Easter Sunday 2011, I Read Matthew 13 and understand "illustrations'

Click to enlarge the image.

These images show a reflection of a box that fascinated me after I noticed a third invisible compartment in it that was useless and is invisible from some perspectives. It triggered a variety of object generated 'thought' about what is 'invisible' and why its visible in a reflection from the object. The use-less compartment in the box is visible in the upper image, left side bottom. I had a moebius band that was clear plastic and I had photographed it  in some strange places, laid it on snow, hung it from a tree branch, my impulses were directing me to do such purposeless things.

 I was watching my body from a new eye and ear as I lived my ordinary life. 

 What  did  Jesus mean when he talked in 'illustrations' to the crowds that followed him and then in  private the disciples asked why he spoke to them by the use of  illustrations'? 

What does this quotation refer to, if it's not a reference to a special 'sense'? THE BIBLE:


"Let the one that has an ear listen to what THE Spirit sayeth unto* the CHURCHES(CONGREGATIONS). To him that conquers I will give some of the hidden manna. and I will give him a white pebble and upon the pebble a new name written which no one knows except the one receiving it.

A conversation between myself and a person that is 'strictly material world oriented' caused me to read Matthew last week. As I read chapter 13, there was a 'sense' behind my ordinary thought that what we experience today in a different way, pathological thinking in some cases,  was ordinary when the Bible was the most shared book, even before printing presses made it available to everyone. 

 Matthew 13:3- 13:9 "A sower went out to sow; and as he was sewing some (seeds) fell alongside the road and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell upon the rocky places where they did not have much soil and at once they sprang up because of not having any depth of soil. But when the sun rose they were scorched and because of not having any roots they withered. Others too fell among the thorns and the thorns came up and choked them. Still others fell upon the fine soil and they began to yield fruit, this one a hundredfold, that one sixty, the other thirty." "Let him that has ears listen. " His disciples asked why he spoke by the use of 'illustrations".

13:11 In reply he said: "To you it is granted to understand the sacred secrets of the kingdom of the heavens, but to those people it is not granted. For whoever has, more will be given him and he will be made to abound; but whosoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in illustrations because looking they look in vain, and hearing they hear in vain, neither do they get the sense of it.  

Then He explains the 'illustration' of the sower and its not about seeds at all:
13:18 thru 13: 24  "You then listen to the illustration of the man that sowed. Where anyone hears the word of the kingdom but does not get the sense of it the 'wicked one' comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is the one sown alongside the road. As for the one sown upon the rocky places this is the one hearing the word and accepting it with joy. Yet he has no root in himself but continues for a time and after tribulation or persecution has arisen on account of the word he is at once stumbled. And as for the one sown among thorns this is the one hearing the word but the anxiety of this system of things and the deceptive power of riches choke the word and he becomes unfruitful. And as for the one sown upon the fine soil, this is the one hearing the word and getting the sense of it, who really does bear fruit and produces this one, one hundred fold, that one sixty, the other thirty."
 Then he tells other 'illustrations'  based on what He had already said: "The kingdom of the heavens has become 'like' a man that sowed fine seed in his field. While men were sleeping his enemy came and oversewed  weeds among the wheat and left".

He  further describes the 'kingdom of the heavens'  by the use of 'illustrations'.
The kingdom of the heavens is 'like' a tiny mustard seed that in maturity is a fine lodging for the birds of heaven.
The kingdom of the heavens is 'like' leaven which a woman hid in three large measures of flour until the whole mass is fermented."
Then speaking to the  crowds by using 'illustrations'  which He says He does to fulfil prophecy, after dismissing the crowds  His disciples came to Him and asked that He explain the 'illustration' of the weeds in the field. In response He said: "The sower of the fine seed is the Son of man, the field is the world. As for the fine seed these are the sons of the kingdom but the weeds are the sons of the wicked one and the enemy that sowed them is the Devil.The harvest is a conclusion of a system of things and the reapers are angels. Therefore just as the weeds are collected and burned with fire so it will be in the conclusion of the system of things.The Son of man will send forth his angels and they will collect out from his kingdom all things that cause stumbling  and persons doing lawlessness and they will pitch them into the furnace;  there is where their weeping and gnashing of their teeth will be. At that time the righteous ones will shine as brightly  as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let him that has ears listen.

