“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
~ Albert Einstein(born: 1879-03-14 died: 1955-04-18 at age: 76)
Row, row, row your boats
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
~ round song
sung to Canadian babies
Introduction
Though I came to this conclusion via a bizarre route, it is actually just common
sense that ordinary conscious experience has to be a hallucination.
Buddha claimed this, and it turns out something as mundane as the study of
neurons has shown it to be true.
You don’t experience reality directly. You experience reality via a
hallucination, a sort of waking dream. Binary inputs coming into your brain on
the nerves are used to modify the hallucination to keep it in sync with the
outside world. Much more of it is constructed rather than perceived than you
would suppose. Your reality can be thought of as an artistic creation as much as
a perception.
My Strange Experiences
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
~ William Shakespear(born: 1564-04-23 died: 1616-04-23 at age: 52) Hamlet
Act I Scene v
From the period 1974-11-30 to 1975-09, and later for a
week in 1977-06, I experienced the bizarre. I am not claiming these experiences
were anything but my overwrought imagination, but I promise you I experienced
them as real, usually in utter terror. They may have been triggered by eating a
bowl of green Jello possibly spiked with LSD by a Christian religious fanatic.
They may have been triggered by mania (I am manic depressive and now on lithium.)
In 2007 a found out a “friend”, David L.,
who attended that party some years later put LSD in another friend’s
coffee, Louis C. At this point I consider David the prime suspect. He is now
dead, so I cannot confront him.
I have never consciously taken any drug stronger than marijuana. For purposes of
your first reading, please presume that everything I am about to tell you was
100% hallucinatory, and that I am accurately describing the memory of my
hallucinationatory experience.
From my perspective, I was feeling and behaving completely normally. I was
travelling through strange alternate universes. The structure of reality was
unravelling. It was not random. Despite how bizarre the experiences sound, I
could discover rules governing them.
For at least a period of a few hours I experienced as real, roughly in
chronological order:
Music
When I was about 12, i.e. 1960, I
lay in my bed looking up at a full moon, with dramatic clouds passing over it. I
could hear incredibly beautiful clear classical music. I could not find the
source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from inside my own head.
Giant
When I was about 15, i.e. 1963, I
noticed a faint cone shaped pillar of light atop Hollyburn mountain in West
Vancouver, BC Canada. I puzzled what it was, but presumed there must be some
mundane explanation for it. I fell into the habit of talking to it as one might
talk to a dog. I gave it a name, Giant, pronounced with
a hard G. When I talked to it I could feel its presence in me. It seemed to have
a personality, very patient, wistful and kind. Our relationship evolved and one
day I asked it to make Ann M. appear at the ice skating rink where I often
skated. On cue, she showed up in the Hollyburn Country Club for the first time
as someone’s guest. I did other experiments asking it to get people to
appear at the Hollyburn Country Club. I told my friends Robbie J. and Hugh. M.
and about this and took them to see Giant. I pointed at
the cone of light. They said "But Munroe (That’s what most people
called me back then), there’s nothing there." I felt deeply
embarrassed. I stopped my association with Giant.
Brigadoon
Circa 1970, I was hiking back
down from Deeks Lake with my sisters and little brother. We got off course. We
peered over a cliff and could see a village below us. The odd thing was the
village appeared to be stuck in a Brigadoon-like time warp. Everything looked as
it might 100 years earlier. They were cooking over a
giant open fire. There were horses and wagons. I had never heard of such a
community. How could they have escaped public notice? How did they earn a living
so isolated up in the mountains? This one has a mundane explanation. A few years
later I learned that McCabe And Mrs. Miller was filmed somewhere in
the vicinity. We probably stumbled onto the set. The main problem with this
explanation is we were quite a bit west of where the movie industry is located
in West Vancouver.
Tiger Fire
I was eating breakfast at the CPR hotel in Edmonton in 1971.
There were trays of food kept warm with alcohol burners. Suddenly I saw people
running and screaming. I thought perhaps some wild animal had got loose in the
restaurant and people were over-reacting. A young waiter ran toward me all in
flames. He appeared to be running toward me in slow motion. I had plenty of time
to react. I became extremely calm. I pulled the boy to the ground and rolled out
the flames then poured ice cold orange juice on his burns. He was screaming
words that hinted he had tried to burn somebody else and had accidentally caught
himself afire. Though I am nominally an atheist, I asked Jesus for divine help
in healing this boy. I felt this was very dangerous for me to do, but the
circumstances warranted the risk. He was screaming in pain. I locked eyes with
him, and suddenly he relaxed and smiled. A man came by and asked me if I were a
doctor. I said "no ". He said, "I am". I then unlocked eyes,
and backed off. The boy started screaming again in pain. I asked the doctor how
long the boy would be in the hospital. He said perhaps three months. I went
outside and suddenly burst into shaking and tears. Later I asked after the boy
and discovered he had been discharged from hospital after a couple of days. His
burns had healed remarkably quickly.
Friendly Ghosts
In 1972-10, an elderly couple,
ghosts, explained the remodelling that had been done to my house since they
lived there. They were quite with it for their age. They thought Jimmy and I
were cute/sweet. I expected they would be homophobic. The next day I checked it
out and could see faint traces of a door that had been covered over where they
said it would be.
ESP
In the middle of the night, I got up with a gut feeling my ex Ben
Best needed me. Waking up in the middle of the night was unusual for me. I
wrote him. I later learned his best friend had committed suicide that day.
Tree Killers
In 1973 I was watching a short at
a movie theatre, a documentary on logging. I started to consider it from the
tree’s perspective. These logging machines were hideous devices for
torturing and killing trees. I became quite emotionally upset at the brutality.
The Guy In The Movie
In 1974-07 I received a brochure
advertising an 8 mm porn movie. This was not unusual. I was active in gay lib
and as a result was on all manner of junk mail lists. The movie featured a
handsome, spectacularly well hung black guy. I showed the picture to my lover Jimmy
L.. He too was quite turned on by the picture. I said, "I am going away
for a business trip in Calgary. If you get a chance to have sex with a well hung
black guy while I am away, do it. So will I." We were monogamous, with a
playful sex life full of fantasy and role playing. To me this was just a fantasy.
At that time, there were almost no black people at all in Vancouver. You might
see one every ten days or so. I thought it would be fun to imagine such an
encounter, but felt there was almost zero chance of it actually happening for
either of us. When I got back, Jim said, "I think you are going to be mad.
I had sex a well hung black guy. Not only that, he is the guy in the movie."
It turned out Jim was not pulling my leg. Don
B. (the porn star) had come to Vancouver on vacation. He went to Have A Gay
Stay to arrange cheap accomodation, and David
L. sent him to stay with us. We had a spare bedroom in our house usually
occupied by such a "transient" as we called our guests. We used to
play tourist in our own city showing gay visitors around. Don stayed with us for
about a month. I will leave out the details, but suffice it to say we had a lot
of fun, not just sexual. Jealousy was impossible since Don was so lovable.
