Category Archives: Unexplained
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?
Locks and keys
The quest to understand my ‘future sense’ continues, but as I look to scientific experts for answers I find the promise of enlightenment keeps fading the deeper I dig. Struggling to learn about physics, cosmology and neurology, I begin to feel that despite all we have learned, we still have the blind leading the blind. As I keep digging, I find leaders in these fields looking for the same kinds of answers. But the questions are too small to open the doors needed to find what we are looking for.
My questions may take me into a wild frontier, but I am willing to consider the possibilities and share my thoughts.
Does precognition require that the future be fixed and unchangeable? No, I get plenty of warnings ‘in time’ that allow me to avoid the implied consequences. Yes, some who prefer a set future, will argue pre-determination and say that I was destined to avoid those. Unfortunately, I also miss some, which has helped me learn the ‘rules’. I now often ignore the warnings that are minor. At first I ignored them because they seemed too silly to bother with. Now, I am usually able to tell that they are real. By going on alert and watching for the consequence without taking evasive action, I try too polish my ability to ‘interpret’ the warning by matching it up to the results. Some events do seem to be much harder to avoid, so that even with the warning and the evasion, I still manage to end up with the consequences. Perhaps they are mitigated in some way, but some events seem more fixed than others.
If the future is malleable, then are there all probabilities in play at all times? No, my ongoing daily experience suggests that there is a flow and momentum toward and around a few set events. I think of it as being in a small boat on a lazy river. If I watch the way the water moves ahead of me, I can infer the location of hidden boulders that could damage the boat. I can’t tell the exact nature of the obstacles, but I can feel a disturbance in the flow. I can try to avoid the obstacles, but sometimes the current is stronger and I hit them anyway. At times, rarely, it seems that even extraordinary effort can’t avoid the event. Then there are the points int he river where another river joins and pushes me along faster and in a new direction. The most rare future warnings come on slowly and build up a tremendous internal pressure in a particular life event direction. These life pivot points are so powerful that even if I resist and go the other way, many circumstances will arise that make resisting the ‘planned’ direction more and more difficult and miserable. Eventually, I have to give in to the life change direction that I apparently should go in just to avoid the cascading negative consequences of resisting.
So now I am thinking of my ‘future sense’ less as ‘sight’ and more like ‘sonar’. If you have ever tried to figure out exactly what a fishing scanner has found in the water beneath your boat, you will understand what I mean. It gives you some idea of distance and scale, but no details. My experience suggests that there is an echo from future events to now. It is almost as if the emotional impact of the event in it’s own ‘when’ then kicks back an echo into it’s past. It then works a little like a reverse memory. Just as seeing a item may remind you of one you saw before, encountering a circumstance that ties to a future event triggers a minor reverberation – future emotions bouncing off of now and creating a noticeable disturbance in the flow of thought. Since the echo of the future seems to be more of an emotional event and not a rational/analytical thought process, perhaps the ‘future sense’ is really a consequence of quantum forces at play in the function of the sub-conscious and emotion. Could the fact that my physical self is present in both the past that encountered the echo and the future which experienced the event/emotion be the link? Would the same molecules from two points in ‘time’ have a form of quantum entanglement just as two parts of the same whole separated by space?
Is time an illusion? In some ways yes, the idea of a rigid linear progression is an illusion, which I believe is created by our brains trying to make sense of too much input. So in the practical sense that most people do experience time in a similar linear way, it is functionally real. There is decay and entropy, which tends toward disorder. We measure the cycle of orbits and half-life of decay to establish conventional units of measure for communication and coordination. At the macro scale these conventions of measuring progression serve a very useful purpose, to allow us to coordinate activities as a society. But when we drill down into the underlying forces at work, the illusion starts to slip. When I speak into a phone and when I am heard are not exactly simultaneous. An orbital cycle is not exactly identical every trip around the star. Half-life decay can be partially reset by cosmic events. Anything I perceive with my senses glosses over tremendous detail and variation. My mind attempts to apply order to match each experience to a pattern and find an appropriate way of dealing with the situation, even to the point of overriding the sensory input if it does not fit. So, I remain unimpressed with any definition of reality that presumes that human observation and measurement are inherently concrete and substantial.
In the shadows
Most people seem to accept the idea of a supernatural/paranormal level to existence, even if they do not claim to know exactly what that is. Although I have had some contact with the unseen for most of my life, I have never felt sure of what is out there than I somehow catch echos of. My experience tells me that most religious traditions have codified an allegorical reference to someone’s long ago authentic experience. But the narratives have been so distorted that ‘truth’ is not clear. How can we peel back the layers and find the substance?
As I let the many traditions and modern theories swirl in my overloaded brain, I cannot escape the impression that all paths are ways to approach the same thing. If there is truly one core metaphysical reality that somehow interacts with our own, what would it be. If we sift all of the common elements together and then stop back, what kind of picture emerges? So many have proposed unifying ideas of the other, but so far I have not felt that ‘snap’ that indicates a solid lock. To me so many traditions seem to have a gilded facade that may hide a darker truth. What unpalatable reality may be underneath the stories of faith and redemption?
