Thinking the unthinkable, amended 6-4-2010

"The human consciousness in addition to the  function of  the exploring of the outside world is burdened with the additional task of discovering the sequestered inner world." Norman O.  Brown, Life Against Death, pp 171

The purpose of this post is to describe an Event that happened about 22 years ago after I closed a book I'd just finished reading: The Lord of Thought, it's an old book by Emmett and Dougall. I don't remember where I found it.  I was reading almost constantly, books that caught my attention in various ways at garage sales, swap meets, and only occasionally (thank heavens) by dropping in front of me, open to a certain page.

The authors purpose was to isolate the differences between the life of Jesus and ordinary men.  "What was unique about that life?", was the question the authors tried to answer.

After reading the last page, closing the book  an 'event' happened that produced in my mind ideas and information that was to  me, unthinkable because the ideas were all  ultimate heresy. They had very little to do with religion as its generally put before us. The result of the 'event' overall was that religion is about whether we are alone in the universe. I had never thought such a thought.  I felt a kind of terror at how unthinkable the ideas were;  how unspeakable they were, literally. The authors had not  written any of the ideas that bloomed in my mind, yet they all seemed obviously true, but unspeakable for many reasons, one of which was literally that when this 'event' happened I was unable to articulate or write about  content in my thought as I do now. I discovered space in the mind by having to reach the point where I could relate 'now' to what was really in my thought, when it emerged. That kind of distance is not possible to see, it has to be experienced. I was in pure experience when I had the impulse to read The Lord of Thought.  

I had the sense I didn't 'think' that information, or create those ideas; they were given to me, they flooded into my thought world.

The influx (that's Swedenborg's term but it fits) of ideas began with the authors primary idea of identifying what was unique but they had not mentioned any of the literally shocking ideas that came into my mind. The 'net effects' of that life were not primary to the authors but to me they were. His life had several unique facts that I"d not thought about, only one of which was that it had inserted  a universal 'zero' in Time on this planet.  He had known the future many times. But he also knew the past. And only that one life distinctly related to a 'kingdom of heaven which is within you'.

The one very unique difference in his life was that he and no other religious personality that I knew about had made a distinct reference to a 'father in heaven' and a 'heaven which is within 'you'.  You is a plural and singular word.

His last words "It is accomplished." were aligned with many facts that are obvious now but in 1988 were not. The planet is now zero in space, a kind of 'Cartesian point' in space from which we were beginning to explore space. The International Space Station was a reality, which seemed strangely linked to that point when "It is accomplished." was spoken;  it referenced a future event that was now possible.  The idea that when Stonehenge was  new, there was a purpose at work, a plan was initiated and a goal was established for an event to happen far ahead in Time. It was somewhat possible for almost anyone, even me to realize by then that Time is variable.

We had begun to experience in life not in words written in a book,  the apparently infinite space between one second and the next in computer speeds; contact with extra terrestrials was linked to 'the heaven within you'  in my mind and that alone was terrifying and bizarrely simplistic.

 There were several unspeakable ideas in that influx, primarily associating that   life  with many other 'net effects'.  But the 'kingdom of heaven is within you'. was the most distinct and literal.

When I saw Field of Dreams almost a decade later the idea occurred to me that the way the corn field seemed to talk in the film could have been how the snake in the garden of Eden  had seemed to talk and I'd had many experiences involving 'projection' in the phase where it is exteriorized perception. I had experienced that  there's a faculty of mind that 'projects' inner content outwards to the material world  but it's a phase on a continuum where there are points of change. It's a kind of self self observation that is somewhat distinct. That mechanism had become one I knew about from experiences in my life, and from people I knew. That was an additional level of heresy, to believe that the mechanism of projection was depicted in the Bible in many other stories. "Let him that hath an ear, listen to what the spirit sayeth unto the churches." The spirit talks to the churches, all of them.

I was unable to believe "I" thought that event; it was a happening to me.  It was not the only kind of  'event' I was trying to understand at that point. The authors had not written anything about the ideas that poured into my mind so suddenly, as though timed to happen just when I closed the book.

It's not easy to describe how many times my 'thought' has been altered by changes that 'color' what I hear, what I see outside my body  and even how my  own thought was 'turned around' and experienced as being 'said' to me, not created by me but I'll have to try to do that. Time and different levels in the mind don't announce themselves, certain subtle relationships have to be noticed. I had experienced a very few events where it seemed Time was slowed down  and a couple where Time was extremely rapid in comparison to 'normal'. That was difficult to notice but it became obvious that a symptom I'd read about, 'racing thought' doesn't really race.  That particular content can't be retrieved in memory after it moves through the mind. That was an unexpected fact  that  some perhaps most thought content was so far from speech.

Swedenborg's remarks about 'thought nearest to speech' and 'thought that falls into speech' were clues when I read them. But I was driven by a kind of motor that focused my attention on trying to capture and hold one word of certain thought in my mind long enough to write it down. I learned about distance in my mind from that task. It was a task that carried it's own motor that drove me to do that but some toddlers I've known seem to have been driven in the same way.

I realized that certain thought is galaxies away from words that can be spoken when I felt driven to 'capture and remember' one word of certain thought  for at least  a year. There is also content that  can be written more easily, spontaneously, without intentions from me. That kind of event has happened more frequently.

I used to be 'thought' less, and I mean literally my head was basically 'empty' until a distinct point in time that scrolled throughTime,  as late in 1981, at Christmas. That's about when I became 'thought' full.  I don't dream the kind of dreams many people seem to have, but one night I had a dream unlike any dream I'd ever had and after the dream, thought about that dream scrolled relentlessly through my mind. I knew nothing about 'interpretation of dreams' at the time and for several years afterwards. What happened in the dream had seemed real, yet I knew I was dreaming and I even 'thought' within the dream while it happened. I remembered the dream and my mind was different after the dream. 

I noticed a change like that, obviously. I couldn't ignore it  because the stream of thought about one person in the dream never stopped and I couldn't sleep at night.  Anyone would notice a change  that prevented going to sleep at night, not waking up rested, refreshed from the darkness or where ever we go when we really sleep.

At first I was curious and wondered how my mind seemed to produce an endless stream of thought about only one aspect of the dream: one person in the dream.

My point is that I had not paid much attention to what happened in my mind until that change re-directed my attention so drastically from what was outside my body, to what was in my head.   I would not have suspected there was inner territory and that the 'flora and fauna' as well as mechanisms of mind that are visible, 'live' there in the inscape. I had no words for what I saw or how the change altered what was outside my body. It was about that point in time as I found out later, that 'right/left' brain essays began to appear in magazines and books. I believed I had brain damage from a blow on the head in an accident.

After that initiatory change  others kinds of thought seeped into my mind and I wondered at times if I 'thought' my own thought. I couldn't catch 'me', thinking this thought which I was listening to now in a different way, seeing in a different way that aroused an intense curiosity eventually. I chanced to read a book by William Glasser, Stations of the Mind that introduced me to the idea that there's a part of me that 'pre-views' reality and seeks to preserve my comfortable state, that was a truly new idea to me then. The Fourth Way which introduced me to the fact there are different "I"s within but reading that kind of information is not enough to understand it. I was watching my mind without knowing it after the dream. When I read The Lord of Thought I had begun to see certain events happened as though they were timed perfectly to happen, but I was not doing the planning.

