A bloggers very literal dream of detailed events that happen the next day. A great example of the high strangeness that often surfaces around UFO experiences. Seems very similar in character to my prior awareness experiences.
Category Archives: Mind
Keeping Dark Secrets
Years ago, I worked for a wonderful woman who was a great boss and a good friend. She had struggled for years to conceive a second child. One day in a staff meeting, she grinned and told everyone the news, she was finally pregnant. As soon as she said it, a wave of complete nausea settled in the pit of my stomach. Dear God, I knew without a doubt she would loose the baby. I was heartbroken for her. Yet, she was laughing and joyful sharing her good news with the group. What could I do? I forced a smile on my face and congratulated her.
Each day watching her anticipate the new life within was torture. My knowing that it would end badly did not help her at all. Even though we were close, I could not tell her. What would be the point? Even if she knew she could not change the outcome. So I hid my sorrow and played along. After a few months of agony the inevitable crisis finally occurred. Over the weekend, she had started to hemorrhage badly and was rushed to the emergency room. Not only did she loose the baby, but she almost bled to death. She had to have emergency surgery to stop the bleeding.
Did I make the wrong choice? Was I supposed to warn her? Even if I had, I don’t think she would have listened. I am convinced telling her would have ended our friendship. This painful experience left me with so many unanswered questions. What is the purpose of knowing the future if it can’t be changed?
I do feel that there is a broad sense of meaning in the universe. But I am not convinced that our individual experiences are micro-managed by a puppet master. To me it feels more like a maze that we are challenged to navigate with the tools we have been given. Back then my future sense only surfaced rarely or maybe I only paid attention when it was dire. So most of the warnings I received years ago were related to death. So rather than welcome the warnings, I felt burdened by a knowledge I did not feel ready to share. All I could do was stay close and spend as much quality time as possible with those who seemed to be at risk. As I look back now, maybe I was missing the point.
As I have learned more about the unexplained, I see so many possibilities. Rather than telling them about the warnings, maybe I should have intervened. Should I have helped them prepare for death in some way? Should I have comforted them and reassured them that death is only a step on our journey? Should I have tried to heal them? As bizarre as that may sound to modern folk, there is research to suggest it is possible, not to mention thousands of years of tradition. But even now years later, with a much stronger sense of the reality of the immaterial world, I still don’t know.
This is the reason I am sharing my stories. I don’t have the answers, but I can’t be the only person struggling with the questions. I would love to hear from the others who are on a similar journey. Maybe together we can find some answers.
Disintegration
As Buddhists have been telling us for thousands of years, the self is an illusion. In neuroscience, the seat of consciousness can’t be localized in the brain, or even the body with any certainty. There are strong examples of some people who continue to be aware after death. People who are intimate experience ways of knowing when something is wrong with their loved ones who are far away. Carl Jung was convinced that there was a collective unconscious that stored and shared knowledge across all boundaries. New developments in theoretical physics suggest that everything we know as matter, space and time are built on misunderstandings of how the universe works. I have often felt that the me I see is not the real me, that thinks and dreams.
So what are we doing here and why do we exist? Who or what am I? Such big questions should have big answers. But I am beginning to think that the answer is actually very small.
In all of the hubris of the mechanistic model of medicine. the focus had been fighting a war on disease. The body is our battleground and pharmaceuticals and surgical tools are our weapons. Yet as hard as we try to attack, the ‘enemy’ keeps stepping aside and changing course so that we are often a step behind. While vaccines have created a dramatic reduction in some deadly and crippling diseases, so many other viral invaders have taken their place. Our sterile world of sanitized babies and aversion to dirt has robbed our bodies of the practice needed to build up a strong immune system. When some hostile bacteria do get a foot hold we rush in with antibiotics to save the day. Yet our hospitals are over run with resistant bacteria. About 100,000 people become ill each year from hospital acquired resistant infections. So what are we doing wrong?