During that time Don and I had long heart-to-heart talks. I learned about the
disadvantages of being stunningly handsome and spectacularly hung. It can be a
very lonely life with everyone relating only to your penis. I was struck by the
statistical impossibility of the co-incidence, not only a
black guy but the black guy in the movie showing up literally on our
doorstep. Jim claimed he had created the event by taking LSD then focussing on
Don’s picture. That sounded pretty far fetched, but Don showing up on our
doorstep seemed even stranger. Don and I sporadically stayed in touch over the
years. I don’t think he has forgiven me for telling the story of this
strange co-incidence publicly a few years ago. I don’t mention Don’s
last name because he is now straight and is quite embarrassed by his youthful
indiscretion making the porn movie. I suppose you could interpret this as
answered prayer, by some god other than Jehovah, one not quite so prudish.
Odour Music
In 1974-09, I experienced a music of smells, arpeggios of
peach, apple, cherry, that were so beautiful I had an orgasm without physical
contact. I had my head in Dennis L.’s
lap at the time. He had told me he was going to do something mysterious, but
gave no clue as to what to expect.
On Being Born
I re-experienced my birth, as if it were unfolding step by
step one night while lying in my waterbed. It started when I began pondering the
phrase "contemplate your navel". It started when I imagined what it
might have been like when there was still an umbilical cord attached to my navel.
I could feel a pressure on my umbilical cord, as if I were having difficulty
breathing. I could hear voices of the doctors and nurses. I could not hear the
precise words, but I understood the gist — there was some trouble with my
delivery, but it was reasonably under control. To me, it was like disembarking
from an ocean liner. It would take some time, but there would be people to greet
me. I felt a calm expectation. When I first emerged, the light was painfully
bright. My vision was blurry but I could make out a white enamel tray. I couldn’t
see anything else, just a blurry French blue background. I stared at this thing
in awe. I had never seen an object before. I had never seen anything before. I
wanted to contemplate it for hours. However, somebody yanked me into the air. I
could make out a nondescript gray blob. I wondered what it was. Suddenly a pulse
of energy shot out of it like a flash of light. It felt pleasant, but far too
intense, like an electric shock. It startled me. I assumed it was my Mom viewing
me for the first time, sending me a burst of love. As I was experiencing this, I
was giving my lover Jim a blow by blow description. This triggered a similar
experience in him. For both of us, it was emotionally extremely intense.
We both held onto each other, shaking, wondering what on earth we had stumbled
into. Midwives tell me that births are not this sanguine, so this experience
must have come purely from our imaginations.
I Ching
recommend book⇒I Ching: A New Interpretation For Modern Times
On
1974-11-30 in the afternoon, while I was supposed to
be preparing for a costume party at our house that evening, I experienced
telekinesis. I threw a pure yang pattern using three coins (yang is
one of the 64 possible I Ching patterns) three times in succession by focussing
my attention on the thought of Dennis
Lewsey’s head. The odds of throwing yang 3
times in succession are 1 in (64)^(3) = 262,144. The odds of throwing pure yang
(no moving lines) are 1 in (8/3)^(6*3) = 46,498,311. As I was doing it, it felt
as though someone or something were holding my head rigidly fixed in one
position.
I was quite excited, saying I would have to tell Dr. Patricia Greenwood, my
probability and statistics prof, that something radically new was happening.
Everyone was busy getting ready for the party and could not be persuaded of the
earth-shattering importance of what had just happened. "If it is that
important, it can wait until after the party." I had been smoking marijuana
at the time, so I think they discounted my observation.
The original method of casting the Ching took hours, and requires using yarrow
stalks. Another more modern method of casting the Ching is to use a computer
program random number generator seeded by the system clock. The coin method
has you throw three coins six times. You form the pattern, bottom to top, one
bar at a time.
I Ching Coin Method
Coins
Pattern
Pattern Name
Probability
TTT
—x—
moving yin, yin moving to yang
1/8
TTH
—
yang, male, inspiring
3/8
HHT
— —
yin, female, receptive
3/8
HHH
—o—
moving yang, yang moving to yin
1/8
Shamanic Possession
On 1974-11-30 we had a "blossoming
into womanhood" party for Lori T. It was a costume party. Jimmy
made me a black angel costume. It was a political statement. Angels should be
allowed to be African too. I had a black robe instead of black skin. Several
completely androgynous people I did not know came to the party dressed in black
tights. I had a bad feeling about them, but I could not put my finger on it.
They seemed to be avoiding my Mom who was also at the party. I asked my Mom to
leave explaining that many of the guests were feeling inhibited by her. There
was one strange young man in the kitchen who stared at me and said in a croaky
voice "Its all there man, its all there in John in the Bible" My
costume was bulky and clumsy. I did not feel part of the party. I went
downstairs and smoked a third of a joint. As I was walking up the stairs, I
started to feel both extremely stoned and outrageously horny. My billowing
costume hid my hard on. Guests were leaving. I went into hall by the front
bedroom and saw my friend Allan D, a very tall blond guy, and John, a bald black
man, necking. I said "It’s ok, you don’t have to go" I don’t
want to go into details, but suffice it to say an orgy spontaneously happened in
the front bedroom. I saw a guy standing beside the bed wearing a costume of wood
with deer horns. I did not recall seeing him at the party. Then I felt him in my
brain, telling me he would take me over. The pressure was totally overpowering
and I blacked out and forgot about the traumatic incident until a year later.
The next thing I remember is feeling John’s shaved head, and it felt so
good I thought I wanted to do this for the rest of eternity. I was so turned on,
I imagined my psychic vibes must be waking the neighbours for blocks around, and
they would be horny out of their minds not understanding why. I became alarmed.
Why was I feeling this much pleasure? Surely it must be some addictive drug
someone had surreptitiously given me. I went into my room and started to cry
because I knew this pleasure was so strong it would take over my life. My well-ordered
life would be ruined. My sister and her boyfriend Alex came into my room to see
what the matter was. I saw her for the first time as a fellow human being,
equally complex as myself, with a complete hidden inner life. It was a
breathtakingly beautiful moment. I was in awe of her. Alex explained to me that
my mission was to solve the problems of peace and war along with five other
people. Later, Daphne said that Alex had not made such a statement, but that he
may have used some of those words.
Body Snatching
I obsessed about spirits inhabiting bodies and people taking over each others’
minds enslaving them. The idea of body snatching nauseated me and terrified me.
I felt sick at the idea I too might eventually take up the practice, because its
pleasure was so seductive. I seemed sometimes to be people other than myself,
but in my own body. I would wake up in my body clueless how to do anything as if
I had never been here before, though most things seemed to work on automatic. I
was at a loss to explain my sudden utter incompetence to people who expected me
to perform normally. I would hear internal voices bawling me out and telling me
to do things that were painful to do, but would be "good" for me or
the general good, e.g. facing some major fear. I became paranoid. I wanted very
badly to die. To this day I still don’t feel comfortable thinking about
these matters. If my theory is correct, this is the paragraph that people will
enjoy hearing the most.