 One new kind of thought addressed me the way another person would do, plural, second person  thought suggestions is the best definition I can find. "We should..."; "You could..."; Let's ...."; "We could....";  That lkind of 'thought' was so distinctly new to me that I can honestly write that my own thought was now an object, to be looked at, understood the way a foxglove that was unlike any that I'd ever seen before that  I found growing in my pasture in 1989 inspired me to think about it.

The word 'spirituality' did not seem an appropriate word to use when thoughts about my own thought and objects in the outer world began to coalesce, to blend and create a new understanding, parallel to my 'normal' understanding.

I don't have a better word yet, but I'm thinking about that.

The Transcendental Function defined:

Freud described it very well, but I didn't read his definition until a few months ago! It's about language. It creates information, it is very likely what F. David Peat described is an 'interactive force'. I have to be cautious about saying it 'is' anything specific, but it does create unique specificity in an individual life.

When I read Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Mind and Matter in 1989, I noticed as I read the book,  a sense of familiarity, of knowing already what he wrote about, from a non-mathematical viewpoint.  As I read I remember a thought occurred:  "The heart of and the bottom line of quantum physics is hearts desire." When I understood  that  thought comment I realized it was statement about particles and waves  but  it includes the importance of an observer, a witness, a recorder, some body that sees and can remember.

I read the book before I knew anything about particles and waves and the importance of an observer. The thought formed as though some  alert part of my mind had  something to say to me, in a language it knew but I barely had begun to suspect existed.

 I think of myself as a recorder of some events in my past now, a selection of events that I noticed and remembered as a result of the transcendental function doing its work.

All language is not actual words, it has to become words at some point but in the beginning there are no words that convey the information that arises from so called 'coincidences' (such as reading F. David Peats book when I read it, just when that information 'resonated within me') when they are recognizable. Individual events are recognizable. Strings of related events are not.  F. David Peat wrote that book, Paul Davies wrote Other Worlds, Wilson van Dusen wrote The Presence of Other Worlds and The Natural Depths of Man, Herman Hesse wrote Steppenwolfe and after reading those books myself, there was an understanding of "The heart of and the bottom line of quantum physics is 'hearts desire'. Hearts desire is what the transcendental function works with.

 About language P. D. Ouspensky says better than I can say it: "It must be admitted that language is a weak and inadequate vehicle even for the expression of our usual understanding of things, to say nothing of those moments when the understanding unexpectedly expands and becomes deeper, and we see revealed an entire series of facts and relations for the description of which we have neither words nor expressions. But quite aside from this, in ordinary conditions of thinking and feeling, we are frequently at a loss for words, and we use one word at different times to describe different things"

"No study of occult philosophy is possible without an acquaintance with symbolism, for if the words occultism and symbolism are correctly used, they mean almost one and the same thing. Symbolism cannot be learned as one learns to build bridges or speak a foreign language, and for the interpretation of symbols a special cast of mind is necessary; in addition to knowledge, special faculties, the power of creative thought and a developed imagination are required. One who understands the use of symbolism in the arts, knows, in a general way, what is meant by occult symbolism.

 But even then a special training of the mind is necessary, in order to comprehend the "language of the Initiates", and to express in this language the intuitions as they arise.There are many methods for developing the "sense of symbols" in those who are striving to understand the hidden forces of Nature and Man, and for teaching the fundamental principles as well as the elements of the esoteric language. The most synthetic, and one of the most interesting of these methods, is the Tarot"

(The word 'synthetic' is intended to be understood as 'synthesize' not the more modern understanding as in 'synthetic fabric'. This was a problem I had very much trouble becoming aware of, using both definitions is a necessity. pimoebius) .

It's my opinion that ancient symbols and their meaning do not convey the kind of information we in our modern age need to learn from the transcendental function. What is physically present is where meaning is hidden but it's not in every moment's content.  I think of a lighthouse with it's beacon always moving but the beam can be fixed, held captive in an obsessive, compulsive activity. Theodore Reik was obsessed with reading everything he could find that Goethe had written when he was 18 years old but he was embarrassed to reveal his 'obsession'!  When he was middle aged he wrote Fragment of A Great Confession, which he believed was about Goethe's life when he wrote it. Later he recognized details of his own life had been the foundation for the story of Goethe's relationship to a young Fredericke.

There's a scene in a movie, Little Buddha in which the starving Siddartha overhears two men passing in a canoe say: "If the string is too tight it will break, if it is too loose it will not play." They're talking about a musical instrument but the words detach from their context and Siddartha slowly rises, hearing them in a new way that is literally a statement to him, useful and necessary. 

That is a 'function' of the transcendental function.

He  goes to the river,  and repeats the words to a bullock in the river, joyfully but with understanding: "If the string is too tight it will break; if it is too loose it will not play." The 'middle way' was revealed in that incident. I'm not certain that's exactly how Siddartha became aware of the necessity for balance because extremes can be deadly and destructive. But that kind of event has happened to me often enough to use it as an example.

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I remember reading an article in Seventeen Magazine when I was about that age (1949) about intelligence, and how intelligent individuals have certain characteristics. They had erect posture, bright eyes, eagerness to learn new things  and curiosity.  A sentence in the article remained with me afterwards, occurring into my mind often enough that I noticed it and remembered where I'd read it: "Intelligence is the ability to identify isolated but related facts and to form them into theories that explain the universe." The sentence was one of a very few 're-occurring memories' of events that happened only once but for some reason was regenerated afterwards often enough that I noticed them and had a minor degree of curiosity about them.

The first paragraph in the introduction of A New Model Of The Universe by P. D. Ouspensky is about certain re-occuring memories that were marked by a certain 'singular sensation peculiar to them' and that those  memories were essentials in his life.  I believe   my re-occurring memories were critical moments in my earliest years.

What is the 'transcendental function' if it's not an 'effect' added to every day real world events...., that operates in life....., on particular events for some purpose that has it's origin in what I think of now that I've experienced it myself,  as the 'ongoing endeavor in Time'. That is probably what has been recognized centuries ago as 'perennial philosphy' at work, moving 'like' a signal, through Time as we experience Time. There's lots of variety in Time, I've experienced that myself. More about that later.

If that long paragraph doesn't make sense consider this example that illustrates the concept: Laying nearby me is a book published in 1895 A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew White. It  has 78 pages in the index of names the author mentions and quotes from. There are 50 names approximately on each page, so  there were 50 x 78 = 3900 sources for the ideas that Andrew White compressed into his book.

The process of abstraction of relevant material occurred through the operation of the transcendental function, that seems  reasonable to me now. I have witnessed in my self, that there's some part of 'me' that is always alert, awake and waiting until the right situation.  I am an observer to it, it is not me.  It is abstract itself, it's not tangible itself and it abstracts relevant information holding it in some mental storage area until it's complete or close to making sense. Mr. White  wrote a large book about a topic that's as much at the center of  life on this planet in 2010 as it was in 1895. Having abstracted here and there information that caught his attention, fragments from 3900 authors are cached in this book. Some modern authors have a bibliography that's  more than a 100 pages long.