Then He  continues:  "The kingdom of the heavens is 'like' a treasure hidden in a field which a man found and  for the joy he has he sells everything he owns  to buy the field. "
"The kingdom of the heavens is 'like' a traveling merchant seeking pearls who sees one fine pearl of great value  and promptly sold all he had and bought it."
"The kingdom of the heavens is 'like' a dragnet let down into the sea, gathering up every kind of fish, the fine are kept and the unsuitable ones thrown  away."
"That is how it will  be in the conclusions of the system of things...." "Did you get the 'sense' of all these things."  His disciples answer "Yes."  then He says: another ' illustration':
"That being the case every public instructor when taught respecting the kingdom of the heavens  is 'like' a man, a householder who brings out of  his treasure store things that are new and old."

What did Jesus intend to convey when he talked in 'illustrations' to the crowds that followed him and then in private the disciples asked why he spoke to them by the use of illustrations?
I believe He introduced the very idea of a  'kingdom of the heavens' and what It is 'like', what it 'is' and how It was experienced even 2000+ years ago when a new 'system of things' was begun.

I'm thinking after reading Matthew that the 'illustrations" are the use of  art  is to force the mind to think of 'things'  that cannot be seen. Recently I read the same remark in a  graphic cartoon book about calculus: "What is the use of calculus?" The answer was: "To force the mind to think of things that cannot be seen."

More on this topic will follow. I believe the sacred secrets of the kingdom of the heavens are revealed by the transcendental function, as Freud described what he believed is a function of mind that I've mentioned several times. This function creates 'ambiguous sayings' and more, much  than that, a conversation between an individual and the kingdom of the heavens.

I'd like to suggest Maurice Nicoll's book, The Mark or The New Man  and his Living Time and Integration of the Life but a willingness to learn  more about  history and origins of our modern psychiatry  is necessary to 'get the sense' of what the 'extra sense' conveys and how it conveys information  to an individual. A specific individual.

An example, a personal experience, this was the first of its kind' happened to me  in the summer of 1984,  I was sewing, emersed in thought one day. The television  was on  but ignored until my attention was plucked from my intense reveries to the words  coming  from the television: "The second world is here and in the second world all the rules are changed." It was shocking, literally to hear those words. For a few minutes I thought about how advertisements didn't have to make sense, then I went back to my sewing. Until the words re-occurred into my thought along with memories of a few events that had happened fairly recently when I'd felt 'wierd', dizzy. They were just normal events but somehow something 'else' than normal. Then the words began to make sense, they were being said directly to me,'who had the ear' then. They explained the 'new world' that was beginning to speak to me.  It was a few weeks before the Los Angeles Olympic Games opened that it happened, that I heard the television talk to me the way a person would but it  was only an advertisment for a new automobile. Or was it the 'extra sense' at work?  It was both. It was only the beginning of a long process of synchronization between my inner content and the material world's events

I repeat this as I do other ideas that  need to be emphasized and held in conscious understanding, as a foundation for what I write,  its from a book, Oedipus authored by Patrick Mullahy and its only in a Footnote, (!!!!) page 507. I believe 'illustrations' and 'reflections' (both definitions) create the 'voice' attribute of events.


"Often in explaining his ideas Freud resorts to analogies or conceptions from the physical world. Another conception of his is “that among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity—although we possess no means of measuring it—a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75"

The Amazing Martin Gardner. revised 6-15-2010

This was intended to be a short post because I wanted to write something about Martin Gardner, who has just left us. I didn't know anything about him when I spotted The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix in 1993 and bought it because it had some interesting puzzles on the jacket. As I read the book I experienced a bundle of the most unexplainable  synchronizations between what he wrote as Dr. Matrix in the book and some experiences I'd had. I called him and asked if I could write to him and being the open hearted  man he was he told me he'd like to hear from me.  We exchanged a few letters afterwards but its not like we got to be chums though.