I n t e n s i t y
I experienced emotions of fear, horniness and joy millions of times more intense
than anything before or since.
Head Tugs
I would often get a feeling like someone was tugging on my
head or twisting my head to point in some direction. This was not subtle. If I
followed the direction suggested, I seemed to have interesting adventures.
Sometimes it would lead me on apparently pointless wild goose chases. It seemed
to have a penchant for forbidden places and places I had never been before. I
interpreted this as some part of my unconscious urging me not to be such a stick
in the mud.
Variable Intelligence
I was at work at Univac writing some instructions for
using a computer program. I kept pruning out the unnecessary verbiage. I kept
going. To my surprise, I ended up with a poem. I discovered that I could
increase my intelligence at will, but the problem was, I could not easily
communicate what I was thinking because it was so tedious to explain it all long
hand in terms an ordinary intelligence person (even myself) could understand.
The other problem with increasing my intelligence was boredom. The sorts of
problem I was asked to work on to earn a living were unbearably tedious. I later
would often have the experience of encountering nominally uneducated people,
people I knew for a fact were not bright, suddenly able to converse
intelligently on all manner of complex topics. It was as if I could induce
intelligence and knowledge in the people around me, even when I was just
listening in. It was my choice just how intelligent a universe I wanted to
inhabit. Most of the time, the people I was doing this to appeared to be unaware
of anything unusual. I felt rather foolish about taking so much pride in my
intelligence when it was something so arbitrarily chosen.
Totem Animals
Sometimes for a fraction of a second, a person would
disappear, and in his place would be a fitting totem animal, the same size. It
usually bore some physical resemblance, similar character traits or a way of
moving.
Elevator Hard ons
Sometimes when I was in an elevator I would
mischievously let males in the elevator get hard ons. They would glare at
me in anger, embarrassment and confusion. I was not flirting, touching or doing
anything overtly sexual.
Linking
I could link with people, taking on their beliefs,
attitudes, seeing the world through their eyes. My own beliefs would fade away,
remembered but without juice or effect. Unlinking was quite painful.
Spiritual Eye Surgery
I went to see Dr. Bert J, my optometrist. I was keen on
getting contact lenses. He said that I was too cross-eyed for them. I would have
to continue to use glasses. I said, "I have a funny feeling I can fix that."
I did a concentration mind-pull sort of thing. He retested my eyes and they were
within parameters to get contacts. He was quite astonished.
Timeshifting
We drove out to a play along the winding lower
levels highway. I was a passenger in the car. I would focus on the sound of the
engine. By concentrating on the smoothness, the sound would get smoother, and
the car would whoosh forward. It seemed I was in some sort of very tenuous
reality where things were only vaguely defined. It was as if I shifted a few
seconds into the future. I could see what was coming up around the next bend. If
I focussed on the roughness of engine, it would get rougher. Reality would
become more defined and sharply focussed and the car would stop. It was as if I
were drifting a few seconds into the past where choice was gone. I played,
shifting back and forth in time, zooming the car forward, then making it mark
time. There was no acceleration pull when I did these shifts. From the point of
view of everyone else in the car, the trip proceeded at constant speed.
Numbness
During the play, my limbs and body gradually went more and
more numb. I seemed to be fading out of consciousness. I thought of Keats’ Ode
To A Nightingale:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.
I became alarmed and tried to get my friends to help me. They paid absolutely no
attention. Sensation eventually returned later that night when I held onto a
light bulb. The next day I asked why they had ignored my pleas. Jim said that I
had just been quietly muttering to myself, but had not made any request. I
remembered shouting.
Roedy as Athlete
I could ice skate faster than anyone else at the rink. I
think of myself as a real klutz when it comes to athletics. Oddly, this is the
event that seemed most impossible and miraculous to me. I imagined myself an
eagle swooping around the rink. My friend Lori T. commented that I looked like
an eagle swooping around the rink. I discovered that I could not fall. Even if I
ran straight for someone, at the last second my body would automatically
suddenly do a spectacular leap around them.
Rhino-cerous
I was reading a book about the life of Walt Disney. I
noticed that words were formed of compounds — little private puns, e.g.
rhinocerous = rhino + cerous = blue nose, character = Char (my sister’s
name) + actor. It seemed as if the entire English language had been constructed
as a private joke for my benefit.
Stigma
An ongoing terror was "why have a never heard of
this before?" Surely if anyone else had experiences like this they would
document them. Is this something exceedingly rare? Will some nameless horrible
thing happen to me to silence me before I can tell people about this? I’m
not mad; reality is coming unhinged. I realise now the reason I had not heard
anything was that there is a huge stigma to admitting having such experiences.
Foreign Films
I went to foreign films and seemed to have no trouble
following them even if I ignored the subtitles.
Fireplace Ashes
If I watched the fireplace, I could see patterns and
shapes in the embers. It was like the child’s game of seeing animals in
the clouds, except the patterns appeared to be actually there, not just the
product of my imagination. It was oddly both exciting and terrifying.
Metamessages
One morning I woke up in what I felt was an alternate
reality. I had no evidence, just a gut feeling. In this reality sex would be
very common. You were socially obligated to invite the mailman in for a quick
screw, for example. I decided to investigate with extreme caution. I asked my
lover Jim what he had done that
morning. He said, "I had sex with Dennis
then I had sex with Peter." I asked him to repeat himself because I was so
astonished. "What’s so unusual about that?", he replied. I said "You
sure adjusted to this new reality fast!" The next day I awoke back in my
home reality. I asked Jim about the previous day. He said that he had told me
that he had gone to the library with Dennis and had tea with Peter and that I
seemed to think this very strange. The meta-message was "I had a trivial
social interaction with Peter and Dennis." In home reality that translates
as "going to the library". In that other reality, it translates as "have
sex with". So long as you stick consistently in one reality you don’t
get in trouble. Peter refers to Peter T., and Dennis to Dennis L. both now
deceased.
X-ray Vision
I could "see" with my eyes closed, and see
through walls. With my eyes closed people looked like vertical oval-shaped light-gray
clouds. The more interesting people had bigger clouds — larger than the
body. Dull people had clouds perhaps the size of a fist. People had what
appeared to be large Chinese symbols on their clouds. I don’t read Chinese.
Dogpatch
I visited a relaxed reality parallel to this one, where
only the relaxed people interacted with me, and the uptight ones became like
cardboard cutouts. The grass on uncut lawns seemed brighter. I came across one
of my ex students Wayne, who was a very relaxed sort of guy. He seemed to sort
of pop out of a sea of faces, looking somehow brighter and more intense.
Horatio
One day I could hear the voice of a friend, David
L., in my head. I felt he was trying to take control of my brain. I was
terrified. My friend Hugh M. suggested daring David to make me touch my nose,
then refusing to do so, and I would discover he had no control over me.
I decided to call David to clear up by growing paranoia. I asked, "Did you
do anything unusual last night about 5 PM?" He replied, "Yes, I tried
to take over your mind." I asked, "Why did you do that?" He
replied, "To show you there are more things under heaven and earth than you
know about."