The process of 'abstracting relevant information' from so many sources is difficult to discern and identify, it happens because attention is not usually focussed on what's going on in our 'head'. It's likely the transcendental function has functioned as it is supposed to do but  perhaps the 'next level' requires becoming detached from the body, and becoming an observer to it and that information generating function.

Until an individual knows as much as possible about history, philosophy, the origins of psychiatry itself, it may be difficult or impossible to learn to get new meaning when it emerges in the mind, until a change occurs that creates distance between 'me' and my thought, so that I observe it, the way I observe what's outside of my body. 

What if Siddartha had heard the boatmen in the same way he had obviously heard everything until that 'extra sense' caused him to hear differently? 

Knowing more about the history and evolution of psychiatric ideas is critical.  Theodore Reik mentioned that Greek milkmaids knew already what Freud wrote down as psychiatry.

More about that later.

  

What happened in the past is determined by what is to happen in the future...

The view of Alki Point in West Seattle, from 57th Ave. S. W. It's a triangle jutting into Puget Sound that was a cow pasture a hundred years ago. There's a small version of the Statue of Liberty on the beach at 61st Ave. S. W. 

Does some part of our mind know the future? There have been a few incidents in my past
when it looked as though some part of my mind knew the future. That's what convinced me that at times in every day life there's an appearance of foresight on my part and that I chose to do what I've done but actually a pure impulse was 'willing' the act, through my body. That kind of event doesn't happen every day. It took a long time to even notice them then notice not only my loss of will but that I couldn't 'see' what my body was doing until something happens that causes me to 'see' into my blind spot. There is an intention at work that's obvious but not mine. This is an example:

I remember getting up early, dressing without a plan to go anywhere but I drove to West Seattle where we used to live, just across from Alki Beach. I spent the day sitting on the bench near Little Miss Liberty, a book in my hand but I know I didn't read it. My usually thought filled mind must have been strangely quiet because I didn't feel the restlessness that has made it difficult for me to'just sit quietly and feel content the way I used to do while my children and neighborhood kids played on the beach. We'd spent a lot of time there and I had loved just being there.

I sat on the bench near the model of the Statue of Liberty for hours, walked up and down the promenade several times but I don't remember thinking about anything.  I remember the  day as a blank except that I left the beach to have lunch then walked around the 'point'. Alki is a triangle of land, it has a lighthouse and of course that's why it's named Alki Point. I took pictures during the day, the last ones were after sundown. I had the film developed and was surprised to see the pictures I'd taken of the miniature Statue Of Liberty and the pictures I took a week later.

The top picture was taken in the evening a week before 9-11-2001. The bottom picture was taken the evening of 9-11-2001, when I got of work, I went  there, and joined a crowd of mourners who had left their prayers in paper bags and draped her with our flag.

I had spent an entire day 9-06-2001 at Alki Beach in West Seattle, near Little Miss Liberty ( miniature of the Statue of Liberty) quietly, without any anxiety or the restlessness that's been my 'normal' for quarter of a century. I lived that day but basically forgot it until a week later

I was at work in the 'kitting area' of Boeing, Final Assembly where I've worked since being suddenly transferred there in 1993, when a co-worker told us an airplane had crashed into a building in New York. We tuned our radios to the news and then soon heard the report that another airplane had struck the second twin tower. I remember looking around and  noticed a co-worker clenching and unclenching his hands, his face registering outrage. This was obviously an attack, these were not accidents. He was ready to go to war right at the moment. He wasn't alone.
Men grouped around a small television someone found but the man I worked with went back to work after a few minutes so I went back to doing normal work myself. It wasn't long before I felt that it was absurd to just keep working.  I said something to him about how inappropriate it seemed to just keep working. He told me there wasn't anything we could do except keep focused on doing our job, mechanics (and their supervisors and their generals) were waiting for our products.

I'm embarrassed  that I was not familiar with the Twin Towers or it's history. I know that's because I've been so self absorbed with my life's events for 20+ years, my inner life has been where my primary attention was fixed. I had noticed points when my thoughts and events in the world outside of my body synchronized, and experienced this as a very disorienting point of conjunction. Unexplainable perfecct timing at times seemed impossible to happen even once.  So when 9-11 happened I didn't know what to feel. I had no attitude, not a clue about what to think except that doing work as usual didn't make sense. I didn't feel the outrage that the men seemed to feel so immediately.

 It wasn't too long before there were news reports that we should not let this event affect us, not create fear that would keep us away from the malls, from doing what we normally did.
As soon as the shift ended I drove to Alki Beach and saw that I wasn't the only person that associated our Little Miss Liberty with the New York tragedy. There were brown paper bags along the promenade, each bag having a note inside, a prayer for those people in New York whose life had suddenly changed forever. Little Miss Liberty was surrounded by flowers, teddy bears, balloons and draped with an American flag. People wept, hugged each other, grieving as though every person that was important in their life was in New York in those two buildings or trying to get to those inside.
I took the pictures without any memory of what I'd done the week before.
I didn't remember that a week before I'd spent a day almost like a thought-less automaton sitting near Little Miss Liberty, taking pictures during the day and leaving only when the sun went down. The memory was retrieved when I had the pictures developed and saw the pictures on the same roll. Then I remembered (or was prompted to remember) that I hadn't made a decision to go to the Point. My body just went there and spent the day quietly doing it's own living.
 I've not changed dentists so every six months I go to West Seattle for a dental appointment then go to the Point to have fish and chips at the wonderful Sunfish. It's owned by some Greek brothers and they know how to do seafood.
It was only when I saw the pictures I'd taken during the day that I 'felt' how strange that day had been, how I'd no memory of anything except a certain quietness and patience that was unusual for me the way I am now. Restlessness is me now.
After I thought about that 'lost day' and how it seemed that a part of my mind 'knew' what was going to happen a week later, other similar events came to mind. Now I could describe several, but this is one that had a great impact on my thinking in a new way about a  three letter word:

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I remembered the day in 1996 when I'd got up, dressed and went to work only to be told it was Saturday and I wasn't scheduled to work! It was a gorgeous spring day so that wasn't bad news although my co-workers razzed me about my approaching senility. I left and headed towards my favorite breakfast place feeling the sparkle of the first really nice spring Saturday. It usually rains or is dark on weekends in our area.

I passed a big Yard Sale sign and paused briefly trying to decide whether to waste the day doing yard sales, then the decision was made for me. I pulled into the yard sale.The first thing I saw was a blue carton, which I picked up and then realized was an audio book, The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt! What a surprise! I had recently noticed the book on my lead's desk and asked him what it was about. "It's about how nobody goes into business except to make money. All the supers are reading it." He looked at me in a particular way he had and said: "Maybe you should read it too." So I called the company library and asked about it only to be told there was a very long waiting list.

It wasn't that important to me so I forgot about The Goal. Until a few days later when I 'forgot' it was Saturday and got ready for Friday, went to work then drove right to a copy. It was even an audio book copy which I much prefer. One detail that I thought was quite a 'coincidence' because I wouldn't have thought of it the way I did later, was that the box had the names of thousands of large corporations on it that had been influenced by the book. I thought it odd when I noticed the book  had been published in 1984.  The information in the book  took 12 years to reach where I was working, and that happened, precisely timed, just when a new airplane body was advancing to Final Assembly.