I can't think of the exact words I'd like to  use to describe how I felt about him, but coincidentally I just read them in a book I'm reading: Many Dimensions by Charles Williams. He can write the kind of words I wish I could. Here they are although they are about a character in the book because immediately after reading them a  thought occurred to me that they described the Martin Gardner that offered to communicate with a 'crank'. Until I got a letter from him I didn't know what a 'crank' is!!! And I didn't know about 'numerology' either!!!
 "But Lord Arglay,(Martin Gardner)  at once in contact  and detached, at once faithless and believing, beheld all these things in the light of that fastidiousness and ironical good will which, outside of mystical experience, is the finest and noblest capacity man has developed  in and against the universe. 

I've never read a more concise description of a person that has learned to live between the 'interaction of opposites'Those words describe how I see Martin Gardner, as I experienced him; he was a poised point of view between opposites writing from a uniquely unsophisticated way of seeing relationships and patterns that others' wouldn't know about unless he made his observations public.   As I mentioned already I chanced to spot The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix and was interested in the puzzles on the cover, then I read the book not realizing Dr. Matrix was a fictional man. I'd never heard of Martin Gardner so I didn't know who I was writing to, and he didn't get mad when he read my letter. He did get a bit perturbed when I mentioned Jung, Swedenborg and synchronicity, just a bit.

It seemed to me that the language of whatever the 'zeitgiest' really is happened to both of us, 'it' used both of us when just by chance I noticed some puzzles on the jacket of The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix and a mild curiosity caused me to buy the book. On the jacket liner Mr. Gardner said that the name of HAL the computer in 2001 Space Odessey is one letter behind IBM in the alphabet. That's quite a coincidence!  He apparently asked Arthur C. Clarke if that was an intentional choice and it was emphatically stated that it was not. They were both skeptics but it seems to me Mr. Gardner hesitated to be totally skeptical about whether we are alone in the universe. If there is a God, we are not alone in the universe. He left that door open.

 An almost unbelievable  bundle of 'coincidences' happened when I read the vignettes  by Dr. Matrix about patterns in pi, 3.1415926535... that caused me to call him, then write a letter, then go back to reading the book, then read another vignette a 'hidden order' in the numbers: 8549176320. I saw my mind operate on those numbers and produce a detail about my life that I wouldn't have recognized.  The events  bundled to produce a single event that could have been 'chance' but probably was not.

 I've been attempting to explain 'synchronicity' the way  F. David Peat somewhat described it, as an 'interactive force'. However he did not identify the 'force' with a process in life, an individuation process that C. G. Jung named 'individuationn'. I had come to believe Jung was obviously influenced by having read Swedenborg,  who used the name 'regeneration' for the same process.  That's my opinion but I wouldn't suggest reading Swedenborg until AFTER reading Robert Monroes' three books, in their order: Journey's out  of Body; Far Journeys; Ultimate Journey.  Ultimate Journey is a real surprise but it prepared me for reading about Swedenborg's description of what he experienced at times,  when he was 'yet in my bed'.

Mr. Gardner was no believer in Jung, Koestler, or Swedenborg as he informed me when he answered my letter to him, all of whom I mentioned in my attempt to describe  to him the synchronization between the different vignettes in his book and events in my past.

I'd had extra ordinary experiences with pi. Not the least of which is that after 2-11-85 , I worked for Boeing in the Fabrication Division in Auburn, Washington and there's a model of the pi symbol in their courtyard.  In 1989 I'd had what I named for lack of a better word, a 'pi quake' that revealed a hidden pattern in the first 10 numbers in pi: 3141592653... . If   14, 1 5, 92, are 'cross summed', the result is:  356 2 653..., the numbers mirror from the center outwards, but that's just a part of what was revealed in a flash when the mindquake  followed, at first glance. Time was different then.  I didn't look for anything when I glanced at the back of Petr Beckmann's History Of Pi and saw 10,000 of 100,265  decimals that had been calculated in 1962.

The History of Pi is a book  I read only because I worked for Boeing and it used to be their 'pride in excellence' award program logo:  PIE. An unexpected mass of information that I realized nobody else would every understand was revealed when I glanced at the first rectangle of decimals in the back of Petr Beckman's History of Pi.