Pass the Salt
One day I started to focus on all the ways people manipulate
each other. It became quite bleak focussing on just this aspect of existence. At
one point someone said, "Please pass the salt". I noticed that there
was almost no way out of this request. I was forced to pass the salt. The
enormity of my slavery weighed on me. Then I burst out laughing seeing what I
was doing to myself scaring myself silly by looking at reality with a microscope.
Blowjobs
I found that by experimenting with various images while I
was giving blow jobs I could drive my partner wild. I made the mistake of
revealing the image when Jim asked how I did that. I had focussed on being his
grandfather. He was quite angry.
Steering
I discovered that if I could remain calm I could steer through these strange realities. Instead of saying to myself, "This
is weird! " which made things stranger still, I focussed on the
normallness — up is still up, red is still red, and the reality would
mellow out. I learned to focus on the aspects of the reality I liked rather than
the parts that terrified me. It is a bit like learning to drive. You lurch about
and sweat profusely in terror and embarrassment.
Financial Nuns
I went to the Robson Square Media centre. I noticed there
was a course being given on some sort of financial matter. I was feeling
mischievous, and decided to go down a hall marked "no entry". I was
puzzled why this hall would be taboo and what the consequences would be of
exploring it. It lead around behind the room where the class was being given. I
looked in and saw a room full of nuns, all dressed in traditional black and
white, doing some ritual, running around the tables. I was baffled. These were
not the participants I had seen from the front door. Just then a security guard
came up and told me I was not supposed to be in there. I played dumb saying I
had got lost. I left via a door not normally used by the public, directly to the
outside. Outside, it seemed the whole world had turned gay. There were a dozen
cute blond young men dressed in black leather. I am unsure of the number, I just
can’t seem to remember that part properly. I recall thinking that "I’m
in heaven. Everyone is cute and gay". I felt very excited. I tried to
figure out why there would be this sudden confluence. I could discover no event
that had attracted them. I went home without trying to pick up any of the boys,
though I made eye contact with a few. I felt queasy at reality behaving in such
an unusual way, even though it was heavenly. This sounds quite dream-like, or
something from a Fellini film. Ordinary reality flowed into it and back out
again, all seamlessly.
Rosemary’s Baby
It was a horribly disruptive time. I worried that
someone had or was giving me drugs. My lover Jimmy
could not handle it and left in 1975-03. Later, after
his own set of strange adventures, he said, "Someday we should write a book
about this. It will be like Rosemary’s baby."
Playing with Bodies
One day I was lying in a room at the Garden Baths. I was
bored. Suddenly I found myself up in the rafters looking down into the various
rooms, including mine. A voice that seemed to come from no particular place
chided me for my interest in bodies. I explained that bodies were very
comforting to me. Even if it was like playing with dolls, I found life too
terrifying to give them up.
Wyrding
Skip this one if you are in the least squeamish. One day I
was at the steambaths and I followed a slim older man into his room. I put my
hand on his stomach. A hole opened up and swallowed up my hand, so that my hand
was inside his body. I am not referring to fisting. Then more gaping holes
started appearing over his body. I was totally wyrded out and felt faint. It was
as though the tapestry of reality was under tension and was ripping. I fought to
maintain consciousness and got the hell out of there.
Arrangers
I had an out-of-body experience OOBE while watching a
very dull heterosexual porn movie in Dayton Ohio. In my out-of-body state I was
an "arranger ". I impersonally arranged a meeting between me down
there and a suitable guy several blocks away. I had a sudden fit of panic. What
the heck am I doing? I’m not an arranger. Plop, I was instantly back down
in my body. A short while later I hooked up with a local black DJ, Jim G. We
spent a week enjoying the pleasures of his big brass bed.
Biblical Sting
I put an ad in the paper looking for sex. A guy came over
and we started discussing some of the strange things that had happened to me. I
was telling him about speaking purely, the way things
said with a clean intention are metaphors and make sense on many levels that the
author did not consciously understand. A booklet I had written with largely pure
intentions called A Guide For The Naive Homosexual was a metaphor
for a spiritual process. I certainly did not mean it that way when I wrote it. I
got excited and, without thinking, started talking in a power
voice, which is resonant and clear, persuasive and which often frightens
people. I said that some parts of the bible were written purely. He yelped in
pain. I said "What’s the matter?" He said, "I don’t
know, but when you said the word "bible" I felt a sudden sharp pain."
He was quite rattled and immediately left.
The Purpose of Life
One night I was lying alone in my water bed, and started to ponder the great
question, "What is the purpose of life?" To my surprise, something
like a voice answered. It was like a chorus of many voices, yet not a physical
sound. Yet it was not the usual voice in my head I use when talking to myself.
It felt distinctly other. It might be described as a pattern in the other
background sounds, sort of not really there, yet very clear. This is not
anywhere near an accurate description, but imagine a voice created by modulating
the sound of reeds rustling. At any rate it first said, "There is no
purpose." I felt a hollow sickness. Then it sort of laughed and said, "This
is not a bad thing. You get to make up your own purpose. You are free to choose
anything you want. Think about it. It is much better this way than having some a
priori purpose handed to you, but it does require you to do some work. You have
absolute freedom. Your choice is just as solid and real as any pre-given purpose."
So my chosen purpose is to stand up for the rights of plants and animals.
Animals include cetacea, humans and invertebrates. This includes working to
eradicate war, hunger and bigotry. My secondary purpose is exploration —
trying to figure out how the world really works not just the conventional
wisdom about how it does.
American Gothic
I got myself a Bible which I carried conspicuously
in my right hand. I put on an American Gothic straight face. I walked into a
discotheque, and walked around slowly with a sort of lurching gate, lowering my
body and stretching out my strides, not quite a Monty Python silly walk, but
getting close. People, of course, stared nervously wondering who I was and what
I would do. I, semi-on-purpose, banged my head into low hanging beam and felt
backwards flat onto my back. Everyone laughed. I got up and walked out.
Roedy as Superman
I was walking down Granville street. A street person
started attacking me, shouting "faggot! faggot!". I just let the blows
rain down, and smiled at him benignly. It quite unnerved him. To get away from
him, I jumped up on a raised cement flower bed, and quickly ducked down behind
it. My assailant, who likely was on some sort of drugs, waved his arms
incredulously in the air and cried out in amazement, "He flew away! He flew
away!"
The Little Old Lady
There was a little old lady who used to hand out Bible tracts
on Granville street at night. One night I went up to her and said, "Don’t
you feel a little nervous being in this part of town at night" "Oh no"
she replied, "Jesus is here to protect me." She went on to explain
that Jesus was literally right there behind her, but invisible to me. I decided
to humour the old dear, and said, "Would you mind relaying a few questions
to Jesus for me?" She said "Not at all". I was curious what sorts
of answers this little old lady would put in Jesus’s mouth. I asked "Why
does God allow all this?" I waved my hand at the drunks and general slease.
I can’t recall her answer, but I do remember thinking it was better than I
expected.
I said, "But, I can’t be a Christian. I am gay." She said, "No
problem. Jesus can change you. Do I have your permission to let him do that?"