I listened to the book, curious to know how one book could 'capture' so many giant corporations and why my lead had said it was about how 'nobody goes into business except to make money'. It's about a man who was told his factory wasn't making money so it's going to be closed unless he can turn it around in three months. He is supposed to take his son's Boy Scout troop for a hike which he reluctantly does because his wife pressures him. His marriage is in trouble too, because he's so absorbed in his work. He has to lead the troop to  a certain place and be there at a certain time but he notices that some of the hikers are slower, they are a 'bottleneck' so to speak. He has to solve the problem of getting everyone where they should be at the same time.

He thinks and thinks and comes up with a plan. Then a miracle happens, he has a thought about how to prevent the kids that were slow from holding the troop to their speed. The hike provides a hint, a clew that may help solve the problems in his factory. He has a genius economics consultant that he calls when he needs help and that's what I thought made a difference. He didn't have to do all the thinking himself. I thought that might be a problem to those who were using the ideas in the book but were not able to get genius level input. But I also thought it interesting to read of how the inspiration in a book that had been written in 1984, 12 years before the idea matured at where I worked, was triggering so many corporate motivational seminars, that all used the same buzz words.  And the birth of the ideas arose from just taking some boys on a hike.

Little details in the book made me notice, then think about how my mind operates so automatically.  I saw my own 'impressons' arise in my thought, defining certain words in new meanings and doing that instantly. Somewhat as though the impressions were given to me, not produced by me. That was a change that had happened very, very gradually but by 1996 when our motivational seminars were peaking, my thoughts and understanding had become visible, like 'objects' to study.
I began to think about the word 'goal' in a way I'd not thought about it; I realized it means 'end', like the 'end zone' in football. That definition hadn't come immediately into my mind but after listening to The Goal it began to come to mind often. There was a lot of talk about the end of 1999 and a problem that had recently been recognized in computers. What was going to happen when computers rolled 1999 over to 2000? Would it be the end of time? The uncertainty of what was going to happen was widespread, some actually feared, others only wondered if that would be the end of time?

I began to think of the 'goal' of Time, defining 'goal' as having a purpose and aiming towards it. But there's a lot of information behind what caused the word 'goal' to replace the word 'end' whenever I heard or read 'the end of time'. Another unusual change happened; the number 911 was so fixed in my understanding as the number to call for help that the date 9-11-brought to mind other ideas about how it's been assumed that God doesn't need our help, but in reality that is not true. 9-11 was a call for help from a place in reality that I had named the Larger Domain. How that idea developed is another post.

So the experience that I'd had when I 'lost time', got up on Saturday, without doing what I normally do, then drove right to a copy of the book that all the 'supers' were reading was similar to how the book was conceived, a kind of accident but perfectly timed.
 But my sense of not having been in charge of my body in both events was bothersome. It looked like a planned event, but who planned it? I have never forgotten the day of the week that way. These events and many others prodded me to consider whether my 'unconscious mind' is totally unconscious of everything, I'm the one that has a very limited understanding of 'events' until it uses it's toolbox. Contact between upper levels and lower very deep levels of mind requires that I notice and learn from some subtle interactions between levels in my mind.
( I was in my 60's when that day scrolled through Time. But I didn't start work until I was 52. I was in a state of mind that was different than normal for me in 1985, when I drove through the security gates at Boeing in Auburn, Washington. That's when I saw the pi model that was their awards program logo then. I was transferred to Final Assembly in 1993 a stream of events began then that shifted my personal life's events into another stream, as though everything that had already happened was just a foundation for further 'work'.  1996 was a calm year but a hurricane of change was already moving towards Final Assembly where a new airplane was going to be 'finished'. It was YA001 when it entered, the first 737 that has a vowel in it's nameber. When it left it was known as YAHOO1. The 'yahoo's in Gulliver's Travels loved filth but Norman O. Brown had recognized that Jonathan Swift's fictional story was a storied version about the birth in history of 'anal retentiveness', a real pattern in life itself.)

The invisibility of the ever present Presence

From page 238 of Jung’s Red Book, the newly published edition:

"The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts. If the spirit of the depths seizes you, you will feel the cruelty and cry out in torment. The spirit of the depths is pregnant with fire, ice and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths as he is full of horror.

The spirit of the depths was so alien to me that it took me 25 nights to comprehend him and even then he was still so alien that I could neither see nor ask. He had to come to me as a stranger, from far away and from an unheard of side. He had to call me. I could not address him, knowing his nature. He announced himself with a loud voice as in a war-like turmoil with the manifold clamoring of the voices of this time."

Jung realized that he had encountered the voices (thoughts) from the depths of mind. This period in his life was about 1912-1917, when he was at a break point with Freud's ideas. (He became aware years later that centuries before he lived, the gnostics and alchemists had already discovered that what they were doing physically produced thought and mental content that was symbolically meaningful.) That realization emerged over a span of time that was at least 7 turmil filled years in duration in his life.
I became aware in a different way that every day activities can produce that kind of material, it's a kind of 'voice' (thoughts, inner imagery) that 're-uses' thought produced by some activity. Knowing nothing about alchemy or gnostics I made the same discovery, i.e., that the mind produces it's own 'thought' and creates symbolic content from every day situations. I became aware of a kind of 'alien' inner content, the way he did over a span of years while I struggled to learn challenge level square dancing. It actually began when I had to learn to 'visualize' my positions as I moved through different formations. It was like opening a door into another world, literally. But other aspects of every day life enfolded into having to learn to 'track' my body mentally, every aspect of my life was involved. The very 'form' and language of advanced and challenge levels of square dancing became a material, similar to what the alchemists used. One extremely difficult concept required learning to dance with phantoms, i.e., non-material people whose positions changed with every step the 8 real people in the set took. In addition to tracking my body, it was necessary to track 'them' as though they were real people.

During that period I began to experience a kind of 'thought' that was not really words at first, just barely sensed as words. The first that I remember was a fragment about 'subracting my self from what I see'. It was not an easy task, noticing that my mind produced content of it's own 'will', but as events accumulated and repetitions made this more distinct, I realized this was 'new' kind of thought. It became obvious to me that intents other than mine began to influence me and that in a very real way the non-self generated material was like a 'voice' speaking to me.

Everything changed but no thing was really different. What could change everything but not change any thing? What changed everything was the agent of change itself and 'it' was invisible itself except through a subtle difference that 'it' could create. As time passed and events happened, I could see the change was within my mind; "it" was transparent and it was between me and what was outside of my body.

A combination of 'Seeing/hearing/thinking/feeling my body/ and even seeing my own normal understanding' created something 'like' an object. My inner content had begun to become an object to look at and a great curiosity was part of that object I have reason to believe, it's a pattern itself.

Mechanisms of mind that I didn't know existed created 'self reference' and 'significance'. That was a condition that created the 'conversational tone', the sense of being the recipient of attention from some 'invisible other'. It's a condition that may be normal and thus invisible to males like Jung and Freud because the 'western paradigm' was already installed, it was their 'normal'. Jung became more aware of 'eastern influences', but Freud did not.