So far, these attributes seem to fit the essence of the many traditions:
– There is a form of consciousness that exists outside of our daily sensory realm.
– There is an inherent connection between that entity and ourselves.
– I suspect some kind of symbiotic interchange exists between us and has for most of our existence as a species.
– Conversely, there seems to be some faction of the entity that is parasitic and hostile.
– They do not inhabit the same sensory realm as we do.
– They seem to need something intangible but essential from us.
– They seem to be capable of manipulating our perceptions.
– They are shadows in our world and we are shadows in theirs.
Possible interpretations:
– We are pawns in some other entities long term internal power struggle.
– We provide something intangible they need or want, so they manipulate our perceptions to elicit certain reactions.
– We may be a form of livestock to them to be maintained and drained as needed, as aphids are to ants and as cows are to us.
– We are not supposed to know what is really going on, we are fed lies and illusions to pacify us.
– We are somehow related or connected, yet not eqipped to directly interact without an extreme effort or altered state.
Critical questions:
– Some of their reality does spill over into ours, but how much is real and how much is illusion? Is the distortion intended or accidental?
– Where they somehow responsible for our existence, as so many traditions refer to a creator?
– Are they a remnant or a vanguard?
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.
Glitch in the matrix
A few days ago, late in the evening, I walked into my living room which has a high a peaked ceiling. Just as I stepped into the room, I glanced up at the peak windows and the night reflected a swirl of black above me. My mind immediately dismissed it as shadows from a ceiling fan. Then my conscious thoughts caught up and realized that this house, which I have lived in only two years, does not have ceiling fans. I looked up again and the black swirl was no longer there. So I began to convince myself it had been an odd shadow or my eyes reacting to the change in light. Well enough.
Until I turned and saw it again in a different corner of the room. It was a set of spiral bands of black pivoting around a central point. But the arms were not straight, they were twisted as if distorted by the rotational movement. Once again, I tried to dismiss it in my thoughts, but I had no explanation. Then I realized what made the sight so odd at first. The first time I saw it, I saw it as a reflection in the glass, which would place it above my head. The reflection was not complete, as the source overlapped the edge of the glass, so I only saw about two thirds of the swirl. The second time I saw it in a specific location in the opposite corner of the room, away from me and I could see all of it. If it was an illusion or my eyes playing tricks, why would there be a reflection of a partial image in the glass, rather than the whole imaginary image?
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.
Out of the mouth of babes
I have struggled so much in my life with relating to others that I am very careful to give my children a conventional upbringing. Even though I am convinced that life is far stranger than most believe, I do not want to let my children become alienated from the culture they live in. I do not discuss the stranger aspects of my life with them yet, but I do tell them that not everyone believes the same thing. I want to let them find their own way as much as possible.
My son is in pre-school and loves to pretend, but he sees pretending as part of playing a game. Most of the time he works very hard at communicating in a concrete and serious way. Like me he is an Aspie and is dangerously honest. He finds any kind of misleading behavior or inaccuracy as totally unacceptable.
Tonight on the way home, we were talking about his best friend at school. Out of no where, he tells me that this boy is his favorite friend. He knew as soon as he saw him that they would love each other and be best friends. He went on to explain that when he first saw this boy at pre-school, a rainbow of light came out of the boy. He claims they both saw it. I asked him to describe the light. He said it was straight up out of the top of the kid’s head. It split into the rainbow colors and went out to points and came back around. I asked him how he knew the other boy saw it on him. My son said that they did not talk about it, but he could tell by the way they looked at each other that they both saw it.
About a year before, in the car on the way to pre-school, my son told me that he could see the ghosts under the road. Now, we do not let him watch scary/horror shows so his exposure to ghosts is strictly through cartoons. He also knows that when people die they are buried in the ‘sad place’, otherwise known as a cemetery. I can’t think of a reason for him to think there were ghosts under the road. He seemed convinced that they were there and they were real. This is the only time I know of where he as spoken about seeing ghosts.
Since he and I are so much alike, I can usually read him very well. Yet, there are times when it seems I am tuned in to him on a deeper level. Oddly, I don’t feel the same level of automatic understanding with my toddler daughter, so it must be something other than just that he is my child. He recently told me very seriously that it was rude of me to say what he was about to say, because it was the same as interrupting him. I told him, I was sorry that I had not meant to do it. Since I so often seem to tune in to the people I am close to, I could see how this would be frustrating if I regularly jump the gun in conversation. I just wish I could tell when I am doing it.
Lately he has started telling me he can smell things from far away. By far away, I mean from the next room or another building. I am not quite sure what to make of that one as it does not sound like anything I have heard before.
When he was about three, he told me how he died when he was with his other mom and dad from before. He said he was on a train with this other family and their dog. Then a bad man came on the train and started shooting people. He said his dog tried to pull him off the train to get away from the person who hurt him. But he said it was too late because he kept bleeding and he died. Hearing about this other family and tragic end did make me sad, but he did not seem very upset about it.