I thought the idea was ridiculous, but to humour her I said "Sure".
A boyish girl named Sherry with bitten fingernails (which I liked), who dressed
in old T-shirts, who had unusually low self esteem and self confidence, came to
stay at my place preparatory to going to a Living
Love workshop. She asked if she could sleep in my waterbed, "just to
sleep". I said "ok". This may sound strange, but we were having
sex before I realised what was happening. I did not like it. It felt sort of
tentative and itchy, like someone lightly running their fingers down my arm. The
next day I went to work at the BC Hydro research labs. I was so horny I had to
keep running to the washroom to jerk off, over and over all day. I was
distraught. It felt so strange to be attracted to something so unpleasant. This
was very embarrassing. How could I get any work done? I went back to Granville
street, found the lady and asked her if there was any way I could be put back to
normal. She said "Sure". Sherry later confessed she had herpes. I was
freaked, but unharmed, and felt reconfirmed in my negative opinions of all
females.
Exorcism
I experienced exorcism. After months of denying any
occult knowledge, Dennis L’s
lover, Fred G. said, "Let’s see what kinds of games I can play"
and held my head. It felt as if a liquid were being drained slowly from my head,
revealing something. I felt calm, in the psychic hands of many good people who
were battling for my soul. I felt my job was just to remain calm and stay out
the way, so I used the TM meditation technique. The draining gradually revealed
something and I suddenly remembered what had happened the night of November 30
and I confronted my demon.
The demon was a sourcerer that originally lived in central America that
supposedly lived in five people’s minds and once, and one had died. That
is why it forcefully invaded me. Its whole purpose in life was to live forever
in other people’s minds without having children. It was willing to endure
any amount of pain and inflict any amount of pain for this goal. The way I look
on it now is my demon was just an addiction
in fancy dress, representing the desire in myself for lasting fame. The exorcism
consisted in becoming calm enough to see the thing and talk to it, explaining
the futility of its life philosophy now that we had love. I persuaded it that it
was in its best interests to die. I told Fred that there were other ones I could
barely sense. He said that they would have to wait for another time. It may be
just coincidence, but as I was riding home from the exorcism on my bicycle I
came across a house on fire. I broke into the house and awoke the occupants. It
felt as if the demon had immolated himself after leaving me. The original
encounter with this thing was the scariest event of my life. Getting rid of it
was extremely pleasurable, relief beyond measure. Afterward Fred denied doing
anything other than just holding my head. For years afterward, seeing dolls
representing deer horned native Americans gave me the willies. Shortly after the
exorcism all the frightening stuff stopped happening. Some weird things
continued to happen, but they became much gentler.
Submit to the Will of Allah
One time I was sitting in Tom M.’s spacious back
yard surrounded by forests. It was a beautiful sunny day and the birds were
singing. An unusual voice that seemed to come from everywhere spoke directly
into my mind. It said that if I were willing to completely co-operate, to do
exactly what it wanted, I could remain indefinitely in the state of bliss I was
in. Even though I suspected it would demand nothing unethical, I declined,
thinking I would get hooked on the bliss and would never be able to break free
should it start requesting unethical things.
Slow-mo Tennis
I slowed time so that when I first played tennis I had
about a minute to calmly walk over to the ball, plan my shot, and get the
racquet angle just right, and return the ball. Though I appeared to my opponent
to be running hard, to me it was as if I were running in ultra-slow motion.
Later Fred told me some tennis pros do this routinely.
Killer Voice
In 1977-06, I was sexually curious
about street people in San Francisco. I joined a group of them and pretended to
nod off. I heard a young woman explain to her friends she thought she could use
hypnosis or some drug magick to con me into giving her money. I suddenly jumped
out at her and shouted "birds!" which I felt intuitively was
one of her phobias. I said in a very loud power voice, "Don’t you
ever dare try to take advantage of people again." She was badly shaken and
complained she had been physically injured by this chastisement. Her friends
bawled me out saying I had used unfair tactics. This is one of my haziest
memories.
Ultimate Pleasure
In 1977-06, in Berkeley I went
to a porn movie called Ultimate Pleasure. It appeared to have been secretly
filmed in my basement changing into a Busby Berkeley-like spectacular with
thousands of humping bodies.
The Impossibility of Suicide
After I walked out of the movie, I was very distressed
that my ex Jim would never talk to me.
I rarely even caught a glimpse of him. I got the notion in my head that he had
died on 1974-11-30, and that I had refused to accept
it. This explained his scarcity of appearances. I decided to die to join him. I
hid between parked cars, then when a big truck came by, I jumped out in front of
it. There was a pop, then I found myself standing on the curb, totally unharmed.
However, I felt a tremendous joy inside. I interpreted this to mean I was closer
to Jim. So I repeated this twice more, with the same result. That lead to me
experiencing both an extreme bodily pleasure and an outrageous horniness. I
became alarmed, thinking I must have surreptitiously been given some illegal
drug. I ended up in the psych ward of the Alameda hospital chained in a room
without food, water or any form of stimulation for what appeared to be a month,
(actually four days). That was the worst experience of my life. They gave me
Haldol which caused my tongue to swell up blocking my breathing, which was
terrifying. They did not care. I was not a person, just a mental patient. To me,
this appeared to be deliberate torture. I surmised the treatment works because
patients resolve never to let themselves be in a position to be tortured again.
Centipede
I lost my ability to speak. I worried I might be
confined to a mental hospital for the rest of my days. How could I possibly pass
for a Nixon Republican — the obvious sanity test of these fascists? One
day a young black man came and took a group of us out into the yard for exercise.
We formed a line passing the ball though our legs. For a few seconds I had a
moment of delicious clarity. I was the entire line, a giant centipede,
passing the ball down my many legs.
Atlas
There was a patient in the hospital who used to sit glumly
in a corner all the time. I don’t remember his real name. I used to call
him Buddha. One day I went over to him and asked him why he sat there so grimly
all the time. He explained that he was holding up the world. I said "I’ll
hold it for you to give you a break". He face brightened. He passed me "the
world" which I pantomimed putting on my shoulders like Atlas. He then ran
off happily. The shrink asked me what I had done to Buddha to so drastically
change his behaviour. I explained how I had entered his reality. I’m still
carrying it.
Black Guys All Know Roedy
In 1978-06, I was on my way to
Cornucopia in St. Mary Kentucky. I was passing through Louisville. Everywhere I
went, some young black man would say to me, "Hi Roedy, howya doin’".
How did they know my name? I checked to make sure my name was not visible on by
clothing or baggage. I assumed this was an elaborate practical joke to poke fun
of my addiction to well hung black men. But then how on earth could the folks at
Cornucopia have got the entire black male population of St. Louis in on it? This
too has a mundane explanation. "roadie" in black slang means "friend"
That pleased me since I consider myself a defender of black civil rights.
Let it Clap
I was having a metaphysical discussion at Cornucopia
in Kentucky with a woman in 1978-06. She was claiming
we completely create our reality, make it up. I said, "you mean that if I
said, "Let there be thunder" there would?" Before she had a
chance to answer out of clear sky came a huge thunderclap.