There was a time when my personal life seemed to be causing me to feel I had to try to prove I wasn't imagining things, but that changed after 1989.

I became aware that there is a mystery in Time itself and the originators of psychoanalysis may have felt the same need need to understand their own life. Their past may have motivated both men in different ways. Freud kept secrets and when Jung realized that, he lost faith in Freud's 'techniques'. But Jung had a different past, and if you read Memories, Dreams and Reflections there are incidents in his past that prepare him for a different future. He had visions in addition to dreams, which Freud didn't seem to write about. It's likely that they in particular experienced "it", this invisible presence in their relationships with females primarily but through interactions with others also. Overall it seems to be a gender based relationship because the real female and the real male have different 'memories' and history has no female input.

Theodore Reik's The Creation of Woman is detective work, the kind that psychoanalysis initiated. He described an event that happened when he was 9 years old that led him to write The Creation of Woman when he was past middle age. He'd overheard his grandfather and Jewish elders discuss the two contradictory stories in Genesis of Eve's birth. He heard himself suddenly blurt out that 'Perhaps the thing is turned around backwards." which meant the second story wasn't about Eve, it was about Adam. I became aware of native rituals later, where the boy leaves the world of women, in a carefully guarded rite of passage and that as well as other information made sense, the second birth described as taking a bone from his rib was Adam's entry into the world of men. There's a lot that can be written about why Reik's idea is acceptable.

In challenge level square dancing all gender positions are eliminated. That's not where I began to feel invisible as a real female, it was in a place where I lived without knowing it, the life of the stereotyped female, the patterns of the past. That's a fact that hasn't really changed but the situation is different now in 2010, than it was in 1984.

I've been a female and their experiences were not as a female. It's likely the females in their life were 'mirrors', in the Echo/Narcissus pattern/form. Narcissus could not 'see' his own inner reflections when they became exteriorized, when they seemed outside of his body. That's where I lived what I learned, literally: The beginning of psychoanalysis was the past. What is ever present is invisible eventually. One thought that was produced was what I just wrote, that 'what is ever present becomes invisible' but also there was a sense that I was seeing what those words meant because they grew from being 'sensed' into real words over a span of time. That became a pattern.

As a female I became aware I was invisible in several surprising and painful real world situations where I was a kind of mirror, a 'reflection' literally. That was not a fact I became aware of by reading about it in a book. I don't believe gender roles have been understood until about 25 years ago when a great change began in the two square dance groups we belonged to. It's global now. The two groups began to learn higher levels of square dancing that removed all gender roles. That situation was a living model, just a model for where the change that was coming could be experienced to some degree. Observation of that kind of experience was where my 'agent of change' was turned on, my attention was fixed on some thing that was not material.

Jung's life was different, he was struggling with Freud's assumptions as well as living with content emerging from the 'spirit from the depths'.

I remember a thought that I observed as it 'grew' into words in my mind over a span of time that caused me to feel that something invisible had to have some way to become visible. The thought was that 'what is everpresent becomes invisible'. I understood that what is 'normal' was once not normal and then it was distinct for some span of time before it became 'familiar' and vanished from any kind of visibility.

Ideas do not remain intact as they move through Time, they are altered; that's particularly true in psychiatric history. If one idea moves through time intact basically, it can be thought of as functioning 'like' a signal. The idea is carried forwards as a kind of 'signal' even though the content changes through generations that do not have a connection to the origin or to each other but what can make 'it' visible?

Yeats wrote a poem that began:

"Turning and turning in the ever widening gyre, the falcon no longer hears the falconer. Everything falls apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

The individuation process, a process that was communicated in Jung's life from what he believed was a 'wise old man' in his depths began to function in a real world location when two groups of individuals began to leave the mainstream level and enter the challenging world of dancing without gender roles.

I didn't know where that thought about came from for several years but when I read certain books that Jung had read in his Time, about alchemy and the gnostics and had learned about symbolic representation from my own inner content, I realized this was an ancient form of conveying information , it was the process in Time itself, functioning as a 'constant feature' in Time itself, that was evident because so many precisely timed events happened that the word 'coincidence' could not possibly account for them. The word 'synchronization' was a good description. Jung also read several books by Emanuel Swedenborg who wrote about a process that prepared a person for life after death, he named it 'regeneration'. The word 're-generation' is what an 'echo' is.

The 'alchemical process' i.e, which I believe can be thought of as the 'constant feature' or the pattern itself ,went to work with the materials in my life, when a small group of individuals began to leave the mainstream level and learn advanced and Challenge levels. In those two groups a real world situation existed that manifested attributes and characteristics of a concept that links the cosmos to the minute. As it is in small things, so it is in large things.

I had the 'sense' of being informed that this 'invisible thing' was able to become visible in subtle ways, (by creating 'differences, absurdities, and even silliness) over a span of several years during which time the 'subtle ways' happened in my life.

The 'subtle ways' were, to give an idea of what I mean: Thought that I know I didn't 'will' myself; retrieval of memories from my past when they were in some way symbolically similar to what I was doing 'now' and more importantly: there was overall a reference to memories that had re-occurred throughout my life when I was very young. And alone. It became obvious those were the most 'telling' events because they had happened when I was alone. Nobody knew about those memories but me, and the Presence itself. Some happened when I was very young.

The 'Presence' that Jung detected and identified as a wise old man knew the past and the future collective, not just his past and his future but the collective.

I had no 'wise old man' within, there were real ones in every day real world life. The Presence that I detected after evidence made it as visible as it can be knew my past, my location on the planet and the most private, unspoken content in my mind. That was made obvious not by actual words but though events in every day life that were perfectly timed, thousands of them that I recognized. Billions that were only in some way 'memorable' as a sense of familiarity that may be experienced as 'deja vu' a sense that I've been here before'. Mirror neutrons, outer reflects what's inner content? When meaning emerged spontaneously from those events, it was not my own will that produced it.

I intended to write about these two paragraphs, but I felt it necessary to present something of my context and why his words pointed towards a loss of personal will in his life. The depths of mind that C. G. Jung experienced in his 'crisis' years may have been more common to males than females like me who knew nothing about anything when my own 'depths of mind' content began to become more accessible to me. It was visible only because it was new, I'd never had that kind of ongoing inner content in my mind. I was curious but I needed to know what was real then, for several reasons. I watched from my own depths without realizing those depths cannot 'speak' words we use in every day life. But the words can be abstracted from every day life and used to create information! The formation of a conversation that came in bits and pieces after 1984 was visible because it was new to me.

That means I could 'see' mental content that was new to me, and eventually I became curious about this 'new thought'. I wondered if "I" was thinking it. Now I wonder if the curiosity was mine. I experienced it as 'me' until I realized there's a 'not me' within me.

Jung wrote that he realized his mind produced content that he didn't 'will'. I've mentioned already that was a comfort to me when I read it. I had no knowledge comparable to what a well educated European man like Jung had, I had an 'empty head' and I mean literally I was basically 'thought' less until about age 52.

The 'horror' of the depths is in my opinion a collective past and the way it's experienced, Carl Sagan described it to some degree in his book The Demon Haunted World. The past is prologue, some have said.