Parenting is hard enough when you realize that every small mistake you make can lead to a lifetime of emotional baggage for your children. I am beyond baffled as to how I am supposed to be parenting when I am such an odd duck and dealing with an odd duckling. The only thing I know for sure is to keeping loving him and giving him support and room to grow. Maybe he won’t grow up feeling that he has to hide from the world.
Out of the blue
For me the awareness of a psi event happens when a focused thought enters my mind that does not fit the flow and pattern of what I had been thinking about. People refer to the ‘stream’ of consciousness, which can provide a helpful metaphor. As my internal ruminations drift along gradually flowing from one topic to another by association, at times something else will intrude. The new thought does not fit the flow and usually has a more defined substance than the usual aside thoughts. To me, it seems like an outside thought, but some have proposed that it is a deeper part of the self getting attention. Regardless of the source, it feels like a rock has fallen into the stream and created ripples that disrupt the smooth flow. A big event creates a big splash of awareness and completely displaces my prior thought process. A minor event barely is noticeable. After a long process of trying to ignore these irritating interruptions, I have learned that they are warnings I should pay attention to.
I have sometimes described the minor warnings as a feeling of ‘uh-oh’ when I do something that will soon create a problem. Being stubborn by nature, when I first became aware of the distinct sense of warning, I felt that I was being micro-managed or supervised by something. I did not like the idea of having something looking over my shoulder uninvited and telling me what not to do. I have issues with authority and being directed by anyone or anything. To me it seemed my independence of will was being impinged. I am not implying that there is a separate entity behind the warnings, only that they have a feel of otherness, rather than me-ness to them. So for a couple of years, I would argue with the gist of the warnings and go out of my way to not respond. My contrary Scottish heritage must be to blame. But time after time, as I tried to convince myself that the warning was silly and made no sense, it would in fact be valid. Finally, a warning came that could have been a matter of life and death, unfortunately I did not listen and could not have prevented the event, even if I had. I will tell that story in my next post.
Oddly enough, most of the warnings are so minor as to be more irritating than useful. For example, not long ago I was getting out of the car in my garage with a half full soda. I got an ‘uh-oh’ thought that I would spill it. So I decided to put the can down on the garage floor where it would be out of the way, while I got the rest of my stuff out of the car. As I moved around the car, I bumped into something that rolled across the floor. You guessed it. Right into the can and it tipped over. Arrrrgggghhhhhh! to quote Charlie Brown. What is the point! I can’t even begin to express how distracting, frustrating and useless it is to feel that sense of ‘uh-oh’ and then have to try and avoid something when I don’t know exactly what it is I am trying to avoid. Not to mention, who the heck cares if I spill soda on the floor of my garage. Surely, this is not the work of some supreme being or paranormal entity. If so, I have had the extreme misfortune of being ‘protected’ by the most nit-picky, OCD, over-eager guardian that ever existed. If there are non-human guides and guardians, don’t they have more important work to do?
Reaching out into the void
Why has it been so hard to measure extra sensory perception and other psi abilities in a lab or academic setting? I have been reading some recent research into psi abilities in order to try and better understand my own experiences. Unfortunately, I have not found the currently published academic and scientific information to be very helpful. My abilities have been evolving over the course of my life so exploring them has been a gradual process of discovery. As a trained observer and analytical person, I have begun to notice some patterns that may help clarify which research models would better capture the measurable events. It appears that the current model of research methods may have built in assumptions that tend to mask the very abilities they are trying to measure. Not to mention, that perceptions vary so much to create one research method that captures them all would be nearly impossible.
I decided to present my thoughts on this and share my experience. I hope that experts in the field can refine the research methods in such a way as to fully legitimize these non-standard abilities. For those like me who do not try to trade on our skills or even publicly acknowledge them, there is a hidden life we cannot share. It is nearly impossible to find others who genuinely share our experiences in such a way as to form a meaningful community. Too many people who are focused only on selling something or trying to present themselves as prophets and spiritual advisers. They have created a culture of belief in a higher power giving spiritual gifts, rather than an innate or developed talent. Some in the alternative spiritual culture seems hostile to trying to understand them in a scientific way. Then the mainstream mechanistic culture does not accept unexplained abilities as anything but a form of self delusion. This leaves folks like me isolated and feeling like we I need to hide in the shadows. After all, it was not so long ago that people who were too different were burned at the stake.
About me… I have a Masters in Sociology. I intended to be an academic researcher, but was accidentally diverted into better paying work. I have spent my career in software implementations. Although I do have some spiritual beliefs, I do no follow any particular religion or dogma. I do not see my abilities as necessarily spiritual in nature. I am also a rational person with a strong interest in biology, medicine and theoretical physics. To me these are not contradictory at all. They are different ways of experiencing the world. Together they provide a more complete understanding of the human experience. I do not wish to become some kind of spokesperson or public figure. As a matter of fact, I am an Aspie with a fairly strong social phobia. So I have struggled for many years with the idea of publishing my experience. I finally realized the only way to overcome the isolation is to reach out and hope to connect with others like me.
Visionary Explorer 