Floating on a Cloud
I was having a discussion at Cornucopia in Kentucky with a
woman named M. in 1978-06. Somehow the world melted
away leaving us sitting under a tree as if sitting on a cloud. I could feel what
her body was feeling. It was as if we had become a single being. It was a
delightful, peaceful, tingly, sparkling headspace. I met her again years later.
She remembered the incident too.
Sai Baba and the Mice
I read a book about Sai
Baba. I said to myself, "OK Sai, you’re on. Perform a miracle."
He was known for materialising vibhuti, an oily ash. I thought some might just
appear. What appeared instead were two cones of sandy dirt (about 4 cm(1.57 in)
tall) in my den in front of the television. I looked for a hole in the ceiling.
I could see no source. I cleaned them up. For several days in a row the cones
reappeared. I could find no source for the sand. About a year later a rubber
plant died and I uprooted it. I found the pot was hollow. This was the source of
the sand, several feet away. Presumably some mice burrowed it out each night and
for some reason carried it over and deposited it in neat cones.
Joe and Rosalie
In 1979-11 I swam with two
adolescent dolphins, Joe and Rosalie, and had an opening
experience. I don’t think they would mind me mentioning them by name.
Floatation Tanks
Many times I floated in a tank of warm epson salts in
the dark. I could hear my mind chatter like some berserk AM radio station. I
found the only way to shut it off was to listen intently. When I would emerge an
hour later, reality had a heavy profound peaceful feel, completely unlike
anything else.
You were Better Than the Movie
I went to the Nob Hill Cinema in San Franciso. It is a gay
pornographic movie theatre. The movie playing was about young men in love with
their cars, masturbating on them. I found this utterly stupid and boring. I
noticed people going in and out of doorway by the front of the theatre. I went
down to investigate. It was an unlit hall with pitch black rooms off it. I could
hear sounds of sex coming from the various rooms, but I could see nothing. I
noticed a handsome young man dragging his reluctant girl friend into the hall.
She was wearing a black dress, the sort older Mexican women wear in the movies.
I went up to him and said "Do you know what sort of place this is? This is
no place to drag your girl friend." His girl friend piped up in a squeeky
voice "I like it." They then started necking. I wondered to myself,
why would they pick this of all places to neck? Aha, the boy is bi, and wants
some male attention on the side. I put my hand on his leg to test the waters. In
short order all three of us were on the floor. Her dress was full of slits so
you could reach in anywhere you wanted. She had a firm athletic body and a
lemony body odour. He was a bit reserved, but cute. Suddenly, there was a rap on
my head. A flashlight shone in my eyes. An officious voice said, "This is
the manager. You will have to go now." I looked up and saw there we were
surrounded by a ring of people. They started to applaud. One shouted out "It
was better than the movie." The boy and his girlfriend raced off eager to
get away from me. I was disappointed given how friendly we had been moments
earlier.
Hare Krisha
I was at UBC near the Student Union building sitting
under a tree. A group of Hari Krishnas were chanting and dancing nearby. A
little girl walked over to me and gave me a bag of peanuts. Everything was
infinitely peaceful. The universe and I were one seamless whole. The experience
lasted only a few minutes. There is no possible way to put such an experience in
words. It was just too utterly different from anything I have experienced in
normal consciousness. All I can do is wave my hands and hope you too have had a
similar experience.
Ganhdi’s Godson
In 1985 I was in Bombay India
working on a computer program for The Hunger Project. As I was having lunch, a
servant came over and asked if a man could join us. He turned out to be the
owner of Ananda Marg, a large company that manufacturered cars, washing machines
etc. It turned out he was Gandhi’s godson. He was astonished that we from
the west knew of Gandhi. He told us stories of life with Gandhi. He then took me
to his private Gandhi museum and left me there alone for an afternoon to look
over the memorabilia. Gandhi wrote thousands of letters by hand, in many
different languages. He did not simply wave his spiritual hand. He worked very
hard on the mundane physical plane. I have always felt a special kinship with
Gandhi, partly because he was assassinated just before I was born, and partly
because he bravely accomplished so much to end the second class citizenship of
Hindus in South Africa without using force or violence. I saw myself doing
something analogous for the homosexuals. I was in awe seeing those patterns of
ink. It was as though I felt his cool presence. I felt profoundly peaceful.
Scrambling
In the early 1990s I bought a copy of Anthony Robbin’s
audio tapes called Personal Power. I successfully used one of his
techniques called scrambling to finally stop pining for my lover Jimmy
who had left me twenty years earlier. I deliberately scrambled my "sacred
" memories by playing them over in my mind forwards and backwards with
silly music, at frantic speed, with Mickey Mouse ears etc. Arthur C. Clarke
wrote a science fiction story about a man who had become hopelessly addicted to
a woman named Kalindy when he made love to her using an illegal emotion enhancer.
I felt something similar had happened to me. No one or no thing could possibly
compare with the memory of Jim.
Sai Baba Manifests in my House
Some time in the early 90s I came across a book about Sai
Baba, and said to myself, "Sai, I hear you can materialise in people’s
homes. Try it here, but find some way to do it so I doesn’t scare the
pants off me." A few days later Sai appeared on TV dragging what appeared
to be infinite amounts of ash out of a limited jar. I have never seen him before
or since on TV.
Through the Looking Glass
I met a handsome guy named John who really, really, really
liked me to give him blow jobs. Something odd happened while we were having sex.
The best metaphor to describe what happened was in Alice In Wonderland where
Alice walked through the mirror into a new world. We seemed poised on the
threshold of some portal to a different universe. He was eager to go through it
and I was reluctant. Our bodies had become fused into one, so I could feel what
he was feeling and vice versa. We met some years later and reminisced about this
mutual strange experience.
Here Elevator, Elevator, Elevator
To this day, I can tell 8
times out of 10 which elevator in a bank is going to come first. I think I do it
unconsciously by analysing the noises in the shafts.
Darcy
In about 1995-12, Darcy M. came to me to get a massage.
During the massage, I felt beams of healing energy. My HIV was instantly much
improved. He then looked out my window and said "What a fabulous view!"
He waved his hand as he did this, lo, my mundane little view was transformed
into something more intense, yet it was just the same physically. Darcy said he
could not see me again because he was entering a committed relationship.
PCAN
My friend Brent K. invited me to come with him to some sort of meeting. When we
got there i discovered pcan stood for Pacific Coast
Association of Nudists. It was a
perfectly standard business meeting, except that it was conducted in the nude.
There was a short, muscular, young black man. He was the handsomest person i had
ever seen in person. He came over to me and said "I am looking for a
husband"
Self Massage
Do unto others… On 2000-07-20
I was giving a massage to a handsome Chinese boy named Ken. When I would run my
hands down his sides, I could feel the delightful sensation of "hands"
running down "my" sides. It was as if I could feel what he was feeling.
