Time Slips

Chrononauts, or What the Bleep Do THEY Know?

2011-02-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

It is with GREAT hesitation that I bring this up.

As you possibly know, or are about to discover, the personality featured in this post is associated with a conspiracy theory - and we hate conspiracy theories.

Not because we think that conspiracies in general do not exist, but because we find it unproductive to speculate and chase wild geese that may eventually turn out to be even less than that - simple mirages conjured up by misunderstandings or simple ignorance, with a touch of paranoia thrown in for good measure.

However, we believe that the story you're about to hear - courtesy of the wonder that is YouTube - is a valid, if unproven, "time slip" account: the account of a man who purportedly was transported to a time 100 years before his birth - and he says he' got a photo to prove it.

But there is another reason why we decided to include this story.

Within the first five minutes of this other video, the man - Andrew Basiago - tells about a connection to copper mining and Chile.

With that in mind, go and revisit this post of ours:

A Strange Bird Over Copiapo

Coincidence?

Maybe. Probably.

Most likely. Of course it is.

But it certainly is a chile-ing one, if you'll excuse the inevitable (if clumsy) pun.

And it was the "toss of the coin" we needed.

Ten ways to travel through Time

2010-12-04T06:50:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, all of them involve machinery of some type.
Which is not only inconvenient, but it disregards the role of consciousness in timespace perception.

Of course, many mainstream scientists, starting with Hugh Everett, disregarded consciousness altogether. And where did that get us? We have LOTS of theories, but few tangible results that we know of.

On the other hand, it is perfectly understandable that science based on 18th century mechanistic positivism would not have the resources - the ideological infrastructure, so to speak - properly to research the "abstraction", the utter mess, that is human consciousness as an instrument of timespace processing.

But there is no denying that consciousness determines, filters in or out, and shapes practically everything that we perceive.
Why deny - or ignore - its role in timespace perception?
It's not a scientific approach at all.

Still, if you are interested in gadget-based "time travel", go here and knock yourself out. :)

THE SECRET TRUTH ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

The article also includes a list of ten countries which supposedly have active "time control research programs", with India leading the flock.

A strange bird over Copiapó

2010-11-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

If you're moderately aware of the stories making news around the world, you are probably familiar with the name Copiapó.
It is the place where the recent global heart-arresting telenovela about 33 miners trapped - and then spectacularly rescued -in the copper mine of San Jose took place.

It turns out, however, that Copiapó had made headlines once before, more than 140 years ago.

On March 18th, 1868, the local newspaper El Constituyente published the contents of a letter received by the editors two days earlier.

It spoke of an unidentified flying object - at first thought to be a huge bird - that caused significant terror and consternation among those who saw it.

Incredibly, the letter was signed by the director of the local copper mine (even more incredibly called "Fantasma" - 'phantom', 'apparition'), for it was there that the "bird" appeared.

The letter claimed that the thing was witnessed, shortly after 18:00 in the evening, by the miners who had just finished their shift.

If you read Spanish, you're in luck.
Here is a very nice article about it, complete with an artistic rendition of the "bird" and facsimile of the article. (A facsimile of the letter would have been even nicer, but I doubt it still exists.)

El caso de Copiapó

And here is a brief description of it, published in the July 1868 issue of The Zoologist:

"A STRANGE BIRD"

Copiapo, Chile, April 1868:

"Yesterday, at about five o'clock in the afternoon when the daily labours in this mine were over, and all the workmen were together awaiting their supper, we saw coming through the air, from the side of The Ternera a gigantic bird, which at first sight we took for one of the clouds then partially darkening the atmosphere, supposing it to have been separated from the rest by the wind.

Its course was from north—west to south—east; its flight was rapid and in a straight line. As it was passing a short distance above our heads we could mark the strange formation of its body.

Its immense wings were clothed with something resembling the thick and stout bristles of a boar, while on its body, elongated like that of a serpent, we could only see brilliant scales which clashed together with metallic sound as the strange animal turned its body in its flight."

Very interesting, especially if you're into UFOs (whatever they are in each case).

I am not.
I have seen many strange things in the sky myself, and I wouldn't be surprised at all even if a massive "spaceship" appeared.
It's just that I do not dwell on this particular modern mystery.

Why am I writing about it, then - and in a blog dedicated to dimensional anomalies, to boot?

Because of an idle thought - and it really is no more than that - that occurred to me as I was reading the report about that 1868 vision at Copiapó.

Could it be that the miners of 1868 saw this?

A Chilean Army helicopter carrying the rescued miners to the hospital.

"its flight was rapid and in a straight line... On its body, elongated like that of a serpent, we could only see brilliant scales which clashed together with metallic sound as the strange animal turned its body in its flight."

P.S. You know the drill - no pun intended - so do come back in the near future to check for any edits.

The Other One

2010-11-12T15:09:00.001-08:00

Bilocation is a phenomenon that has always fascinated me.
How can a person be seen at two (or, heavens forbid, more!) locations at the same time?

Some explain it with "astral travel".
But this explanation does not make sense when the "original" is fully awake and conscious and engaged in perfectly mundane activities at the time.

Is it a matter of perception?
Clearly.
But clearly there is something for the others to perceive.
There have been numerous cases where there were plenty of witnesses attesting the vision of a person who was known - and also witnessed by others - to be at a different location at the time.

Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, the famous and controversial Capuchin monk, is just one such example.
And of course, there are many stories regarding the weird phenomenon of the Doppelgänger.

One of the most famous such cases is the story of Emélie (often spelled Emilie) Sagée, the French-born school teacher from Livonia (an ancient land, today divided between Latvia and Estonia), whose strange case was described by Robert Dale Owen in the first edition of his book Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860).

The events supposedly took place in 1845 - 1846, at a boarding school called Neuwelcke (or perhaps situated in a place of that name), around "a mile and a half from Wolmar" (Valmiera, in Latvian).

Here's a short version of the account, copied verbatim (and gratefully) from here:

Most of her students in 1846 and 1846 often witnessed Sagee’s doppelganger. The double would often mimic the young woman’s movements, be very active while Sagee remained motionless, and appear healthy during times that Sagee was known to be ill.

One time, all the students in the school saw Emilie Sagee working in the school’s gardens at the same time that they could see her sitting in a chair in the room with them! When two of the more courageous students attempted to interact with the image in the chair, they discovered an “odd resistance in the air surrounding it.”
Ms. Sagee never did see her own double.

She didn't, but she did feel increasingly faint - or so the story goes.
And it is an interesting story. Dale Owen heard it from Julie von Guldenstubbé, the second daughter of the then famous Baron von Guldenstubbé (more about him below), who was one of Sagée's pupils and purportedly had witnessed the phenomenon herself.

The ruins of a castle in Valmiera (Wolmar, in German)*
Borrowed from this lovely website.

If you're interested in this topic, you were probably familiar with this story.
But you may not have read the original account of it.

Well, now you can.
Here it is, free of charge, thanks to the Internet Archive.

Why a Livonian school-teacher lost her situation

(yes, she was kicked out, on top of everything)

I find this book particularly valuable because it includes the author's tentative explanations and thoughts about such spacetime - or perception? - anomalies.

So, make sure you read the entire book, when you can, not just this story.
(And notice the quality of the language, of sheer literacy, compared to today's books on the subject - not to mention internet postings on various forums.)

However, after perusing the various editions of the book (there were eight of them, I believe, from 1860 to 1891), there is an interesting question lingering in my mind: why is this story to be found in the first edition only?

There is no answer implicit in this question.
I have no idea.

I have no doubts about Mr. Dale Owen's personal integrity - judging by his writing, he strikes me as an intellectually honest man - yet I cannot help but think, was perhaps his witness found to be less than reliable?

The Guldenstubbés were an interesting lot. The Baron himself was an eminent "spiritist", a passionate adherent of spirit-summoning and "direct writing", which was quite in vogue at the time. (You can read about his vision of a "ghost in the tower" here.)

Surely Dale Owen was not only aware of this - it is probably why he got in contact with him and his daughter in the first place - but clearly thought there was good reason to consider the Baron's daughter a reliable witness.
(A thought occurred to me while reading about the Guldenstubbés: is it possible that it was Miss Julie only who saw the teacher's "double" and the other girls thought they did, too?
This sort of contagion is by no means as extraordinary as it may sound.
However, it was just a thought. If you read the story carefully, it seems clear that there was more to it than mere "contagion".)

Or was something else amiss?

We may never know.
But it doesn't really matter, because the question here is: can such things be?
And there have been simply too many well documented cases to dismiss their existence.

For a tentative explanation I'll refer you to a section in the same Dale Owen's book, "The Counterpart Appears Where the Thoughts or the Affections Are?" (p. 857/858, immediately following the account of Emélie Sagée).

As for Padre Pio, according to the website above, "the closest he ever came to an explanation of bilocation was to say that it occurred 'by an extension of his personality'."