The ideas and patterns that are 'believed by individuals collectively united' need to be understood as 'ruling authorities' (patterns) within that don't go away, perhaps until that content is literally re-viewed. I mean 'looked at again' and understood in a new way with completely different mindsets that don't automatically see the way Gurdjieff described as 'mechanical'. That can't happen to someone that's already familiar with the past as it's been defined. Jung described but not very well, a process of 'individuation' and a 'transcendent function' that operates 'like' a mathematical function. Who but a mathematician knows that?

(Computer language has made many difficult concepts 'like' functions, attributes, characteristics, objects a part of every day life, thank Heavens.)

Freud described a somewhat similar idea which I will quote verbatim because it's important: "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"

Freud did not name this function as the 'transcendental function' which Jung did describe as being a function similar to a mathematical function, but I believe this is an accurate description of the transcendental function: "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...that's an encyclopedia of implication. That function sorts out, creates significance, importance and relationship in the process of self observation, and life re-view, it brought my central idea to my attention over a span of decades, sorting it out from millions of books, trillions of words.

There are authors whose books describe much better than I can hope to do, the life process and it's stages and states of mind. I lean towards Ira Progoff's The Symbolic and the Real; The Dynamics of Hope but I recommend every individual to read widely about the history of psychiatry itself. That's the surprise, that's where the 'art' of interpretation became fixed on the hidden side of every day life. It's birth introduced a new kind of 'art', i.e, interpreting life events that the individual often didn't realize had 'meaning' and that there is a 'psychologically sensed' level of life.

I named it the 'Larger Domain' when I realized it was really, really real, the real reality itself.

C. G. Jung's main contribution to my understanding was that he recognized a 'world within' and the process itself. He named it but it had already been discovered and written about by Emanuel Swedenborg, a man whose visions are classified as 'insanity'. He used different words, like 'regeneration' but Jung 'devoured' Swedenborg and never mentioned that he learned about the 'literal sense' and the 'symbolic sense' from Swedenborg's writings. There were proofs of many of Swedenborg's visions which made him credible enough to some. I found evidence of an 'ongoing endeavor in Time' from both men, and many other authors. The effects of that 'ongoing endeavor' on an uneducated (like me) individual seems to lead many into feeling there's a conspiracy not in the negative sense, but a more positive sense.

Too many indiduals get lost because such specificity as I've experienced is not scientifically verifiable except at the pattern level. Patterns are 'forms' that can have any content. Form + Content + a witness can create a new way to bring a new idea about reality; that may be what Einsteins' equation means, it means wholeness of experience. His idea that God does not play dice may be utterly wrong. I believe that whatever 'it' is, that spoke from the 'spirit of the depths', 'it' tries to get connected to 'us' collectively and individually.

"What is on one side of the equals sign is the same as what is on the other side but the arrangement is different." Both sides of the 'equals' sign unite matter and non-matter. What is 'non-matter'? What Jung mentioned was the 'spirit of the depths' would be non-matter, human thought, motives and memories would be non-matter,

The dark side of life is under the 'scope NOW!

"C. G. Jung wrote: "Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce but which produce themselves and have their own life." Memories, Dreams and Reflections

I've hesitated to create a blog because I'm in a phase of life where I'm feeling that my life story will never be understood, even when I try to write it down. Why attempt something that seems impossible? After 1984 some events happened that I didn't have the feeling I created or made happen, now I realize that I was an observer to them, a recorder of what happened and I feel I should try to describe what I learned as well as how I learned that those events 'happened' to me, I didn't plan them myself. I didn't know anything about Jung in 1984 and the first time I read about 'synchronicity' (and remembered it) was in F. David Peat's book, Synchronicity, The Bridge Between Mind and Matter. What is it, this 'bridge between mind and matter' if it 'knows' me so intimately?

Because the 'thing itself' demands dealing with the impossible itself. When a certain kind of 'event' happens once and it seems impossible such a thing could happen even once, then it happens again, and yet again the idea of impossible has to vanish. The language that's used to describe 'that kind of event' is the same form that was used in the parables in the bible, a story has to be told and personal experience forms the 'bond' that creates understanding, i.e., 'wisdom', real knowledge.

I intend to clarify what 'kind' of event I'm writing about using that 'form'by telling a story as briefly as I can make it. This is an example very brief, much compacted because each event could be written in a book. This one is the first of it's kind that I noticed: We're on the freeway in heavy weekend traffic headed for a trip around the Olympic Peninsula in Washinton state. I'm driving when suddenly I hear myself blurt out: "I don't feel like myself any more. I'm not Betty anymore, I'm Ju-anna."

Quite suddenly a van on my right pulls in front of me then crosses to the left and sped away, but I notice the first vanity license tab I've seen on it's rear bumper: DJWANNA. My first glance decoded the letters to: 'Do you want to?' but my second sight recognized that the letters spelled out, seeming to repeat, to echo precisely what I had just said my new name was going to be but in a new arrangement of letters. I had not thought about changing my name when I heard myself blurt out "I'm Ju-anna." Some part of me seemed to know that van was approaching and was going to cross my path as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

Two other similar events happened but I gave absolutely no attention to them after they happened. We took pictures on that trip and one roll of film fell into a crevice in the van so I discovered it months later and left it to be developed. I visited a friend who showed me not one but two birthday cards her husband had given her, she was thrilled and I was envious. I admired them, said the appropriate things then left and picked up the pictures, wondering what was on them because I'd no way of knowing where they were taken. They were pictures from the trip we'd taken. I was astonished to see that one picture was virtually identical to one of the cards her husband had given her. A woman in a pink sweater over a bathing suit is waving her right hand as she runs along the edge of surf tinged with sunset colors, the picture and the card were basically identical in so many attributes I didn't see how that could happen.

The third event was different in that I was thinking one day about a person, just thinking about how difficult it was for me to talk to that person. I felt prevented literally, as though a barrier separated us. I'd never felt that kind of barrier before and it puzzled me. "It's like he has a wall six feet high around him." That evening we went to his house and I was amazed to see a new fence, six feet high across their front yard.

I had not a whit of curiosity about how such precise timing could occur, not once but three times. The fact that all three events related to one couple did not register either. The loss of personal volition didn't register, the sense of listening to my self, of hearing my self say things I'd not thought about took a long time to recognize and become curious about. A long string of 'impossibly timed' events, several strings in fact had accumulated by then.

There is something in life that's been 'mysterious' to those who met it and many men have tried to describe it in language that doesn't create understanding. I met 'it' in every day life; it was able to 'abstract' certain events from every day life and operate on them, through them, and many of those events happened when I was less than 20 years old. Most of them happened when I was less than 13 years old. One happened when I was alone. I never told anyone about it and never thought about that event after it happened until the day it was retrieved as complete in every detail as it had originally happened.

Many details of every day life escape notice, a special kind of attention has to be turned towards trying to get meaning from them and that kind of attention is not it seems to me, under my conscious authority. Carl G. Jung wrote as I mentioned a couple of times already, that his mind produced content that he didn't 'will' himself. In his time that might have been a novel idea, that the mind produces content of 'it's' own, sending it 'to' me. In those events and millions of similar events that have happened I can see easily now that 'it' worked like it knew the past as well as the future. And 'it' created a kind of 'story', a very complex story from events that were literally abstracted from my specific every day life, using them as it's 'material' in a way that I don't believe "I" could have accomplished. Unless "I" am everywhere at once, in Time and in space, connected to the past, the future as well as this 'point' that's named 'now'.