Scientists are making inroads in explaining the ways in which gut microbes alter the effectiveness of certain medicines, influence our immunity and metabolism, and even affect our mood. Their findings suggest that modulating the microbial communities within us — perhaps as simply as through dietary modifications — could potentially address a wide range of conditions, including inflammatory diseases, obesity and anxiety. http://www.livescience.com/39762-microbe-host-dynamics-nigms.html
Our gut bacteria also play a role in the manufacture of substances like neurotransmitters (including serotonin); enzymes and vitamins (notably Bs and K) and other essential nutrients (including important amino acid and short-chain fatty acids); and a suite of other signaling molecules that talk to, and influence, the immune and the metabolic systems. Some of these compounds may play a role in regulating our stress levels and even temperament: when gut microbes from easygoing, adventurous mice are transplanted into the guts of anxious and timid mice, they become more adventurous. The expression “thinking with your gut” may contain a larger kernel of truth than we thought.
Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do well to begin regarding the human body as “an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Our bodies’ microbiome is home to around 100 trillion different organisms. More than 99% of the genetic material in our bodies is not human. There are literally pounds of these organisms in and on our bodies. Without them we would die. So did they evolve to serve us, or did we evolve to serve them? After all, they can control us, but we can’t control them. We act on emotion and our sense of ‘self’ but how do we really know what that self is? Maybe we are a colony without any meaningful existence as a single organism.
Could all of evolution be driven by the needs of bacteria to control their environment? Some researchers even think our genetic material has been rewritten multiple times by virus activity. Some comets may have seeded our planet with bacteria or viruses from other worlds. All human cultures say that we were made by the gods, and that the gods taught us the skills we needed to survive. So now we are diligently reshaping vast parts of this world, and taking our tiny overlords to all corners and beyond. Is the voice of god really the chemical signals from inside to serve and obey?
I wonder if the interconnections of friends and families goes beyond the bonds of affection. Once we share bacteria with someone, we may become intertwined in a larger network. The ‘spooky action at a distance’ described by Einstein and others could link back to the interconnected particles of matter that came from the same source. The shared state that entwined particles have is known to span vast distances of time and space. Are the paranormal forces at work in our lives, not our own but the product of other beings inside us? Do they somehow fundamentally shape our perceptions with their signals so that we can never see past the veil?
Entangled Myth
I recently read the book Entangled Minds by Dean Radin. I have read a number of other books that also review the large body of rigorous, repeatable lab studies that have demonstrated a measurable effect of PSI interaction over the last hundred years. What most impressed me about Dean Radin is that he goes beyond the now thoroughly established, if not well publicized, conclusion that PSI is real. Radin’s multi-disciplinary background as well as personal experience may have given him a bit more insight to begin proposing a mechanism behind the magic.
Basic physical concepts like time, space, energy, and matter were imagined to be fixed, absolute, and fundamentally different substances. It was taken for granted that reality existed in an absolute sense, independent of observers, and it was an additional token of faith that action at a distance was impossible. The concept of mind, then viewed through the fledgling discipline of psychology , and especially its rising fad of behaviorism, was regarded as an illusion created by the clockwork mechanisms of the brain. Because mind was an illusion and action at a distance was impossible, genuine psi phenomena were also impossible.
Radin, Dean (2009-11-19). Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (pp. 241-242). Pocket Books. Kindle Edition.
Our cultural framework is still heavily embedded in a mechanistic world/cosmological view. Even practitioners of other scientific disciplines seem to have little awareness of the potential upheaval that could result from the application of the principles of quantum entanglement to the molecular scale. The social sciences, which include my own academic background, are even further out of touch with the frontiers of the physical, chemical and biological sciences. The foundation needed to understand and apply a new understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and energy rarely exists outside of the practitioners’ discipline.While the public is still unaware of the successful research of PSI events, surveys show that most people do accept the reality of PSI. The remaining mystery is how it might work based on our current scientific knowledge. Radin begins to tie the emerging understanding of entangled particles and quantum physics with the patterns of PSI events. Unfortunately, the public is generally unaware of role of the observer in establishing reality and the measurement of quantum particles’ ‘spooky action at a distance’ as famously labeled by Einstein. So tying one mis-understood event to another probably does not go far to break the stalemate that keeps PSI research on the fringe of science and society.
Psychologists still practice as if the brain and the mind were the same thing. Yet, there are documented cases where the mind is operating without the brain functioning. Any out of place thought is a delusion, rather than a stray idea from a passer by.
Bio-chemists and medical researchers are still focusing on the role of specific disease agents and chemical compounds in restoring health. Yet, their population based research has only partial predictive value in managing illness. The role of the mind in establishing and maintaining health is rarely acknowledge, other than as a placebo effect.