You'll find many other similar accounts in the book.
But if you prefer visual information, then skip the various video sites, overflowing with spurious material, and aim straight for art: rent Krzystof Kiewslowski's unforgettable film The Double Life of Veronique - and enjoy.

* This structure has nothing whatsoever to do with the story itself, but it is such an evocative photo (oh, those clouds!) that I just had to include it.
I did try to locate the erstwhile "Pensionat Neuwelcke", but all to no avail. All I found out was that "Neuwelcke" would be Melbarži, in Latvian. There are at least two of those, and none of them is "a mile and a half from Wolmar".

Would Time by any other name still stink the same?

2010-08-12T03:51:00.000-07:00

A wordy intermezzo

One of the things I love the most about my life is that it occasionally produces short, electric word storms that get me going.
They get other people going, too, although not necessarily in the same direction.

Here's a snippet of one such impromptu exchange that happened as I was standing on a terrace with an acquaintance of mine who is a physicist, on August 10th, the notte di San Lorenzo, when Saint Lawrence sheds tears - AKA comets - and wishes come true.
I must have had a secret wish for a rambling conversation about time, because that certainly came true.

The beginning of the conversation is intentionally omitted.
You're welcome to insert one of your own making.

HE: You mean, our perception of time?

ME: Time is nothing but perception. You of all people should know that.
And maybe that's just it. We name it as if it were something outside, a force of nature or something, when in reality it's all on the inside. All of it.

HE: Not all of it.

ME: All of it. And I know everyone is supposed to sort of know that, but intellectual grasp is one thing and true knowledge, conviction, is another. If time were used as a name for a perception, almost sense-like, like smell, sight, touch, maybe that would make Time easier to grasp. And maybe even manipulate.

HE (silent, staring at me):

You just gave me an idea.

You just gave me an idea.

(It's not a typing error; I gave him an idea twice. Or maybe he thought I would not understand the first time.)

I wish I could say he dramatically stormed out and ended up producing something that will be on all news channels. Or at least in Nature magazine.
But he didn't. He stayed for pizza and apple beer, and even watched part of Australia's Next Top Model (a rerun) on TV with me.

Still, he said I gave him an idea.
Let's just hope it's about physics.

Just a reminder

2010-08-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

On this day, 109 years ago,
two lucky women embarked on a journey like no other.

Versailles, by Dont Techno.

Moving house

2010-08-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

The following report comes from a reader called simply Barbara.
She does not wish to be identified any further. (Which is perfectly OK.)
It is posted here verbatim, with only a link inserted, to refer you back to a post she mentioned.

In her own words...

"This happened maybe four years ago, in summer time. I don't recall any other details, as it was a long time ago. But after reading the post about the house in England that keeps appearing and disappearing I remembered this event that baffled me at the time.

About two miles from my former home (I lived in a city) there is a tall woody hill with an inn at the top that many people like to visit on weekends and after work to chill out. There is only one road leading up there from the direction of the city (where I lived), although there is another road on the other side of the hill.
I used to go there from time to time because it's close and offers a very nice panoramic view of the city.

On this particular day I drove there with a couple of family members and a friend.
As we were nearing the beginning of the slope, just before the road starts going uphill, I noticed a tiny oldfashioned cottage on the left side of the road. It was very tiny, with whitewashed (but dirty) walls and a straw roof.
This sort of building was very common here centuries ago, but nowadays it's very difficult to find a cottage like that.

Th cottage was standing alone on top of a small grassy hill, just above the modern housing development sprawling on both sides of the road. It looked old and abandoned.

I was very surprised because I didn't remember seeing it before, and enchanted to see a cottage like that and I thought to myself it would be a perfect "retreat" for me to do my writing and stuff. I also remember thinking it was a ridiculous idea considering it was so close to my home, but I really liked it. I rememebr thinking I would have to ask a relative of mine who is a lawyer how to go about it.

Later that day, on our way back home, I didn't remember to look because I was engrossed in a conversation we were having.
But I did remember to look the next time we went there, maybe two months later.

The cottage wasn't there!

I remember thinking it was sooo typical! Every time I like something, a product or a service, whatever, they discontinue it or it becomes unavailable to me. It happens all the time, with makeup, with perfume, with TV shows I like.
But I was especially sad that the cottage had been torn down because it was so unique.

Maybe three or four months later we went to the hill again to have a "twilight drink" (like a "night cap", only it wasn't night yet :)). I didn't even bother to look for the place where the cottage had stood on our way there. Besides, we were talking, so I only remembered it just as we were passing the spot where I had seen it, so I didn't really look.

But as we were driving home I was sitting in the back looking through the car window on my right side... and there was the cottage again!

I asked the person who was driving if he could stop, but it was really impossible (too much traffic).
When I got home I called that relative who was a lawyer and asked her if she could take a picture of that cottage the next time she goes to the hill (because she used to go there often, whereas I have a disability that prevents me from walking for any length of time and I do not own a car).
She could not recall any such cottage (and she lived nearby), so I gave her a precise description of the site.

The next time we talked she said she saw no such cottage. She described to me the surrounding houses, and the description fit the place I had seen, only there was no cottage.

I don't know what to make of this. There is only one road leading up the slope, the road we took. You simply cannot take any other road because there is no other road.
Also, the distance is very short, comparatively, so it's not like there are a lot of such roadside grassy slopes. In fact there is only one, with modern houses below - and that solitary cottage was standing high on the slope, above the houses. It was extremely distinctive - the only house with a straw roof I've seen here! - so there's no way I confused it with some other house.
Also, it was not a prefabricated structure that could be taken down and reassembled again (not to mention that it looked old and abandoned).

I don't live in that city anymore and I don't visit the hill. The few people that I mentioned it to and were familiar with the place didn't seem to recall any such cottage.

I have no idea what that was.
But I do know what I saw.... Twice!"

Cottage, by Proama.

Thank you very much, Barbara.
Personally I find such inconspicuously placed events fascinating and even poetic, in an odd sort of way.

And by the way (no pun intended ;)), I gather you hadn't read the story about a certain hill at the time of your writing... or you would count yourself lucky that the hill itself was there. :)

About the image:

Such a beautiful story deserves a beautiful picture. This one, we thought, was beautiful, even though the structure is just a wooden shack, not a brick and mortar (and straw) cottage, like the one that Barbara saw.

We did not ask for permission to insert it here, but it certainly wasn't because of lack of respect towards the author.
You can see the picture here, and the author's gallery if you click the link beneath the picture.

Mind fields: Are "ghosts" glimpses of parallel worlds?

2010-08-04T13:08:00.000-07:00

A reader called Val B. wrote in to ask do we think 'ghosts' are glimpses of other dimensions, say of parallel worlds or alternate realities, as it were.

Apparently it was this post that triggered your question, Val.
I am glad. Because in that post we broach - ever so lightly and superficially - the question of the nature of "ghosts" (expounded also in this post).

Personally I find "ghost" to be a catch-all term that catches precisely nothing.
In all too many people it seems to be an automatic response (never a good thing, not in my book) to all sorts of unexpected or "illogical" apparitions.
Even worse, underlying there seems to be a deeply rooted but mindless preconception that "ghosts" are: a) dead people, who b) ended, usually tragically, in c) the place where the apparition occurs.

Really?
How do we know that?

We don't.

I understand the need by many people to feel there is an existence beyond death. Who wouldn't?

But such apparitions rarely prove - or disprove, for that matter - anything of the sort.
Besides... I firmly believe that the truth, and only the truth, does set us free.
And stereotypical thinking - jumping to conclusions - is by definition removed from the truth. It disregards the truth, whatever it may be. Even worse, it disregards the need to quest for truth.

It would be interesting and very useful to compile a classification of different types of apparitions.
In fact, am sure it's been done, but I have yet to find a good compilation of the sort.
However, they can be roughly divided in two main categories: apparitions where perception seems to be unilateral; and apparitions where perception seems to be mutual.

There are a number of instances that would certainly seem to indicate that certain apparitions are glimpses of perfectly ordinary, banal moments in a long-since-deceased person's life.

What's puzzling about such cases, if you think about it, is that the vision isn't reciprocal. In other words, the "apparition" doesn't seem to notice the person who can see her or him.

Then, there are cases - they seem to be much rarer - where the vision is, or seems to be, reciprocal. (Here is one such case.)

Regarding the first type (which could be further subdivided into various categories), I am increasingly leaning towards the tentative conclusion that there probably is an all-pervading "medium" - something akin to what the ancients called aether - that absorbs and automatically records everything that takes place, reflecting it back when the circumstances are right.
(Or perhaps everything is there all the time, but we can only occasionally catch a glimpse of it.)

Everything, every single molecule of our physical (and possibly para-physical) world, seems to be composed of this mysterious film-like subtle substance, or somehow partaking in it.

That could explain visions such as the Roman legion marching endlessly through a cellar in York. That was clearly a vision - not a recreation of that event. In other words, it was like a tape playing on TV - not a reoccurrence of an ancient occurrence.
How do we know?
Because the lower part of the legs and the feet of the soldiers were not visible.
They were following a road, the level of which was in those days much lower than today.