I've experienced the 'impossible thing its self' for such a span of time, for so long that it has to be possible. That fact and no other encourages me to try to explain the way the 'voice of the age' began to 'speak' through the 'medium' of every day events. I've been a witness to me, a recorder of me from a detached perspective that emerged slowly when an situation began where I needed to prove I wasn't imagining anything.

I think of moments in my past as snapshots, some are so complete in details that they stand out vividly, now. I don't remember every moment, it's the most complete moments that shaped and built a way to see what's unique in my particular life. It's my particular life and no other life has those particular moments. But everyone can experience such 'kinds' of events, that's what makes me feel it may be important to try to put them into the right category: they are the material for a highly personalized life on this planet. It seems impossible but when the impossible happens every day, it's possible.

Jung's Red Book is here.

I'm not a Jungian exactly, but I do feel that he was an important viewing point on the events of his time. At this point in my life, I believe each of us is a living point of view. The idea came to me from experiences but I read it in a book, Mr. God This Is Anna. Every moment in her short life was connected to Mr. God, she was a viewing point for Mr.God, he was in her middle. She was always learning naturally every day.

Today I got to look through the Red Book, and I wanted to post something from it. It's a gorgeous book, huge in size about 12" by 18", very heavy, it's not going to be a book anyone can read at McDonalds on a lunch break.

What I read and want to publish and discuss begins with these words from page 238 of the Red Book:

"The Frightfullness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts "

But first some context. I do a lot of that:

If you are somewhat familiar with the last chapters of his Memories, Dreams and Reflections and his Collected Works you know that Collected Works (CW)are different. Its theories and generalizations are for the educated who have a scientifically oriented but somewhat inquiring mindset. That's not been the general public but that's changing rapidly now. Memories, Dreams and Reflections was written from a different mindset, it's about his real life. Its about his relationship to his inner content. Since he also mentioned that his mind produced content that he didn't 'will' that may or may not be his own mind he related to. In the last 4 chapters there are hints that many of his experiences wouldn't gain the respect from scientists that was what he was trying to achieve in the CW.

(For an honest appraisal of C. G. Jung I suggest reading the first book I read about him, The Haunted Prophet by Paul Stern. It's a critique without being only critical. The main idea I got from the book was that Jung learned that the unconsciousness of a patient often spoke to him but the person could not 'hear' his own unconscious content. The unconscious seemed to symbolize in some way, giving clues that Jung learned to decode. The patient was not 'in touch' with his own unconscious, )

That's a fact to trust.

The Red Book was created by Jung when he was acquiring the information that resulted in the Collected Works but that's my own theory. And he wrote that his endeavors were life long. He went through a 'creative illness' (1912-1917) that's how Jungians view that period which extended over a period of years. I have my reasons to believe he went through a long phase of psychosis then he lived a blended life, his inner and outer world meshed when he wrote the CW. That seems obvious after reading some of the Red Book and the last chapters of MDR. He wrote and this is a fact to keep in mind, that his mind created some content that he did not 'will' himself, there was a 'wise old man' in his inner content. Reading that when I did meant a lot to me.

From what I read in the Red Book today, it's my opinion that the material in it was received in 'visions. It was not self generated material.

Robert Monroe mentioned getting 'rotes' which were packages of information given to him by his invisible companion, to be 'digested' at leisure. Jung's 'visions' and his 'numinous' could be what Monroe named as 'rotes'. (Monroe's travels while he was in his bed were scientifically verified, because he was a scientist himself and he taught others how to experience out of body states, purely mental travels and guided adventures in other worlds. In Journeys Out of Body he discovers he can control them. In Far Journeys he discovers a presence from whom he received 'rotes' of information. In the his last book, Ultimate Journey he described incredible mental adventures, and having read that book, I felt it linked to Hoellers interpretation of Jung's Seven Sermons TO the Dead. His many journeys to find 'bits of his self' when his mind detached from his body and went somewhere were real to him, and they may have been really real to those 'bits and pieces' he collected. I'm on the fence about how really real they were. But his mind was always connected to his body.

I could not understand why that book wasn't a best seller but James Redfields' The Celestine Prophecy overshadowed it possibly, it's about the world of 'meaningful coincidence' and that's Jung's term for 'synchronicity'.

Jung didn't seem to be asleep when he had what he named visions but he may have induced, or believed he induced a state of mind known as active imagination. That seems to be like untethering the mind, watching it impartially without expectations or attempts to control anything the mind creates. He uses the word 'visions' and 'numinous' but he received information that he wrote in the Red Book. (I named mine 'mind quakes'. They were not like visions but 'rotes' they could be, it was information, cached and it had to be unpacked.)

In MDR Jung writes about some of his less than typical personal experiences in the last chapters. I was surprised at what he wrote because he described his opinions about life after death. Basically they agreed in my mind with some aspects of what I'd read about Robert Monroe's experiences in his last book, Ultimate Journey. He wrote that one that has lived life physically is given the opportunity in the next world to describe their adventures in the body! They want feed back! Stephen Hoeller's book, Gnostic Jung's Seven Sermons TO the Dead point towards that idea. The 'dead' want, need and expect input from the living.

(Mr. Hoeller decoded Jung's original Seven Sermons TO the Dead which is written in an old and complicated style, 'like' St. John of the Cross's Dark Night Of The Soul. Example from Seven Sermons: "At night the dead came back again and amidst complaining said: One more thing we must know, because we had forgotten to discuss it: teach us concerning man."

--"Man is a portal through which one enters from the outer world of the gods, demons and souls, into the inner world--from the greater world into the smaller world. Small and insignificant is man; one leaves him soon behind and thus one enters once more into infinite space; into the microcosm, into the inner eternity."

That ancient form requires interpetion of everything, but even I could get something from it when Mr. Hoeller tackled it. Psychiatry is based on the same 'style', everything represents, stands for, or symbolizes something else; it's Art its self in my opinion, the thing itself.

As for out of body experiences, I have had only a very brief 'out of body experience' when I knew I was asleep in my bed but it was nothing like they described. However in a quite different way I have experienced seeing my body and my mind's activities apart from them. They were united, synchronized with a precision that I can't describe except to write they were synchronized. This 'unity' caused me great confusion for a long time, a few decades overall.

I had an unusual experience today that produced the same dizziness, and that reminded me of how I felt. It happened when I pulled into a slanted parking slot just as the car in the slot in front was moving backwards and the car on the passenger side pulled out! For a few seconds it seemed my car wasn't stopped, my car seemed to be moving. Dizziness is an understatement but I realized my mind couldn't make sense and I felt in my body a 'no compute' state. The result was real dizziness. I assume that's because there was no point of reference in my past, the mind seems to require that. I've learned a lot from events like that one.

Over a span of years I 'saw myself' and heard myself from a kind of 'detached position', so that I was both observer and what was observed. It felt like being both actor and audience and the entire world was the stage. Other people participated or so it seemed to me, in creating that drama. In fact everyone except me seemed to know the script! It seems to me now that my task was to assemble 'bits and pieces of information' that came at me from a variety of sources into my story.