It seems we are stuck at the beginning of a scientific revolution, not because the research is unavailable or inconclusive, but because the general academic community and the public can’t absorb the results. The scope of cosmological and theoretical physics have moved so far out of alignment with the general world view that they have become akin to magical arcane practitioners of dark arts.
Messengers or monsters
What other beings exist among us? The Judeo-Christian tradition tells of many kinds of supernatural beings. Angels are God’s messengers and the demons are the fallen angels trying to lead humans to destruction. A literal reading of the Bible and other ancient texts identify many types of entities all in a massive power struggle. All traditions I am aware of also have similar stories of struggle, deception, corruption and redemption. Even our modern forms of entertainment paint the monsters’ portraits and tap our deepest fears. Somewhere inside us is a core that knows without seeing that something dark is out there. We try to reduce that fear with rationality, science and a materialist paradigm that tells us we are alone. But we are not alone.
When one sense is lost, the others become stronger. We have come to rely on sight, sound, touch, taste and smell as if they were the only senses. So we comfort our fears by turning on the lights and closing the doors, as if that would ever be enough to stop the monsters. Our ancestors left us warnings and tried to prepare us to face the unknown. Somehow, through the generations, we suppressed the abilities to sense and communicate with the other side and with each other. By denying the reality of unseen and powerful forces, we cut ourselves off from our own strengths as well.
Long ago, all members of a community believed in good and evil with powerful forces at work in our lives. That common belief gave the group unity and strength, but may have opened the door for both good and evil. Now that few believe and try to deny the other senses, we declare the world of our five senses to be all that exists. This new form of faith has closed many doors. But the darkness has not vanished. The struggles we face are inside. That is where the others still wait for us.
Do they have tooth and claw, with hideous faces and terrifying howls? Do they plot evil with twisted games and crimes of greed? Do they sneak up on us in the night and suck our blood? No, because those simple actions are all comprehensible to us and are only how we have tried to metaphorically understand elemental forces. Those forces are already here, inside us and everyone around us. By unleashing our own inner venom, greed, rage and hate, we continue to feed uncontrolled manifestations that can reach into our reality. I don’t know if there are other races of evil intent trying to break into our reality or if the essence of corrupted human souls continue to seek our destruction, even after death.
I suspect that our animating force or consciousness manifests many different ways in many different realities. After all, if we can reincarnate as humans or animals, as I know from experience we can, then why not as aliens or demons or any other entity? Perhaps our own inner creative forces actualize the entities that do reach us. Physics leaves open the possibility of many realities, with the role of observer as the defining force of creation. The others we vaguely sense may be our inadvertent creation as our fears are made stronger by denial and isolation. The doors inside that we lock in fear are also starving our souls of the meaning, connection, magic and mystery that we need to grow together.
The cosmic struggle that we are locked in is really a war of unity vs. discord. We are on a path of collective evolution into ever more integrated living systems. Yet, our material universe is in a state of explosive decay. Perhaps our consciousness is immortal but divided and immature, needing cycles of incarnation to grow and develop. I see us now like bacteria that must bind together to form a colony to survive the changing environment. Living beings have the potential to form webs of cooperation, caring and creativity. We need to fully develop both as individuals and as communities to reach the next level of development and evolution. There is an ultimate conflict ahead when our collective consciousness will either find a way to transcend or transform the material plane, or the cycle of life will finally draw to a close.
Downside Up
Last night I dreamed that I was traveling with friends on a train over a long distance. As we traveled, we would occasionally pass through a tunnel that would immerse us in total darkness. As we emerged into the light again, each time I noticed something else that was just a little bit different. One tunnel would change a companions hair, the next another’s pants, as it went on the results progressed in intensity. Eventually a whole person was replaced. I seemed to be the only one who noticed.
Then I shifted and I was a mother who had lost a child during one of the tunnels. I looked every where for my missing child. But as I asked, each person seemed more and more confused as they had not seen a child with me. Finally, I stopped asking and began to realize why. Although it felt as if all of these changes were happening in front of me. I eventually realized that the people around me are not changing places, instead I was the one who was sliding from one reality to the next.
Chicken and Egg
This morning as I was chatting at the playground with a grandmother I had just met, we starting talking about zoos. She felt that zoos which confined the animals in small enclosures were depressing. Although I agreed, I also pointed out that large open air zoos make it hard for the kids to see and relate to the animals. We sat quietly for a moment.