In other cases, it seems as if the individual memory of a person, long gone, is the source of visions. It is as if it created a field of experience - or, more accurately, as if it projected its own field of experience remembered for others to, literally, step in.

Still other apparitions, especially recurring and unchanging visions (i.e. the various "white ladies", "grey ladies", etc.), may be the result of cumulative collective imaging (which is not exactly the same as imagining). In other words, they may be externalised mental "growths", fed by the collective mind of their environment, including the mind fields of those who have long since died.

But it's the "mutual" apparitions that puzzle me.
In such cases one could speculatively surmise that a two-way glimpse of parallel timelines is taking place.
If all time is happening all the time - only our minds are adapted to a "tunnel vision" that helps us remain relatively stable in an endless, timeless ocean of apparent chaos - then it's not outside the realm of possibility that occasionally the "veil" should part for a few instants, perhaps ruffled by the breeze of some unusual electromagnetic activity influencing our brain and our mind, affording a mutual view of what is, only perceived by two individual (i.e. limited) minds as two different points in spacetime.
And that might be true even for the realm of what could have been.
(Ask Michio Kaku - or almost any of the authors featured in the side bar - to explain it to you. :))

Final conclusion?
None can be made at this point, by anyone - except, maybe, to conclude that we know nothingabout the nature of the world and of our very lives, and should proceed accordingly.

And isn't that a gloriously liberating acknowledgement? :)

P.S. I can tell this post is going to be SO edited in the future.
So please, do come back at a later time.

Is it the fault lines' fault?

2010-07-12T15:53:00.000-07:00

Every serious discussion about more or less verified "paranormal" events ends - and sometimes starts - with the big question: what causes these events?
What triggers them?

One of the episodes of the series "Ghosthunters", mentioned in a previous post, for example, presents an interesting (if necessarily tentative) explanation of apparitions in the Severn Valley, in England. (It is the episode called, appropriately, "Spectres of the Severn".) Namely, that the apparitions purportedly witnessed by many people in said valley are to be blamed on the terrain itself, more precisely on the fault lines that run across the valley and the geomagnetic activity that they produce.

Personally, I am quite inclined to believe it. What else but magnetic or electric currents of some description could trigger such unusual visions? After all, everything around us, including our brains (which, I believe, house only a small portion of our Mind - a gate to it, if you will), is electricity - patterns of energy, receptive to all kinds of impulses from the greater "net" into which they are woven and from which they emerge.

Furthermore, I've always been intrigued by the apparent fact (which probably is no such thing, just a firmly anchored subjective impression) that there are countries or lands where reports about "paranormal" events - and that includes folk legends - seem to be more bountiful than elsewhere, notably Great Britain and Japan. (A typical - and typically shortsighted - reponse to such musings is: "Well, they are probably more prone to belief in such things than people elsewhere". Well, if that is so - why is it so?)

I used to suspect that it may have something to do with the vast expanses of water surrounding both of these countries. Water, after all, is among the best conductors of electricity there are.

And it may be so. But the theory that it might be the shifts of tectonic plates activity that affect the neural system is no less fitting. Japan, for example, is criss-crossed by fault lines, being a hotspot for earthquakes.

Whatever the precise cause, I have little doubt that the specific geomagnetic pattern of each place potentially has a measurable effect on the neural system of living beings, perhaps triggering unusual insights into the realities of timespace.

What I find somewhat silly, however, is the often simplistically reductionist view of such interaction.

By now almost everyone - certainly everyone reading this, I dare say - will be familiar with the various experiments involving artificial stimulation of the brain by magnetic and electrical impulses, conducted in the past two decades or so. By stimulating certain areas of the brain (the temporal lobes) researchers were able to trigger what seemed like "mystical" or "paranormal" experiences in the test subjects.

Here is a good compendium of such work by Michael Persinger, a well-known researcher in this field.

Spirituality and the Brain

What I find oddly shortsighted is the failure by many researchers and interpreters of such experiments to realise that identifying the spot in the brain where reaction takes place, and even replicating such an experience by artificial stimulation, does not automatically identify the source of said experiences in the "wild".

(Furthermore, these experiments are not as reproducible as many reports would have you believe. See, for example, the cutely but somewhat annoyingly titled article Electrical Storms Busted as the Source of Ghosts.)

In fact, this type of research fails to answer even the simplest questions. Because it's one thing to poke the brain with a wire (if they can be simplistic, so can I), and another thing to be walking about and suddenly be confronted with, say, the sounds of singing coming out of nowhere (or take practically any experience described in this blog).

Yes, a geomagnetic or electrical impulse of some description is messing with my brain.
But how? Why then and there? Where is it coming from?
Why do some people - people from all walks of life, sometimes a priori skeptical about such phenomena, and often quite oblivious to the possibility of such a thing happening - witness certain events and others don't?

And most importantly: why do "established" (i.e. repeated over time) anomalies always appear more or less the same to all those who witness them, even though they knew nothing about them beforehand (or about each other)?

It is the same question raised by so called "hallucinations".
Yes, they may appear under the influence of some substance... but does that necessarily mean that it is the substance that produces them?
(And we're not talking about delirium tremens, so there's no need to banalise the discussion by dragging it in.)

Or does it perhaps mean that the substance has made the person simply more susceptible to see what actually is there, but unseen in ordinary circumstances?

(This is the question raised by an articulate young clinical psychologist in the episode Spectres of the Severn, above. By the way, this man became a clinical psychologist because of a "paranormal" experience he had had years earlier, along with a few friends of his. It is described in the first episode of the series, Ripples in Time.)

Anyway, if you want to explore such anomalies and their possible sources "scientifically", here's a gadget you don't want to miss:

MADS

And here is a good comprehensive introduction to "paranormal" phenomena:

And finally, to end this on a lighter (?) note - being summer and all - here's an "unscientific" but fun and unpretentious - and ultimately potentially useful - article on fault lines, or "ley lines", and their connection to "paranormal" phenomena, written by someone who had been researching them for more than two decades.

Ley-Lines and their Connection to the UFO

For the record and in the name of intellectual honesty:

In the past few years I have developed a singular distaste for anything involving the terms "UFO" or "alien" and "abduction" in a single sentence.

Which is all the more pity, from my viewpoint, because I vividly remember the soft glow of a gentle, smiling awe that I felt as a child (and even later) whenever I witnessed something extra-ordinary in the skies. And I have seen, more than once, things that definitely appeared to be: a) artificial objects; b) flying, or airborne, to be more precise; and c) unidentified (not just by me).

Were they of extra-terrestrial origin, even if they turned out to be some sort of never-seen-before aircraft?
I honestly don't know.

But I certainly can understand the fascination that UFO hold for so many people.

So, it is not that I dismiss - certainly not entirely - the possibility of (presumably extraterrestrial?) "aliens" descending upon us and abducting unsuspecting citizens, for whatever purpose.
It's just that, faced with the avalanche of dubious reports and intepretations of such experiences, I feel I cannot be bothered with them anymore. I've grown tired of them.

Nevertheless, I decided to include the link above because it gives a good, easy-to-understand account of the phenomenon we're talking about here.
I may add others in the future.

No mere flesh and blood

2010-06-27T12:29:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 61st anniversary of the death of Frank Smythe.
(And the interesting thing is I decided to write this entry yesterday, before finding out - just now - that it was the anniversary of his death. Serendipity!)

Smythe was a great mountaineer, one of those rare individuals who thrive on the most extreme challenges.
He was also one of the relatively few mountaineers who openly admitted to have witnessed things that transcend our usual human experience of this world.

Here is one of Smythe's experiences, as described in J. H. Brennan's oft-quoted book Time Travel: A New Perspective (p. 53).

Frank L. Smythe describes how he entered a grassy hollow near Glen Glomach in the Scottish hills and experienced a time slip. He saw a small group of weary men, women, and children stagger into an ambush laid by men wielding spears, axes and clubs. In the resultant massacre, every last member of the group was slaughtered. Smythe was so horrified he ran from the scene.

The interesting thing about this account - it happened in 1940 - is that Smythe was a mountaineer, not an historian [unlike Arnold Toynbee whose experiences are discussed immediately previously in Brennan's book]. He had no particular interest in or knowledge of the spot where the time slip occurred. He did do some research into the area, but only afterwards, as a result of his experience. On the debit side, Smythe was never able to confirm his experience. He discovered two massacres had happened at the spot, but the clothing and weaponry did not match his vision.

The history of mankind being what it is - exceedingly prolific in blood and gore -, it is not at all surprising that not every single massacre would be properly recorded.

But even if it were... what would the confirmation of an event matching Smythe's description tell us? Is there something at that spot, near Glen Glomach - some fault, some "ley line", some source of electromagnetic activity - that would occasionally obliterate the single vision of linear time that is characteristic of our human experience?