I  had just read the copyright statement, then  paused to wonder why 100,265 decimals had been calculated rather than a nice round number like 100,000. Then I turned the page back and noticed 265 in the first 10 decimals, and then.... a sudden extremely rapid slide show-like shifting of numbers revealed patterns and relationships that I knew immediately could only be recognized by me, with my particular habits,  memories and  especially my experiences in life. The number 651 was everywhere, explicitly and coded, that was nothing I looked for but a habit I'd had since I was 9 years old was obviously what created these relationships, where 14 = 5; 15 = 6. 651 was familiar to me.  That number and  permutations of 256/651 had begun to come to my attention strangely over a span of years  after I bought a 1979 Datsun 210 that was already tabbed as ETW 651. At first glance ETW generated Extra Terrestrial Woman, to my amusement, as spontaneously as BYOB produces 'bring your own bottle'. It seemed likely Mr. Gardner's mind worked naturally that way, he had 'mindquakes' all the time.

 The kind of 'quake' that I experienced just happens, I can't make them happen and  they are always unexpected but what makes them 'strange' is that they generate information that shakes up my world view, exposing something that was hidden. They were perhaps normal every day events to Mr. Gardner because I had become aware that "what you get used to gets to be normal". To me they were not frequent events.

It began when I read the vignette on page 59 about a 'curious reflection in pi' then  called him, then read further in the book. On page 72-73 Dr. Matrix tells about a 'woman named Betty who had a compulsion to put things in order, who was the first person to guess what the hidden order was in these 10  numbers: 8549176320'. That was a bit of surprise to me because I'd just written about a hidden order in 10 numbers: 3141592653... , my  name is Betty and at the time I was driven by a need to put things in order, but  I'm not talking about housekeeping. I was trying to figure things out, and they were not material things.

When I glanced at 8549176320 I couldn't guess what the hidden order was but as I looked at the numbers, I 'saw' 917 slip directly below 854 and I recognized 8547198, my telephone number. Read 854 then down to 719 then up to 8, we'd had the number for a decade by then. 1-2-3  sum to 6, they are the numbers in my birth day/year (1-02-32) and obviously  0 was my point of origin.

Thus 8549176320 was information about me, very specifically. I didn't look for or expect to see that. The kind of 'seeing' that happened to expose my phone number is depicted in Mercury Rising, in a scene where an autistic boy looks at a puzzle, the numbers shift around then he goes to the phone ,  dials a number then says: "You are a Stranger." A hidden message had been revealed, he recognized  the message and made a phone call that wasn't supposed to ever be made. The movie gave me an  idea because until computers wre so much a part of every day life I had no prior sense of what a 'slide show' was. The scened in the movie was  very similar to what happened to me. Habits I've had since I was 9 years old made the slide show happen. That kind of mental activity, visible and unwilled may be an explanation for how Mr. Gardner 'saw' as Dr. Matrix.

II couldn't see the 'hidden order' in the 10 numbers so  had to look in the answers at the back of the book. I didn't see the hidden order in 8549176320. I couldn't see  that the numbers were arranged alphabetically the way they are spelled. eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, three,two, zero. But I did 'see' that after my phone number, 854 7198, the number 6 is the sum of the 1,2,3, the numbers in my birthdate, 32 is the year I was born and 0 was my point of origin.  I had observed my hand write a poem about zero as a point of origin one day when I was at work. The 'interactive force' had certain been involved in how that poem was written but thats' another topic, observing one's body from a 'once removed' perspective.

When I read the above paragraph in Williams book, I was sitting by my window, alternately watching the torrents of rain and reading the book. Charles Williams can create scenes with words that carry as much information as a mathematical formula. It's just a different kind of information.  Martin Gardner was very different, but he produced an 'effect' in his own style, that's obvious. So many other people felt something from reading  his books but I'm no mathematician. When  I told a co-worker about the sequence of events, he suggested I read The Ambidextrous Universe. also by Martin Gardner and that was a different kind of coincidence too. Reading words must in some way affect the mind, and even 'feed' the mind. freeing up some kind of information that's 'bound up' until it meets its exact match.

Some information can't be conveyed directly, I'm not the first or only one to find out that body experiences are where education about reality happens, but reading some of Martin Gardner's books triggered many such events. The Ambidextrous Universe, The Magic Numbers of Dr. Matrix were great works, written by a  man that could write about how opposites are necessary to point towards that which is invisible, but which creates them.