Then I thought, it would be great if there were tunnels with observation domes among the animals. So I started to speak, but she beat me to it. You know, she said, if there were tunnels under the animal enclosures, and you could pop up in a dome every so often to view the animals, that would be the best of both. I could only agree and let it go.
No one wants to hear that you accidentally read their mind. After all, I don’t know for sure if I read her or if she read me. Judging by how often this is starting to happen, I am guessing it is me. I wonder how often this happens every day with people all over the world. Maybe we all are constantly hearing each other’s thoughts but never know it.
As we move through our busy lives busting about, working hard, who’s will are we doing? Which of our impulses and feelings are really our own? Is there a puppet master pulling the strings? Or are we all part of a human hive fulfilling some greater purpose of which we known nothing? Perhaps deep within us all is a receiver that is tuned to the signals of a collective whole or an outside entity.
Considering the amazing research I have read recently on psi, I wonder if our conversation attuned us to the same channel and we then somehow collectively processed the problem so that we shared the job of finding a solution. The accumulation of evidence suggests that psi is a low level but common ability which can be boosted by multiple people focusing together. Athletes, performers, politicians among others work to focus the will of the crowd to support their goals. In what other ways are our abilities harnessed without us even realizing it? Are bureaucracies almost alive with the persistent effort and support of their members? Are formal ceremonies more than just a recognition of an event or are they actually a transformational experience? Are researchers around the world working on the same research actually functioning as part of a network of analytical capacity? Is inspiration a flash from our subconscious or is it really the output from shared thought?
Don’t try, do
I have been reading about the research by Russel Tarq into remote viewing. His research among others, clearly found the best results came from learning to step aside from the analytically part of our thoughts. To me it seems automatic to try to name and categorize everything I experience. Remote viewing seems to be a way of learning to hover in a drifting state of mind to receive information, without trying to make sense of it. I find letting go and just opening up to be the hardest skill of all. So perhaps it is a more animal, instinctive part of our mind that taps into the intangible.
Yet, unlike remote viewers, I consistently get warnings without preparing but rarely get visual input. If I could get both the heads up warning and the visuals, my extra sense might be a whole lot more useful. I wanted to see if this was a skill I could develop. Since I clearly have to deal with the unknown anyway, why not learn to be intentionally part of the process.
I found some online randomized psi training tools that replicate the classic card guessing lab tests. After trying them out a few times, I was discouraged. Then I realized what was wrong. I was trying! Duh. So in that one moment of clarity, I just started clicking as fast as I could go on the cards in a 50 card set. When I had been averaging the expected chance results of about 25%, the results this time were 38% or far above chance. But as soon as I started feeling cocky, the results on the next few runs were back to chance. I was trying again. So I stopped the exercise in discouragement.
Later as I was playing a very simple fishing game on my tablet with my toddler, I was getting frustrated at how hard it was to get the timing right to catch the fish. You have to anticipate the vector of the fishing line and the future location of the fish so that they meet up exactly to be successful. To make the game even more difficult, if you miss the time it takes to reset will often cause you to miss a chance at another fish cruising by. I was only catching about 10% of the fish. Heeeyyyyy, light bulb! I closed my eyes and stopped trying. I left myself open to feel a very subtle kind of shift in my mind with no concrete thought or focus. Shift, tap, fish. Shift, tap, fish. For about three minutes, I was almost continuously catching virtual fish while keeping my eyes closed. Once again, as soon as I felt like I was the bomb, the effect disappeared.
As much as I would like to think I have got this whole thing figured out. It is clear that there is more than a lifetime of discipline needed to reach the open, serene, receptive state of mind needed to hear everything the universe has to say.
Passing Through
You don’t have to be from another planet to be an alien.
I used to find it very odd that unwelcome visitors from other countries were called aliens. Since I read so much sci-fi as a kid, I would get the two kinds mixed up. When I heard a news blub that mentioned aliens crossing the border, I would picture in my mind hordes of little green men invading from outer space. Ridiculously, since I most often heard about ‘wetbacks’, I usually embellished my inner news clip with amphibious frog-like Kermit aliens. This left me somewhat confused as to what the panic was all about as a herd of muppets couldn’t be all that dangerous.
Clearly, I was not properly indoctrinated into the local phobia regarding the most recent immigration wave. In the world of right wing politics and culture war hysteria that I grew up in, there were rigidly defined camps. You were either right or left (wrong) or rarely center (wimp). Given the available options, I wasn’t even on the map. If anything, I was vertical. All I wanted was out.