View from the Glen Elchaig track towards Glen Glomach
© Copyright Peter Van den Bossche. Taken from here.

Be it as it may, this was not the only odd sight that Smythe witnessed.
Here is a very interesting account of what is, I suspect, all too easily dismissed as the result of oxygen deprivation or whatever.

On June 1 1933, Frank Smythe was as high as anyone had ever climbed. But it would be another 20 years before anyone would stand on the summit. Exhausted after two nights in the so-called "death zone" and emaciated by weeks at high altitude, he began his descent to Camp Six at 27,400ft, where fellow climber Eric Shipton, too ill to climb, lay in a tiny tent waiting for him.

As he made his way down, he began to hallucinate - he was climbing without oxygen - and he had an overpowering feeling that someone was with him. It was so strong, that when he stopped, he divided his mint cake and turned to offer half to his "companion".

Later, he noticed two dark, bulbous objects hovering above him. One had "what looked like squat, underdeveloped wings, whilst the other had a beak-like protuberance like the spout of a teakettle. They distinctly pulsated... as though they possessed some horrible quality of life."

Smythe collected himself enough to do a mental check, naming each of the peaks around him. Then he looked back. The things hadn't moved. A mist drifted in front of them, and, when it cleared, they had vanished.

(From the article "The last 1,000 ft are not for mere flesh and blood", by Simon Smythe, published in The Telegraph, April 8th, 2003.)

Oxygen deprivation?
It is a facile "explanation", and in reality says nothing - certainly not about the event itself.

Frank L. Smythe died on June 27th, 1949, in New Delhi. He was two weeks shy of his 49th birthday.

Wherever he is, I hope he is enjoying himself.

Wotton Hatch Revisited

2010-06-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

A comment and a promise from Josh, a kindly visitor to this blog, reminded us of an old favourite that has been covered here in late 2008. All the material for that entry was gleaned from books, most especially from Brennan's Time Travel: A New Perspective, so we only included data that were available in those sources.

But early today, thanks to insomnia and the full moon that kept me happily awake, I found myself watching TV in the early hours of the morning, when an old programme I had totally forgotten about came on: Ghost Hunters.
As I sat watching it, I suddenly remembered that an episode of that series covered the Wotton Hatch incident, among others. I could not remember the title (the first and so far last time I had watched it was in 1996 or 1997), but it didn't take me long to find it.

It is the episode called Ripples in Time. (And it covers not only the Wotton Hatch incident, but starts with another one of our favourites: C. G. Jung's "time slip".)

The "Mr and Mrs Allan" from our post were really a well-known bookshop owner, Eric Barton, and his wife, Irina. And there is much, much more additional - and more importantly, first hand! - information about the whole incident.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can watch it here.

The Long Way Home

2010-05-29T00:27:00.001-07:00

One of the most fascinating types of timespace anomaly is a sudden loss of orientation due to a seeming change in the environment the subject is quite familiar with.
It is also one of the easiest targets for self-styled skeptics, who are all too happy to simply and flippantly attribute such events to some (usually, and utterly unscientifically, left unidentified) brain malfunction, even when there is no real evidence that would point to the likelihood of such an event in any given subject. Just because something could happen, it doesn't follow that it did happen.

Such things - as all events, really - should be studied individually, if we ever hope to understand their origins and dynamics.

Here is a real story of such an event. It happened in Tagawa (Fukuoka), Japan, around 1950 - 1955, to the mother of a very dear friend of ours, called Seika.
It is perhaps important to note that the person to whom it happened - the mother - is known to be an extremely rational and no-nonsense person, not given to flights of fancy.
At the time of this event she was a young schoolgirl, perhaps 10-15 years old (probably while she was still in elementary school, according to Seika).

Here is her story.

Mother visited one of her girlfriends, just like many school girls do. Probably before dinner time (or before it got dark), she decided to go home.

She was all too familiar with the area but suddenly she couldn't find a road. It's not that she forgot how to get home - there was no road where there should have been one. I suppose she found herself standing on a country field with no road.

She decided to think she'd been fooled by a 'fox' or 'racoon dog'. She went back to her friend's house and told them what happened. They let her stay there overnight.

The next morning, she found the road and went home. I remember sensing her 'pride' when I heard her talk about it. (That she wasn't fooled - that she was smart enough to go back and wait till the road appeared again.)

Awarded: It is called the Apple Highway, 2009.

Japanese folklore, rich in "ghosts" and other so-called paranormal phenomena, has a preferred culprit in such cases: kitsune, "the Fox".

But I don't think too much should be read into the attribution of this type of anomaly to "the Fox". I suspect said "fox" is just an umbrella mythic figure that serves as a pop explanation for anything that trascends the ordinary experience of life.
It should be mentioned, however, that its attributed action often seems to be illusion-inducing.
And this could be significant.

Anyway, stories like this one can be found practically all over the world (but it's not often than one can find a reliable almost-first-hand source).
Here is a very interesting story from 1941, which, however, sadly lacks the geographic coordinates one would like to see.

Two points seem to stand out as possibly related: the "squeaking" pillar or whatever it was, and the military airfield that is mentioned in passing. Because of the anonymised nature of the account we can't know where it happened. Could it be that at the time of this event, in 1941, there were some sort of experiments conducted by the military in the vicinity? After all, this was precisely the time when World War II precipitated the development of the radar and other such devices.

Just something to ponder about.
It is certainly much more rational and "logical" than just dimissing it - dismissing everything and anything that transcends the usual experience of our limited senses - as fancy.

The End of Time?

2010-05-26T13:53:00.001-07:00

Ye of little patience: another story - another "exclusive", no less :) - is planned for later this week (up until and including Sunday).

Meanwhile, we've been pondering about the nature of time ad nauseam. Naturally, it never leads anywhere; or if it does, there is no way to confirm the validity of such insights..
But if you're anything like us here, you know musings about the nature of time are as irresistible as they are (or can be) maddening.

So, why not muse upon it in the company of a book that proposes there is no "time" at all?
It's not a particularly recent one, but then good work doesn't have an expiration date.

I am referring to Julian Barbour's book The End of Time.

And since you can borrow it from any good library - as I would recommend - this post can't even be construed as advertising. Be warned, however, that once you've read it - and if you're truly interested in the curiosities of what we call "time" - you might be tempted to keep a copy forever.
I know I was. And I did. (Relax: not the library copy!)

Here's Barbour's angle, in a nutshell:

"The main aim is to introduce a definite way of thinking about instants of time without having to suppose that they belong to something that flows relentlessly forward. I regard instants of time as real things, identifying them with possible instantaneous arrangements of all the things in the universe. They are configurations of the universe. In themselves, these configurations are perfectly static and timeless. But how and why can something static and timeless be experienced as intensely dynamic and temporal?"

So, it's all instants. Everything is NOW, in Barbour's opinion. Those individual "frames" in the seeming continuum of a lifetime, any lifetime, are the single core, the essence, of what our true four-dimensional experience is.; the rest is memory and/or imagination (and a very creative one, but I digress.)

Yes, I bet you already suspected that much.
But you might want to read about it from a physicist's perspective.

To whet your appetite or get a sense whether you'd like it at all, you can read this illuminating review here.

Or you can watch this Dutch video (23 minutes), about which Barbour says it has done "a remarkably good job of explaining the ideas of The End of Time in a non-technical way".

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Here are a few "dummy" questions that the interviewer should have asked, in our opinion, but either didn't or they were edited out.

* If there is no place for continuity of any sort, were all things created instantly in all their states and potentialities (and even their non-state opposites)? In other words, is a person created as a newborn, an adult, an old person, all at once?

That's what I get it from this interview, and that's what I've been suspecting for a long while now.
And if this is so, what is it that propels our perception to experience the seeming "arrow" of development always in the same direction, from young to old, from "cause" to "result"?

But the most essential question, in my opinion, is the following:

* Throughout the programme, Barbour uses - inevitably, of course - time-bound (and time-shaped) language: he "came" to the conclusion, he will" take a snapshot - and so forth.

Isn't "time" ultimately simply a name for our experience of continuity (illusory or not) between all these discrete instants?

I certainly think so; and if this is so, then the true nature of "time" is really a moot point, however interesting. In other words, if we are never going to experience it in any other way, why should we even care what the true nature of "time" is?

But is it so?
Are we really doomed to experience "time" as we normally do - in a linear fashion? (And the many entries in this very blog seem to attest we do not experience it linearly at all, ahem, times.)

This sub-question seems to me particularly interesting because it would indicate, regardless of the answer (positive or negative), the sort of mechanism that dictates such perception - and which perhaps could be transcended.

Theoretical physics can be great fun and certainly a great exercise for the abstract mind.
But unless it is also useful in a meaningful, existential way, it is mostly an exercise in futility.

Still, it is a great work that makes you think about such things.