It was a delightful, peaceful, tingly, sparkling headspace. Sometimes people
massage me, so it is no great work of the imagination to guess what my actions
would feel like, but I actually felt it. What is odd is I did not feel
the hands on my literal body, I felt them out there on Ken’s body. It was
as if Ken’s body was an extension of my own. This sort of thing happens to
varying degrees quite frequently when I do massages.
Falling Flowers
This one has hundreds of witnesses, but is not that
spectacular. In 2001-08 I went to see Astronaut J.
Edgar Mitchell speak at the University of Victoria. Just as he was about to
speak, a large bouquet of flowers seemed to leap into the air slightly and flop
onto the ground, as if prostrating itself to Mr. Mitchell. Mitchell joked that
the flowers were bowing to everyone. I suppose this could have been done with
trickery and a little nylon thread. Granted, the flowers could simply have
fallen over, but to me it did not look like ordinary falling. It was just
a little too vigorous. Then again I have done no experiments kicking over large
floral arrangements to study their expected flight dynamics.
Unpredictable Computers
Computers often behave in ways that are inconsistent
with by understanding of how they could possibly behave. I have been programming
since 1963 so I have a pretty good idea of what
expected behaviour is. When this happens, I usually feel sick with fear. It is
partly why I hate Microsoft sloppy, bloated code so much. At some point, I
expect machines to exceed humans in intelligence and it will be a big shock for
humans to get used to it. I keep wondering if today is the day.
Bliss
It is like going to sleep. You withdraw your attention from
the outside world. There is a faint Star Trek force-field buzzing. You feel
buoyant and that you are about to fall backwards. Then it washes over you. It is
quite pleasant. You come out of it feeling refreshed, with a nice afterglow. It
is like that oceanic feeling you sometimes get when you don’t move after
sex. There is also another feeling associated with it, like being hit on the
back of your neck. Your arms twitch. I don’t know if everyone experiences
it this way.
I
started sporadically having experiences similar to what you might expect people
would have in future having ocular implants installed, and a gradual switchover
from a biological to a virtual or artificial body. Reality became a sort of play
I was making up, then jumping into and playing out.
Channeling
Starting in 2001-09 I channeled a number of aphorisms,
poems and even some jokes.
There were quite different from my usual style of writing. Most of them made me
cry with their beauty. Other people didn’t think they were nearly as
wonderful as I did.
Prophetic Dream
A few days before 9/11, I dreamed of an airliner
flying through a glass office tower and emerging the other side with building
and plane unscathed. The “soundtrack” to my dream was from a 1979
Chanel perfume commercial (Share the Fantasy
video) with a crooner singing I don’t Want To Set The World On Fire
in which a shadow of an airliner passes over the TransAmerica building. When the
towers collapsed, I was immediately struck by many holes in the official story
and to the similarity to my dream. Thousands of other people around the world
also had precognitive dreams about 9/11 just prior to
the event and many wrote them down, posted them or told others about them before
the event happened. For everyone, these dreams were very disturbing not only for
the content, but the vividness. Barring pure co-incidence, perhaps something
that simultaneously grips the world consciousness is powerful enough to project
back in time. As you will read in my essays about 9/11, a large number of people had to know about
the attack in advance. Perhaps the intensity of such plotting also produces some
sort of ESP broadcast effect. I find it odd that Christians are so skeptical of
these dreamers even with documentary proof, but will swallow something far more
improbable like the resurrection of Jesus for which there is no evidence or
witnesses.
Freeze Frame
On 2001-09-13 I was riding in the Skytrain to a have a
pizza with Dave B. then go to a VPCUS meeting. I was tired and was just on the
edge of falling asleep. I was in a blissful state. Suddenly the train stopped,
and clicked frame, frame, frame, then took off normally. It was as if I were
watching some 3D movie and the projectionist had put it on freeze frame for
three frames. There were no inertial effects to the train "stopping".
It could well have been a dream that superimposed perfectly on what I was doing
just before I fell asleep.
Making Sense
“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I
definitely overpaid for my carpet.
~ Woody Allen(born: 1935-12-01 age: 73)
At the time, I felt I was on the verge of making some huge scientific
breakthrough. If I could just hang on long enough, I would learn to steer in
these strange realities without scaring myself silly. Was Everett/Walker right
with his many worlds hypothesis, that quantum uncertainty takes all
possible branches creating an opulent fabulously branching tree of realities for
you to choose from? Perhaps Jesus was right that the Kingdom of heaven was "at
hand", just a matter of steering toward the more heavenly parts of the
possibility tree of life. I composed an essay
describing my empirical theory of how steering works.
when I had my “;steering thrusters” on, I sometimes got a feeling like
I was on a boat gently rocking.
I went to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Eric L, our childhood neighbour. He said “You
hallucinated everything”. I said, “But everything looked just as real
as you do now. How can I tell hallucinations apart from reality?” They were
solid, 3D, in full resolution, no details missing. I have witnesses, at least to
some of this. I have photographs of the people involved. He said “Then you
must have hallucinated the witnesses agreeing with you.” Without a tool to
determine when I was hallucinating, other than weirdness, I felt this view was
not going to be much help.
How could hallucinations be so perfect? Where did all the detail come from?
After years of fruitless mulling, and reading about all manner of spirituality,
I put the matter on the shelf and only rarely took it out to think about. Geneva
H. came to visit me in 2000-05 and she started asking
questions about that period of my life. Suddenly, it all came together. In a
sense the psychiatrist was right, but what he left out is that ordinary waking
consciousness is also a hallucination, a sort of dream. I decided to
write this essay.
The Brain
Imagine yourself being a brain trapped in a dark skull. All around you are
millions of little neurons bringing information about the outside world. They
wink on and off with electro-chemical energy. When one neuron winks on and off
very fast it means the tip of your big toe is too hot. When another does the
same thing it means green light is landing on a certain spot of your eye.
You, as brain, have to make some sense out of this giant mess of winking neurons
and somehow weave it into a seamless whole, that experience we call
consciousness. You create an model/idea of reality from this binary information.
You don’t experience reality directly. You never experience anything but
an idea.
Even you, or more accurately the experience of you, are an idea. And like
any other idea, in some sense, you don’t exist unless you are thinking
about that idea.
Your conscious experience is necessarily a creation, similar to a work of
art, considering the unpromising raw ingredients — neurons twitching.
There are other possible sources of information to create the experience, memory
for example. We might “see” a spider or "see" a piece of
lint depending on which we remembered was more probable to appear on the carpet.
It seems plausible we have some sort of weak psychic link with people we are
emotionally involved with. This too may feed information into the soup.
Synthesthesia
The seamless internal experience we create has visual, auditory, emotional,
tactile parts. However, there is no hard and fast rule that says only
information from the eye neurons is allowed to influence the visual parts of the
experience.
Just look into a beloved’s face in flickering candlelight and watch it
change, based mainly on your imagination.
Rare people see sound, or hear light. We all do a similar magic, mostly
superimposing memories, beliefs and emotions onto what we see and hear.
