into every day life of much of what I read in those 'fantasy world' stories. In the early 1980's I was trying to type on an old manual typewriter, agonizing and isolated in my misery because I could not type one line that I could read.
Three years later neurological tests were done that resulted in my becoming aware that my handedness had changed from right to left. When I got home, I picked up a pen to see if I could write with my left hand and was astonished to see my hand write my maiden name in reverse as fluidly as I would have done correctly with my right hand. The change of handedness was evidence of a change, one that literally caused me to see 'in reverse' in a certain way but my mind had changed, my body had changed, everything seemed different to me. My first computer was an amazingly inexpensive package, complete with a printer for 350 dollars.
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