Intermezzo: Haunted Hollywood

2010-03-05T16:03:00.000-08:00

What the average man calls Death,
I believe to be merely the beginning of Life itself.
We simply live beyond the shell.
We emerge from out of it's [sic!] narrow confines like a chrysalis.
Why call it Death?
Or, if we call it Death,
why surround it with dark fears and sick imaginings?
I'm not afraid of the Unknown.

From an entry in Rudolph Valentino's diary
(or so I am told, I haven't read it)

As has been explained in another entry or two, we don't "do" ghost stories here.
Well... in principle.

Tonight, in honour of the upcoming Oscar night - an event that means absolutely nothing to me or to anyone in our team (with the possible exception of Lynx, who'll be watching the event for its fashion value) - I decided to make an exception and offer you a link to a brand new compilation of (sometimes first-hand) accounts about the "ghosts" that purportedly roam the hallowed halls of Hollywood and its water holes. Not because we don't have any "time slippage" stories to tell (one, especially, has our collective fingertips itching!), but because those that we do have deserve more time and attention than any of us have at this moment.

Besides, it's a very good excuse to point you to the very interesting and entertaining website that hosts it.

So, grab your favourite snack and click away!

If you liked the stories above, then there is a good chance you'll like the book (by the same author, Laurie Jacobson), too:

Hollywood Haunted:
A Ghostly Tour of Filmland

If not, you can try another book on the same subject (by Tom Ogden):

Haunted Hollywood:
Tinseltown Terrors, Filmdom Phantoms, and Movieland Mayhem

I wish the Olympic games - another event that rates 0,00 on my scale of interest (and it's because I like sports) - had such an entertaining collection of otherworldly stories.
Then again, after this year's eventful edition, they might see the need to create one...

Dream Time - is it a timespace of its own?

2010-02-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

Some people love to hear about other people's night dreams and to talk about their own.
I don't; never did. The only dreams that interest me are people's so-called "daydreams".

It's not that I don't find dreams interesting. It's just that there seem to be different types of dreams, and it's very difficult to understand their meaning unless one is deeply involved in the dreamer's life.
Some dreams seem to "recycle" past events, others seem to (and sometimes do) predict future events, and others just seem to be... a timespace of their own - a territory unknown, yet oddly familiar while one is in it.

But today I find myself wondering: is that dreamscape, the apparent "spacetime" of dreams, perhaps an actual (para-physical) field, accessible from outside the dreamer's mind?

Two nights ago I had a series of dreams; they were - as my dreams usually are- convoluted and alien to the everyday world in their imagery, to the point of being impossible to retell (although they made perfect sense in their own "spacetime").
When I woke up, the only thing I remembered was the "tail" of the dreams: a beautiful music that had something - I couldn't remember what - to do with stacks of gold coins or money.
I didn't dwell on it, but I did try to recall the music; and for a few minutes after waking up I was able to repeat the tune. (It was something I had never heard before.)
And then, of course, I stopped thinking about the dream altogether, all the more so because there was no specific mood associated with it (I do remember feeling very happy hearing ht music, but there was no impression of a powerful "message" lingering, as sometimes happens).

In the afternoon I met with an aunt of mine and her daughter, my cousin. As we were talking about some unimportant things, my aunt mentioned a cashier. At that point my cousin jumped in and said: "Right! That reminds me! I had the weirdest dream last night: about a cash register playing a song..."

Walfrido Garcia: Dockside Dreams, taken from here.

At this point I found myself staring at her and remembering my dream at the same time: yes, that was it - it was an open cash register that the music was coming out of. That's what all those stacks of "gold coins" that I vaguely remembered were.

I told my cousin that I had the exact same dream. I told her so with a straight face, and even though she said she believed me, I am not sure she did.

I asked her - and tried to remember myself - whether there was anything on television or in the newspapers in the previous days that could have made us both dream of that. She couldn't remember, and neither do I.
(At this point probably I should mention that I have an exceptionally good memory and, even more to the point, that I am usually very "aware" of my own thoughts and reactions to my surroundings. In other words, it's not easy to pump anything into my head without my knowledge.)

I asked my cousin about the details, but there few she could remember: that she was happy and she laughed when she saw those cash drawers open rhythmically, with all those stacks of coins, and the music came out of it.
So was I. Her description sounds exactly like what I remember from my dream.
(At least now you know what makes our hearts sing...;)

In order to test... I don't really know what, I even tried a trick - I asked her: "Didn't you have a similar dream a while ago? Remember?"

She didn't remember.
(Of course not.)
Nor do I remember having a similar dream at any point in my life.

Whatever it was, nobody will convince me it was a "coincidence". I mean, what are the odds of that happening?

But whatever it was, it was not the first time it happened in my family.
My mother told me, a long time ago, that when she was a girl she shared a dream with her mother.

My grandmama being the down-to-earth-person that she was (and I must say, most of my family are like that) didn't dwell on it or even try to analyse it. Luckily, my mother remembered it. And I'll always regret Carl Gustav Jung never got to learn about their dream, as I am sure he would have been fascinated by it and would probably offer some interesting explanation.

What could be the explanation for such a phenomenon?
Based on other, non-dream experiences and lifelong thoughts about these matters I am inclined to think that families and friendships - perhaps any sort of interpersonal relationship - are more than more or less temporary physical conglomerates. The "pool" of their shared input - thoughts, emotions, experiences - may transcend the mere visible physical realm; and it may even outlive all of the individual members that contribute to it and tap from it.
If that is so, then it could be considered a sort of "timespace" in its own right.

And that is the reason why I wrote about this here, even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with time "slips".
If something so deeply individual-seeming as a dream image is accessible, or generated by, or both, by more than one person at the same time, it inevitably opens the question about the nature of space - and thereby the question of the nature of Time.

Your wish is THE command

2010-01-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

The following account comes from M.R., a faithful - not to mention patient - follower of this oh-so-sporadic blog.

It is a fascinating little story - and to me doubly so, because I have experienced the very same thing.
So have you, perhaps.

***

A few years ago - maybe three or four - I used to visit a good friend of mine who worked in a six-storey building. He was a good worker, often staying overtime, late into the night. Which is when I visited him, because otherwise he wouldn't have had the time to receive me.

The building had a modern elevator which always ran smoothly and quickly; it was well maintained. There was nobody manning it; the building didn't even have a night porter, as it was shared by many smallish private businesses.

On more than one occasion something funny happened.
As I was walking through the lobby towards the elevator I could see on the indicator (above the elevator door) that the elevator was on the sixth floor, apparently staying still. Then, as I lifted my hand to press the button, I heard the elevator make that characteristic "vroooom" noise it makes when it goes into motion, and it descended directly to the lobby. There was nobody inside. And I hadn't touched the button!

At first I thought maybe somebody had stepped into the elevator and then changed their mind. But I didn't hear anyone move. (It's difficult to imagine, but even though six floors sounds like a lot, it really wasn't such a tall building, an the staircase was very acoustic, every step could be heard all over the building, especially late in the evening when the building was practically deserted.)

I told this to my friend, half expecting to hear he had sent the elevator my way (because he knew I was coming), but he said no, and that the same thing had happened to him too. He said that he even asked the repairman about it, and the man said it's "impossible" and that the elevator is in very good condition.

The same thing happened to me again maybe four months later. It happened exactly the same way: as I lifted my hand to press the button (but I didn't), I heard the elevator stir, go "clank" and then "vroooom" and start descending. And sure enough there was nobody inside. And nobody could be heard moving around.

I don't know if this has anything at all to do with "time slips", but I reckon it was something out of the ordinary. It was as if the machinery had received the "command" of my intention or wish to ride in the elevator before I physically pressed the appropriate button.

(I don't remember anything particular about the weather, sorry!)

***

You said it very well yourself:

It was as if the machinery had received the "command" of my intention or wish to ride in the elevator before I physically pressed the appropriate button.

There is nothing for me to add, because I believe that is exactly what happened.

How?

By means of some electrical impulse, perhaps.
Let's not forget: everything is basically electricity, patterns of energy interacting with each other. It is a well established fact (yes, much to the chagrin of Amazing Randi and his correligionaires, it is a fact) that telepathy does exist, both among people and between people and animals. Who is to say that a more or less sensitive electricity-driven device could not pick up a pattern emitted by the brain - or mind field (it's a term I happen to prefer ;) - of a human (or even of an animal, for that matter)? Only, in this case it is called telekinesis.

But WHAT exactly was in the "pattern" emitted that stirred the elevator and made it go "clank" and "vroom"? ;)

Was it the mere thought?
It seems unlikely, because it would raise the question, why doesn't it work like that every time? After all, even seemingly "automatic" actions are preceded by thought.

Or was it a specific charge of the intention at that moment?

I mentioned this had happened to me too (also more than once).
It's a good thing it did because, while I also don't remember the weather or higroscopic conditions and what-not at the time, luckily I do remember something else, and very well:

I was very relaxed - not at all "mindful" - at the time, and I was happy to be going where I was going (to visit my mother). I was in a state of happy but relaxed anticipation, in my mind already walking through the door, as it were.