Auras
Some people routinely see auras (clouds around people’s heads that
indicate the emotional and spiritual state of the person). Some would be
terrified if they saw auras.
Auras are a way of displaying information. The information can be gleaned
in many different ways, not necessarily from photons. Some people display this
information to themselves as auras. Others may display it as various feelings of
comfort or pain in the gut. Some, such as myself, feel it as a tug.
It is a creative choice. Only when the usual choice is disturbed do we
become aware of the process.
My Weird Stuff
I see nearly all the weird things that happened to me as a result of playing
around with the way I internally present data to myself. I just used more
dramatic cloaking than I am usually comfortable with.
For example, for my out-of-body experience, I did not necessarily float to the
ceiling, but I presented the information I had gleaned about the theatre as it
would look from the ceiling. That little view transformation was trivial
compared with the unconscious effort of gleaning a 3D model of all the parts of
the theatre.
This photo taken around that time shows some of the intensity, pain, terror and
despair.
Practical Application
Simply being aware that your ordinary reality is also a hallucination, loosely
based on information you received about the outside world, might tend to make
you less dogmatic.
You have probably seen how witnesses at a criminal trial all present wildly
different descriptions of the wrong doer. They are not necessarily lying. The
internal experience is nowhere near like camera-like, especially as
remembered.
My late mother used to hear mocking intonations in others’ voices that to
my ears simply were not there. She had absolutely no doubt about what she was
hearing. If she realised that her perception of voices was a hallucination
warped by beliefs and past experience, perhaps she could have allowed in a
sliver of doubt.
Your mind is so good at filtering out information you don’t want to hear
or that overwhelms it. You never have a complete picture. It is good to know
your internal map of reality can be inaccurate, and does not necessarily jibe
with anyone else’s.
Also steering is useful to know to steer through life’s
mundane realities. Focus on the strawberries you like, not the tiger’s you
don’t and generally life will give you more strawberries and fewer tigers.
You are giving your subconscious instruction on what sort of experiences you
want it to create for you. Even if outside reality does not change in the least,
in your inner experience there will be more strawberries.
Experiments
My engineer father, who was not given to flaky beliefs, claimed that if he was
sitting in a movie theatre, by concentrating on the back of the neck of somebody
sitting a few rows down, the person would soon begin to fidget and scratch the
back of their neck. It should be fairly simple to see how long it takes for
someone to fidget that way with and without the concentration.
When you have an experience of unitively merging with another, you can ask later
if the other person experienced the same thing.
I have noticed that being on live TV or radio is highly exciting. It is
subjectively different from other forms of excitement, a feeling of being more
fully present. I have wondered if there is some feedback. Does the attention of
that large audience directly affect you? You could test this by monitoring the
heart rates etc. of people in a studio audience and see what happens when:
You put the camera on them, and they notice.
You put the camera on them, but they don’t notice.
You put the camera on them, but don’t put the feed out to the public.
When I went under anaesthesia, I felt my consciousness fade away to nothing.
Consciousness then seems to be at least measurable on a scale of 0 to 10
subjectively. What if I rated my consciousness under various conditions, e.g.
going under anaesthesia, while on live TV, while meditating, while experiencing
cosmic consciousness etc. At the same time you monitor every bodily function you
possibly can trying to find something that correlates with my subjective measure
of consciousness.
Once you have a way to measure something, you can make strides understanding it.
Unfortunately whatever you measure may not correlate in other species or
computers. You can’t discover anything this way about the consciousness of
anything but humans.
Physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK, and psychologist Stuart
Hameroff of the University of Arizona in Tucson have proposed that consciousness
might arise from wave-like quantum-mechanical effects involving protein
filaments called microtubules in nerve cells. Other physicists pooh pooh the
idea saying the quantum decoherence has nothing whatever to do with human
consciousness, that the idea got started when John Von Neumann speculated that
the act of taking a measurement which collapsed the Shrödinger wave
function, making concrete a nebulous possibility, may have something to do with
consciousness. The notion sounds silly if presume only humans are conscious. But
then nothing follows common sense at the quantum level.
You might check out correlations in people’s reported experiences in
cosmic consciousness. Is there consensus on what it like to be a donkey,
computer or turtle?
Books
recommend book⇒The Dancing Wu Li Masters : An Overview of the New Physics
It is a beautifully ethical book, and reassuring to anyone terrified by these strange experiences. I’ve met Stephen several times. I am quite convinced he lives in a slightly different reality from most of us, where little miracles happen every day.
If you ever get a chance to spend some time with this woman in the flesh, take it. She is something else. She has some pretty off the wall beliefs, e.g. it is possible to be immortal. She has some way of inducing feelings of ecstacy and wonder. Her book talks about how your thoughts create your reality, not just your subjective reality, but your consensual reality. This book is mostly suggested affirmations to improve your relationships. I personally have not had much success with formal affirmations, but it is nice to have a framework to explain how thoughts (positive or negative) create your personal reality.
This is an unusal book, about how different cultures experience the natural world. Our experience depends much more on our Western cultural conditioning than we would ever imagine. It also tackles the slippery question "what is consciousness?".
Scientific
American Article on Parallel Universes: physicists are taking seriously
several types of parallel universes, including quantum many worlds, Level 1 (other
universes like ours), Level 2 (universes with different values for universal
constants) and Level 4 (universes with different physical laws).
Feedback
I spent thousands of hours trying to make sense of these strange experiences,
trying to find some explanation for them. I eventually gave up, deciding they
were just "sound and fury signifying nothing" (Macbeth Act V Scene V).
If you have had similar experiences or you have other ways of interpreting them
please email me via email. If you
have any thoughts on their significance, please share that too. Please let me
know if your correspondence is for public posting and commentary, or purely
private.
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Roedy Green :
©1996-2009 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products
is
one of the 64 possible I Ching patterns) three times in succession by focussing
my attention on the thought of Dennis
Lewsey’s head. The odds of throwing yang 3
times in succession are 1 in (64)^(3) = 262,144. The odds of throwing pure yang
(no moving lines) are 1 in (8/3)^(6*3) = 46,498,311. As I was doing it, it felt
as though someone or something were holding my head rigidly fixed in one
position.
video) with a crooner singing I don’t Want To Set The World On Fire
in which a shadow of an airliner passes over the TransAmerica building. When the
towers collapsed, I was immediately struck by many holes in the official story
and to the similarity to my dream. Thousands of other people around the world
also had precognitive dreams about 9/11 just prior to
the event and many wrote them down, posted them or told others about them before
the event happened. For everyone, these dreams were very disturbing not only for
the content, but the vividness. Barring pure co-incidence, perhaps something
that simultaneously grips the world consciousness is powerful enough to project
back in time. As you will read in my essays about
9/11, a large number of people had to know about
the attack in advance. Perhaps the intensity of such plotting also produces some
sort of ESP broadcast effect. I find it odd that Christians are so skeptical of
these dreamers even with documentary proof, but will swallow something far more
improbable like the resurrection of Jesus for which there is no evidence or
witnesses.
Feedback
Rings
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Roedy Green :