Perhaps if I could travel to the stars like the characters in my books, I could find the people like me. Over the years, I avidly followed the development and launch of the shuttle. I was sure that by the time I was an adult, star travel would be as common as flying across the country. Then came the Challenger disaster and years of cautious rebuilding. I watched and I waited, but it seemed that I would never find my way home.
Then one day, in my own backyard, I looked up and saw something that seemed impossible. A strange craft in the sky, flying above my house. It had a flat triangular tip in the front, a long narrow fuselage, and ended in narrow wings where the tail should be, but they bent up vertically in the middle. It moved like a plane, but it did not look like any plane I had ever seen on TV. Were the aliens finally here? I ran and grabbed my Kodak 110 and took as many grainy, low res photos as I could. I was ready for first contact!
Alas, this was not an alien craft, but instead an experimental plane designed by Burt Rutan. When years later, I heard that his team was competing for the X-prize for the first private craft to reach space, I was ecstatic. I followed his progress to victory in Space Ship One. Thanks to him and many other pioneers who have helped the private space race to finally begin, we are a few steps closer to reaching the stars. For some, it will be the final frontier. For others like me, it may be at last a place to belong.
Just Another Day
At a doctor’s appointment this morning in a new office, I waited for a nurse to call me back. Three different nurses arrived one by one, looked at their papers and called a name. I ignored them and waited. Another nurse emerged and I started to stand up. I caught myself and sat back down so that I would not draw attention. She scanned the papers and called my name. I stood and followed her to the exam room.
Later as I went to pick up one of my kids from a lesson, I walked in the door about 3 minutes late and knew immediately that my child was not in the building. Yet, I did not feel any sense of danger. I walked through looking and asking the leaders. Everyone had seen my son leave by the front door a few minutes before and no one had seen him since. Becoming frantic, I went back out and looked all up and down the front walkway. No sign of him. Yet, I felt strongly that he was nearby, but it made no sense. Why would he hide? Where could he hide,? I could see a long way in both directions. Not to mention it was a cold night and his jacket and shoes were inside. I had the strongest need to step outside and call for him, even though it seems impossible that he would be near. So, I called him and up he popped from a small corner near the stairs where he had decided to hide. After the required lecture and hugs, I asked why he had gone there. He wanted to wait where he could see me drive up, but I had driven in the back way.
A busy house often results in a dirty carpet, so I have a small steam cleaner for small messes. I cleaned up yet another routine mess and then started to put the equipment away as I usually do. But in this case, I had the strong thought that I would need it again very soon. So, I did not bother to wrap the cord and put it in the closet. I then gathered my drink and stuff to go join the kids.
This evening, playing with the kids, I started to set my glass of wine down on the carpet. I immediately got the “uh-oh” feeling. Sighing, I picked up the glass and moved it to an out of the way spot between a big toy and a door. Once again, I argued with the feeling that it could not possibly tip over back there. A few minutes later I moved across the room to pick up the ball we were playing with. As I turned, I saw it. My youngest holding the empty glass and saying, “Empty”. Yep, time to go get the steam cleaner.
The situations today were very clear and easy to spot. I usually get at least one a day. But for every strong feeling that is so clearly on target, there are a handful of near misses. I used to just ignore the near misses. But as I have become a little more clear on spotting the warnings, I can sometimes feel a faint shadow of what might have happened. Usually those are the ones where I would have smacked my shin or hurt myself in some other clumsy way. I can almost feel the pain I narrowly avoided. I realized that some will simply call that imagination. But I am clear on the difference. Not only is the echo more concrete than imagination, but I don’t experience the same faint almost pain when I avoid a normal obvious visual hazard. Still to anyone who has not dealt with it personally, it would be impossible to prove that I had prevented an accident. It seems to me, that the better I get at listening to the warnings and correctly adjusting my actions, the less I can demonstrate the validity of my extra sense.
The result of this constant double checking of every feeling and impulse is mentally exhausting. I would love to be able to just rest my brain and not have to think about the what ifs and extra layers. But I am terrified that if I drop my guard for one minute and stop paying attention, I will miss the critical warning that would save my kids. No matter how drained and stressed I am from all of this mental effort, I will do my best to stay on guard.
Visionary Explorer 