And the elevator, it seems, picked up the energy of my intention to get there ASAP - and anticipated my physical command.

In this case my "wish" (= intention) really WAS a command.

And maybe it always is.

Time portal - take two (or is it twelve?)

2010-01-20T13:34:00.000-08:00

This is just an update - or rather, a link to an update - regarding the "time portal" from this earlier post. It is also the closest I could find to a "summary", in English, of the developments outlined in that post.

Were the Untersberg mythical "twelve doors" actually twelve CAVES?

But there is more: a set of digital images depicting what clearly is an oddly "mis-placed" orb.

The author of the images thinks it's plasmic energy.
So do I. (But then, what do I know?)

What do you think it is?

Is it ALL a game?

2010-01-11T10:55:00.000-08:00

Sorry, no story - or even a musing - today.
But after I saw the beauty posted on our sister blog yesterday evening, I couldn't resist posting something similar, only more appropriate to the topics discussed here.

It's a web game - one of the best I've seen in a long time.
It engages some of the abilities you need in your daily life to function optimally - and which are absolutely indispensable to would-be researchers of "parallel worlds" researchers.

Why?
See for yourself.

Start here...

And when you're finished, continue below.

(If you can't see it, go here.)

Time portal found?

2010-01-05T14:43:00.000-08:00

I know some of our regular readers have been following a certain thread on ATS discussing the mysteries and possible dimensional anomalies surrounding the area of a legendary mountain, the Untersberg, on the border between Austria and Germany.
(And this, unlike the thread mentioned in the previous post, most certainly does deserve a link.)

The thread is interesting mostly because it is probably the main and most reliable compendium of information and focus of discussion in English.

However, there are a few forums (or fora, whatever, no time for dead languages now) in other languages, notably in German. This one, hosted by a man - a shaman - who calls himself White Eagle, is probably the most relevant one.

And it was here that the announcement has been made two days ago that possibly (the font size is no glitch) a "time portal" has been found in the vicinity of Hallthurm.
("Stumbled upon" - by two people from Salzburg, on December 30th - would be perhaps a more fitting expression.)

Picture of the area where the "time portal" - or whatever it is - could be located (taken from here).

It is highly speculative, of course - how could it be anything else?
And nobody is saying it is anything else.

But in the opinion of White Eagle (the author of the original post on the forum) who, being a native, has been researching the area for decades now, that location could be the site of a "time portal".

Anyway, this thread, for a change, really might be worth following.
There have been all too many anomalies reported about the area through the ages to simply shrug and chalk them up to... what, exactly?

Unfortunately for all those who cannot read German, the thread on the German forum is, of course, in German. And we don't have the time to translate it right now.

But I am sure there will be English "summaries" coming up soon. *
Meanwhile, you can learn a lot about the road that led to this possible and highly speculative "discovery" by reading through the thread on ATS (beware, though: it's gigantic!), especially the original posts and, with particular attention, the recent (September-December 2009) posts by a member called BlueOrb (who among other things came up with highly interesting parallels between the nearby buildings constructed for Hitler and the buildings of the Cathars, and seems to be researching the topography of the churches around Untersberg).

Now, if you look at your watch... didn't the time you spent reading this pass unusually quickly? :-)

P.S. As you well know, we edit our posts again and again and again... That's how we are. So, be sure to come back sometime in the future, to check out our afterthoughts.

* Please, see the comment by BlueOrb below this post.

P.P.S. (added on 6. I. 10):

Just a quick note to all those of you who, in your eagerness to find out more - either to escape from the tax people or to "debunk" it - might be composing email upon email, to extort more information from us... Please, have another look at the post.

Did you see the word possibly?

Do you know why it is so big?

Because we couldn't find any BIGGER fonts.
OK? :-)

Hold on to your hats.
We're sure this decade is going to be a fast-speed chase along a very bumpy road in any case... :)

The dangers of conf(abu)lation

2010-01-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

I am serving you yet another P.S.
But if you are interested in the "dead again - alive again " phenomenon (whatever it is), it may be worth the few seconds of your time that it's going to take.

There is another thread discussing "dead celebrities who are now alive" over on ATS. (See the link in the post above, in the section regarding Karen Carpenter. I am not giving it here simply because I think the entire thread, save for two or three messages, is - to be blunt - unworthy of your attention and mine. I mean, seriously: now there are people "explaining" this apparent anomaly as being the consequence of - take a deep breath now... ... - cloning.)

Amidst all the "chaff" there is a single interesting - albeit not the least surprising - indication of what is going on in many, perhaps most, cases:

A person thought s/he had heard that Joanne Woodward, a fantastic actress and wife of the late Paul Newman, had died many years ago - drowned, to be precise.

Another person pointed out that it was Natalie Wood - wife of Robert Wagner - who drowned, back in 1981, during a yachting trip that included Christopher Walken.

Have you noticed anything particular about the names of the people involved in these two accounts?

That's right: they all start with W, or include this visually very prominent letter.
So, what we have here is a classic case of conflation (which, of course, is NOT the same as confabulation, a far more annoying, and potentially dangerous, phenomenon that only harms the endeavours - and the reputation - of those who are striving to explore genuine mysteries).

Oh, BTW: you may be glad to read that - amazingly! - the person who thought it was Woodward who had drowned (only to be "alive again" in recent times) conceded that was what happened.
I know I am.

The truth of the world is mysterious enough as it is.
We don't need more "chaff" to confound it.
Intellectual honesty is the way to go... wherever it is that we are going.

Out of mind?

2010-01-02T16:18:00.000-08:00

Oh, to be in England - the magic country of wandering houses and wayward hills and flights across time ...

Just as I thought I had read most of the most interesting "time slip" stories taking place in the United Kingdom, I was reminded of another one - of two, actually. (And yet a third one, for good measure.)

It's a story about a vision purportedly witnessed by Dr E. G. Moon, a supposedly "very down-to-earth" Scottish physician, on a certain day in 1935 when he visited one of his patients, the famous Lord Carson, at his home at Cleve Court (Isle of Thanet).

Now, this particular house is said to be haunted.
But what is said to have happened to Dr Moon doesn't appear to be a "haunting" proper. (And what is a "haunting" - or a "ghost", for that matter - anyway? For a few of my thoughts on the subject, see here.)

I found this story here, and since it is uncommonly well written, I think it would be best to let the author of the original text speak:

In 1935 Dr EG Moon, a very down-to-earth Scots Physician with a practice in Broadstairs, was at Minster in Thanet visiting his patient, Lord Carson, who lived at Cleve Court, a haunted house referred to elsewhere in the section. After talking to Carson, the doctor left his patient and made his way downstairs into the hallway. His mind was very clearly occupied at the time with the instructions he had given the nurse about the prescription he had left for Carson. At the front door Dr Moon hesitated, wondering whether to go back upstairs to have another word with the nurse.
It was at this point that the doctor noted that his car was no longer where he had left it in the driveway. In fact, it had been parked alongside a thick yew hedge and that, too, was missing. Even the drive down which he had driven from the main road was now nothing but a muddy track, and a man was coming towards him.

The newcomer on the scene, only thirty yards from Dr Moon, was rather oddly dressed wearing an old-fashioned coat with several capes around his shoulders. And he wore a top hat of the kind seen in the previous century. As he walked he smacked a switch against his riding boots. Over his shoulder he carried a long-barrelled gun. He stared hard at Moon. And the doctor registered the fact that the man coming towards him might have looked more at home in the 19th century.

Remarkably, Dr Moon seems not at the time to have been either alarmed or even mildly surprised by the changed scenery, by the quite oddly dressed man approaching his or the fact that his car was missing. What preoccupied him was the thought of Lord Carson's prescription. He simply turned away, without any concern, to go back into the house. But he did quite casually take one more look at the scene he was leaving. And now, as if by magic, the car was back where it had been and the yew hedge too. The drive was no longer a muddy track. And the man had also disappeared, back one assumes to the previous century. And it was only now that Dr Moon realised that something odd, something decidedly odd, had occurred.
All of this took seconds and so there is every reason to understand why Dr Moon did not immediately go out into the driveway to see where his missing car was. For the same reason it is understandable why he did not speak to the man dressed like a farm bailiff of the past. Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state. When he came to - for that seems to be the best way of describing his return to his own time - he described to Lady Carson what he thought had occurred. He was anxious, however, that no word of if should come out in his lifetime for fear that his patients would begin to question his judgement. It was only after his death that the story was revealed.**

Now, this is a fascinating story as it is. But it's this little bit what makes it even more interesting, to my eyes:

"Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state".

He seems to have been in some sort of trance, an almost hypnotic state, similar (at least I understand it that way) to the state of mind one often encounters in dreams: the weirdest things seem not only somehow "normal", but often we simply know (during the dream only), why they make sense, why they should be so. This, I believe, is the Theta "state of mind" (actually, a brain wave rhythm).