Jung wrote that every individual lives a story and that it's the personal task to discover one's story. He wrote that his was to discover the collective unconscious. I believe it had already been described by Emanuel Swedenborg or at least it was referred to as a 'memory that man possesses which he doesn't know he possesses'. (Or is possessed by, is what I believe at this point.) By the way, I am not promoting either Jung or Swedenborg. Jung obviously was influenced from reading Swedenborg, I was influenced by reading both but there were others who were equally or more important men.

Not many female authors in my batch of 'influences'! But I will mention Monica Furlong's The End Of Our Exploring as being a major source of usable information just exactly when I needed it. She wrote about 'journeys'. Because the word 'end' (as in the ' End of Our Exploring) is so commonly defined to mean 'termination' I need to define it as meaning, purpose, goal as in 'the goal of time', or the 'purpose of time' or the 'meaning of Time'. That's because I saw 2012 a few days ago, it's about the 'end of time', meaning termination of time. My point is that what Jung wrote, especially what he created in the Red Book could not have made sense to me without background from authors who wrote from prior centuries. They gave me information when I needed it, just when I needed it quite often. The timing seemed impossible quite often.

That perfect timing is what gave me the sense that the planet has a voice and that we are in our unconsious levels of mind, all connected in that particular 'vein' of our lives.

I'd been having experiences of my own that I was trying to explain to myself, that's how it all started. I began to see something that wasn't tangible, but it was there between me and what's outside of my body. Obviously the difference was mental. I don't believe what I was so troubled by was the 'astral body' kind of projection, or the psychiatric kind of projection but it was a difficult kind of self observation. It was difficult to recognize that it was complete unified senses at work. Self observation that created a literal life re-view as well as a re-direction of my energy and attention towards what was going on in my mind. The energized body felt 'wired', trembly, literally and its activities showed me the information I needed to understand my 'task' in life.

F. David Peat's book about synchronicity doesn't mention Jung's main idea, which was a process of individuation.

Jung used active imagination. I've never done 'active imagination' but I've had some 'mental adventures' in waking states. They were not visions like his but they were bundles of information and lots of memories from my past. Monroe's description of 'rotes' in Far Journeys were a clue to me because the bundles or packages were packed, cached is a good word to use. I suspect Jung's visions might have been 'cached'the same way. I named mine 'mind quakes' eventually because they required real time events over a span of years, even decades to understand them as a form of conveying information. Basically they decoded themselves, bit of information by bit of information in events that would ordinarily have been 'just daily happenings'. What created the sense of 'significance'? That's the part Jung didn't seem to write about in depth, but I've not read much of The Red Book yet.

Anyway I've wondered if Jung's 'visions' were not somewhat similar to Monroe's 'rotes' or Joseph Chilton Pearce's 'postulate arrived full blown in the mind'.(The Bond Of Power) Or what I decided was a mind quake. It was not possible for me to get that kind of meaning from my own understanding as I was in 1984, an American, poorly educated and not too inquisitive although that's not how I would have described my self. The variety of my purely mental, but observable adventures did not seem to be 'visions' but they were received, not self generated.

Psychosis is probably another word for the same kind of experience that Jung named the 'numinous'. Whatever it is, it is hard to bear and hard to bare because such events, rare as they were to me are embedded in 'thought'. His were experiences that almost no normal person could live through and hope to describe in every day language. The process of individuation and Jung's idea that it's a natural process of life came to him I suspect through the same kind of experiences many ordinary people (I'm one of them) struggle through.

Next post will begin here, from page 238 of the Red Book:

"The Frightfullness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts "

"What happened in the past is determined by what is to happen in the future" Norman O. Brown.

Hint of the day: I highly recommend Norman O. Brown's books, especially Apolalypse and/or Metamorphosis his last book. Especially the chapters on Islam, because its' very relevant to our 'now' conflicts. I especially recommend the chapters on 'The Excremental Vision' and his interpretation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels in his Life Against Death. If you read Gulliver's Travels and thought it was a fantasy story, there's a hidden 'world' behind it. Literally. The ideas about the origin of psychoanalysis as well as 'hidden dimensions in books' were so new to me in 1996, perfectly timed to mesh with what was going on where I worked. Maybe it will be new to you. And he exposed extremely interesting ideas. That book is in my opinion the best place to get some grasp of the origin in history of anality, the anal retentive mindset. One of my mindquakes had happened in the same location Martin Luther was in, when he 'got' his revelation: he was on the privy in the tower. Just try to explain a mindquake that happened in a toilet cubicle.

The transcendental function and me at the library.

It's hard to be in the local Jung library without taking several books home. I've got more books than I have space for already. I've been interested in C.G. Jung's ideas because he did establish the existence of the 'transcendental function' and I believe that function is what creates the processes of individuation. Even if he didn't define it very well, Joseph Campbell did say that function operated similar to a mathematical function.

As though that explains everything. Or anything.

Whatever this function is it created so called 'synchronicities', or to be more accurate and specific, synchronization between me and what's outside my body. As though a 'zipper-like pull' operated between me and whatever was happening outside my body at the time. (DNA + RNA) the material world + 'me' = a new understanding of me, on this planet.

What is a 'transcendental function' you may ask? Before I answer I'd like to point out something that ought to be obvious about psychiatric ideas, the basic fact is that something hidden has to be brought to the light of waking consciousness.

C. G. Jung heard a voice in a vision after he asked: 'What is this, that I am doing?" that answered him: "This is Art." Think about what art is basically:, a representation of something that requires decoding and intepretation. Codes are very much in the air at this point in Time.
I would never have understood Picasso's 'art' if I'd not read in Rollo May's Courage To Create that his paintings 'represented' the state of man, disconnected from nature. but that was just the beginning.

Reading words to get information is not the only way to get information, every day experience is what the 'transcendental function' utilizes. But I grew up hearing people remark in offhand ways that 'life is a school and we are the pupils'. There was a point when I began to understand that I was a pupil in a school and there was an instructor, not present physically but it was there; not materially, but it was there. I suspect the 'transcendental function' is it's program/process/pattern and it is a real educational force in the field of 'imagination'.

The originator of modern psychiatry Sigmund Freud discovered there was meaning in dreams, but also behind slips of the tongue, mistakes, forgetting, jokes, i.e., there's something hidden in every day pathology. The definition of 'every day pathology' as being 'mistakes, forgetting, jokes, slips of the tongue' was a surprise! That information surprised me but I grew up in a restricted environment. I didn't know about that information until about 1996 when I read the first page of Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death,The Psychological Analysis of History in which he provided that information. Psychiatry is about 'art', decoding and getting meaning from...everything.

The transcendental function as I understand it operates like a 'highlighter' that selects, abstracts, creates curiosity, activates attention (and holds it captive basically) and it creates new meaning as well as new contexts.


My understanding is that its a defined program that operates in time, not necessarily linear time, since the process of individuation is where it 'functions'; but within a clearly defined situation: an individual life. The transcendental function would operate using material supplied by every day life circumstances and personal memories, using whatever is available in that specific life. The specificity is not easy to describe or prove to someone else.