Salvador Dalí, The Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite of Cnide in a Landscape (1981)

And, luckily for us, we seem to have another story - from the very same region (and found on the same website) - pointing to the very same phenomenon, whatever it is that induces this strange state of receptiveness.

It is the account of a woman called Charlotte Warburton, who is said to have had a "time slip" on June 18, 1968, on Calverley Road, in the English town of Tunbridge Wells (Kent).

You can read the account here. I shall only point out the similarly unquestioning state of mind that she seems to have experienced - because I believe it is the key to such phenomena.

Was it an external factor, something from outside, what caused these experiences?

A third account - not strictly a "time slip" -, about a girl called Naomi Fuller (read it on the same page as the two accounts above) would seem to suggest that there is something about the area itself that, under certain (as yet undetermined) circumstances, switches a susceptible mind into a Theta-like state, which then makes it possible to perceive usually non-observable realities.

But if that were the case, wouldn't there be many more reports of such experiences? After all, timidity or fear of ridicule can only explain so much.

On the other hand, of course, there places, all over the world, where such experiences (be it "hauntings", "ghosts" or whatever one might call them) are reported quite often. Of couse, it is virtually impossible to establish how many reports are genuine, and from those that are, how many were "fed" by self-suggestion, by expectation.

Anyway, such places deserve - and often get - a thorough in situ individual investigation. (However, many seem to show unusually high electromagnetic activity. More on that some other time.)

For those who would fancy having a look at the planetary configuration of Mrs Warburton's purported "time slip", I even made an astrological chart. (Not knowing the exact time of the purported sighting, only that it was "morning", I entered 10 a.m.)

(If you find anything interesting in it, do let me know. ;))

Be it as it may, I think there is little doubt that it is the individual's susceptibility that makes such things happen.

But if you think I am politely alluding to so-called "hallucinations", you couldn't be more wrong. Apparently, there can be shared visions of things normally unseen (this blog is full of such accounts; I would especially recommend reading the entries about Jung, the Andersons and, of course, about the legendary Misses Moberly and Jourdain) - and not all of them can be satisfactorily explained away as either lies or "folie a deux".

So, judging by such accounts, it would be relatively safe to assume that, at certain locations and under certain (undetermined) influences, an external local force (or interplay of forces) is capable of inducing or triggering perception of otherwise unobservable realities external to the observer - and judging by the accounts of odd or uncharacteristic receptivity accompanying these visions, it would be safe to surmise that the mind is perhaps on a Theta-like "wavelength" at the time of the experience.

More on that on a future occasion.

* Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear who the author of the text(s) is. According to the Credits, it could be either W. H. Johnson or John Haverson (or both).

** I have yet to unearth the original source of this account.

All you need is love

2009-12-24T12:50:00.000-08:00

No: as you probably suspected, this has nothing to do with the Beatles.
And it is only a coincidence (or is it? I wonder sometimes) that I am writing this on Christmas, the love-fest par excellence - or at least a widely recognised symbolic date signifying love: towards our usual loved-ones and towards the Other.

What happened was that we were here discussing one of our earlier posts - the one about the missing socks - and I was reminded of a "technique" that Cynthia Sue Larson often mentions on her website:

(4) Feel Your Love for What is Lost

While all the previous steps are very important, feeling your love for what you have lost is undoubtedly the most important. While you continue staying grounded and breathing in love, remember all your favorite memories about what you've just lost. Allow yourself the luxury of feeling as much of that love as possible. Feel your heart growing warmer and warmer with those feelings of love. This love you are feeling is the bond between you and what has been lost, and by feeling your love as strongly as you can, you are calling what you love to return to you.

And that's not all. I remember reading somewhere - probably on her website again - about a woman (for some odd reason I seem to remember the totally irrelevant fact that she was from Israel) who started applying the "feel love" technique every time she found herself in a traffic jam, for example. Instead of cursing the other drivers and people on the street, she started developing a feeling of warm love and gratitude towards the "offenders" in any given situation.
And apparently "miracles" happened every time she did that.

I am especially interested in this because I happen to know it really does work.
Nobody,and I mean nobody, is immune to the cataclysmic power of love.
The usual reasoning used by those who enjoy (or so they think) being indignant to defend their wrath - "but if everyone just gives in, how will they ever learn?!" - is inane. This is one situation where the old question, "would you be rather right or happy?" (of which I am, in principle, no great fan), really does apply and makes sense.

Think about it: the feeling of "love" means actively partaking in, and (re)generating, Eros,the unifying force,the all-encompassing power that holds atoms together - that holds the Universe together, with all its dimensions.
And so, it may very well be the only - certainly the most powerful - force to transcend dimensions.

Love your way out of trouble.
(And I don't mean making eyes or flashing smiles for a calculated effect: I mean feeling love in your heart.)
Or at least give it a fair try.

It works.

Blast(s) from the past(s)

2009-12-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

At the risk of sounding insane - or, much worse, boring - I just have to register the reappearance of that cat again.

Yesterday evening I returned home. As I went out again, to empty the trash bin, I saw my neighbour's cat jump from the (neighbour's) stairway and disappear into the bushes in front of the house.

I can almost hear you: "She is losing it, the poor thing... She is obsessed with the cat!"
Well, I can't really blame you, especially considering the fact that most likely you don't know me in person. All I can do is to reassure you - again - that it does have exactly the same (very specific) appearance of my neighbour's purportedly deceased cat (which would be a Methuselah anyway, were he alive).

But in case you're interested in reading about it anyway, and certainly for my own benefit (instead of keeping a diary of such occurrences) here are two interesting tidbits that may - or may not - be associated with the cat's reappearance.

For two days before the sighting of the cat I had been, once again, actively practicing - or so I would hope - the "parallel life" thing, so to speak. (See the previous cat-related entry, hyperlinked above.) I must be getting better (?) at it, because this time no headache followed.

And the same day of the sighting I had been awoken by what sounded like a sound from my past that I thought I would never hear again: the sound of a melody another neighbour used to play on her flute, until she moved away, about four years ago. (Other people, unrelated to her, live there now.)
At first I thought I had been dreaming. But as I got up, I heard the flute again. I even heard the passage that always gave her trouble: she skipped a few notes, just like she always did in the past.
It went on for about two hours: the usual time lapse for her daily practice in the past.

As I went out that afternoon, I walked by her house to see if she had returned to live there. (I really didn't know her well enough to just knock on her door.)
But nothing seemed different. The car of the family that lives there now was parked outside the house.

I really don't know what to think at this point.

Bats in my belfry is a very tempting explanation - oh, how easy and pleasant it is to laugh, even (or especially) at oneself! - but it would really make no sense. My mind seems to be working better than ever in every other aspect.

Anyway, I'll continue with my tentative inhabiting a timeline that I like better than this one. In an age when everything seems explored-out to death this may be the last - and ultimate - adventure.

Meanwhile, you can read a fascinating account about an unexpected change in a very mundane reality, taken from a very interesting - and extremely useful - book, called Parallel Universes of Self, by Frederick Dodson.
(You can see the image and other details of the book in the Recommended display on the right side of the screen.)

That morning, I had meditated and shifted myself into a slightly different reality. I was scheduled to go to a hairdresser I had been to many times around midday. Upon arrival, I was astonished to find that a brand-new building had been built right beside the hairdresser's place. "How could they build it so quickly?" I asked myself. I had only been there four weeks ago, and four weeks ago, there was a lawn and a park bench, without any sign of a building or even a planned building. I stood there for a while, baffled and confused. I entered the hairdresser's shop and asked, "When did they build that house?" The staff looked at me incredulously. "Oh, it's been there for a few years, actually. I remember when it was built," said one of them. "It was shortly before Christmas, five years ago." I stared in disbelief. "But wasn't there a park bench and a small grass hill there?" They couldn't tell me or couldn't remember, but they looked at me as if I was mixed up. I could have sworn that only a few weeks ago, the place looked entirely different. After getting my hair cut, I went out to examine the place. Behind the building, everything looked exactly as it had before - except for the brand-new building. Finally, I accepted that I had shifted into a parallel reality, and that the building was a good indicator. It was the first of many physical reality shifts I learned to accept, rather than labeling me insane, as the consensus-reality would.

Well, it's not the first time that a building has proved to be wickedly unstable... :)
Then again, entire hills have been known to disappear (and, who knows, reappear somewhere else?).

Anyway, it would be all too easy to dismiss such accounts as being the consequence of faulty attention. If that were the case, it should also be explained why other segments of the same reality appear unchanged in the eyes of the same observer.

Maybe for some unfathomable reason the author of the account above failed to register the change at the time when the house was built, and kept the earlier landscape intact.
Which would still mean that (at least) two realities can coexist in an observable mode.
Or perhaps even in an alternate - on again, off again - mode?
More on this the next time.

To tell you the truth, I am not very satisfied with this entry. But I wanted to register my experience, whatever it was, while it was still fresh in my memory. Because whatever it is, it is not something that should be neglected.

P.S. As you may know by now, I often edit my entries (again and again and again), as new thoughts occur to me, so don't forget to come back at some later time.

My body, myself?

2009-11-27T13:13:00.000-08:00

One of the most mysterious phenomena from the fringe of the so-called "normal" human experience is the appearance of one's look-alike, also - and better - known by the German name of Doppelgänger (pronounced: dopple-GEHN-gehr).

There is an old belief still going around that supposedly everyone has a "double" or a look-alike somewhere in the world. The concept of the doppelgänger is a more sinister variant of this belief, in that the "double" isn't thought to be a real physical person but a sort of ghostly Self of the person, often interpreted as a harbinger of death of that person.

The term itself - doppelgänger - first appears in the German novel Siebenkäs (here is an online English translation), published in 1796/97 by Jean Paul. But there seems to be little doubt that the writer was merely harnessing the poetic potential of a belief that was much older than his work.

The exact origins of this belief may be difficult to determine, but it does seem to be ancient. It appears in the concept of the vardøger (Norwegian) or the etiäinen (Finnish), in Northern European folklore, for example. The main characteristic of this concept is that the apparition (or, sometimes, sounds associated with the person in question) is a predecessor of the person in question, seen arriving or performing any given activity before the real person is seen doing the same things. (A typical case is the well-known story about Emilie Sagée, to which we may return in the future).

There are many stories about doppelgängers or seemingly related apparitions. Abraham Lincoln reportedly saw a ghostly double of his own image in the mirror, which he interpreted as a presage of both his re-election and his untimely death before the end of the second term as the president of the USA. According to his wife (who was, incidentally, the creator of Frankenstein), so did Percy Bysshe Shelley, also shortly before his death. Even Elizabeth I of England and Catherine the Great of Russia reportedly saw their own doubles (and feisty Catherine even had hers shot - not that it helped much).

But there is one famous sighting that stands out, not only because it was not followed by the death of the "original", but because it appears to have been a genuine glimpse into what was the "future" of the person who saw it: Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

Goethe's testimony is all the more interesting in this context because he was in possession of a prodigiously perceptive and analytical mind, producing ground-breaking research in various fields, such as optical phenomena.

Here is what Goethe wrote in his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, published in 1811 (the following excerpt is from the English translation by John Oxenford):

I now rode along the foot-path toward Drusenheim, and here one of the most singular forebodings took possession of me. I saw, not with the eyes of the body, but with those of the mind, my own figure coming toward me, on horseback, and on the same road, attired in a dress which I had never worn, — it was pike-gray, with somewhat of gold. As soon as I shook myself out of this dream, the figure had entirely disappeared. It is strange, however, that, eight years afterward, I found myself on the very road, to pay one more visit to Frederica, in the dress of which I had dreamed, and which I wore, not from choice, but by accident. However, it may be with matters of this kind generally, this strange illusion in some measure calmed me at the moment of parting. The pain of quitting for ever noble Alsace, with all I had gained in it, was softened; and, having at last escaped the excitement of a farewell, I, on a peaceful and quiet journey, pretty well regained my self-possession.

It is typical of Goethe, ever the scientist, to try and explain this vision.
But as reassuring as this explanation may have been to him... is that really what happened? How would he explain the sighting of very specific clothes that he had never seen before and was to wear eight years later?

And, of course, there have been many later attempts to explain this sort of perceptual anomaly. However, the most scientific-sounding explanations are often the most treacherous ones, precisely because they sound "sensible". For one thing, they tend to omit any aspect of the phenomenon that doesn't fit into the proposed theory; also, they tend to blur the difference between cause and effect. (Such is the case with the recent experiments with stimulation of the temporo-parietal lobes, to which we will return in the future.)

The "eye of the mind", of which Goethe speaks, does not necessarily reside in the brain.
As a matter of fact, the mind itself does not seem to reside in the brain (the brain being more of a processor - not a generator).

But more on that on some future occasion.

Into thin air?

2009-11-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

Exactly two hundred years ago today something strange is said to have happened in Perleberg, Germany.

The young British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst was returning from an important diplomatic mission to Austria. On November 25th, around noon, he stopped at the small town of Perleberg, precisely half-way between Berlin and Hamburg, in Prussia.

At the Posthaus (it was exactly what it sounds: a post house) he ordered a new set of horses and then he went to the nearby "White Swan" inn (Zum weißen Schwan, later the Hoffmanns Hotel), to eat and rest.

Around 9 p.m that evening, Bathurst was ready to continue his journey. Standing outside the post house, he was watching his luggage being loaded onto the carriage. Then, he is said to have "walked around the horses" - and disappeared. Just like that: into thin air.

The post house, the inn and other buildings around were searched, as were the nearby woods and marshes, and the river was dragged, all to no avail. Not even the reward offered for any information leading to him helped: Bathurst was never found.

At least that is how the story goes - and it is certainly one of the better known stories about "unexplained disappearances". It has captured the imagination of thousands; and while it may not have been a time slip, at least three authors certainly thought it was - or they made it into one (one each, that is):

Avram Davidson wrote about Bathurst in Masters of the Maze.

Australian author Bertram Chandler wrote about it in his 1964 story Into the Alternate Universe: Contraband from Otherspace.
The third story featuring the elusive Mr. Bathurst, by H. Beam Piper, is conveniently available to you right now, free of charge.

An old postcard of the main square in Perleberg

It seems, however, that Bathurst's disappearance might be considerably less intriguing than the vox populi has made it to be in the past two centuries.

The purpose of the British diplomat's mission had been to convince Austria to join the war against Napoleon. (The highly sensitive and dangerous nature of his enterprise is indicated by the fact that Bathurst was travelling under an assumed name and identity: as a German merchant, by the name of Koch.)
Indeed, French agents were suspected early on to have had a hand in Bathurst's disappearance; but Napoleon swore on his honour that he had nothing to do with it.

Here's what Charles Loy Fort has to say about it:

"He walked around the horses.

Upon November 25th, 1809, Benjamin Bathurst, returning from Vienna, where, at the Court of the Emperor Francis, he had been representing the British Government, was in the small town of Perleberg, Germany. In the presence of his valet and his secretary, he was examining horses, which were to carry [198/199] his coach over more of his journey back to England. Under observation, he walked around to the other side of the horses. He vanished, For details, see the Cornhill Magazine, 55-279.

I have not told much of the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst, because so many accounts are easily available; but the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould, in Historic Oddities, tells of a circumstance that is not findable in all other accounts that I have read. It is that, upon Jan. 23rd, 1810, in a Hamburg newspaper, appeared a paragraph, telling that Bathurst was safe and well, his friends having received a letter from him. But his friends had received no such letter. Wondering as to the origin of this paragraph, and the reason for it, Baring-Gould asks: "Was it inserted to make the authorities abandon the search?" Was it an inquiry-stopper? is the way I word this. Some writers have thought that, for political reasons, at the instigation of Napoleon Bonaparte, Bathurst was abducted. Bonaparte went to the trouble to deny that this was so."

That may have been so. Nevertheless, in 1990 the investigator Mike Dash undertook a re-investigation of the case, and discovered that parts of Bathurst's clothing were found in the woods in the same year of his disappearance; and in 1852, human remains were found in the cellar of a local mason's house. It was evident that the dead man had been murdered. Furthermore, Mr. Bathurst's sister even went to Germany, to identify the remains...
Thanks to this wonderfully convenient extra you can read all about it here.

(Interestingly, even Bathurst's date of birth seems to have undergone a process of curious "disinformation" through the years: according to Dash, he was born in September; according to all the other sources freely available on the internet - AKA Wikipedia and all the others who borrow its information - he was born in March, either the 14th or the 18th.
Go figure.
Myself, I'll go with The Peerage, where his date of birth is entered as March 14th, 1784.)

Whatever the truth, Bathurst's disappearance remains a mystery.
And to honour its longevity, the town of Perleberg is going to unveil a commemorative plaque at the old Posthaus, in a special ceremony that is to take place on November 28th, followed by the opening of an exhibition to mark the occasion.

What I find most interesting of all - and somewhat, strangely, endearing - is that even 20 years after Dash's recapitulation of the real course of the search for Bathurst, the old version of the diplomat's disappearance is still making the rounds, unabated, with barely a mention of the evidence pointing to possible - even likely - murder.*

People simply love unsolved mysteries - and it's the unsolved part that they love most of all.

And why not?
They may not even know it themselves, but there is a nugget of ancient wisdom in such an attitude. More than wisdom: it's the obscure awareness that even the most (seemingly) explicable events contain a core of mystery that is linked to our deepest yearnings; that, in its heart of hearts, even the known and the mundane is - like ourselves, each and every one of us - still and forever an enigma.

For the human heart and mind, the "inexplicable" is the signpost pointing towards the transcendental.

* LATER EDIT:
I have just found a rather good account of this story that does mention the evidence. Clearly it was written by somebody who likes to think, rather than just copy and paste old stories, like so many other "paranormal" blog- and webmasters.

** For more unexplained disappearances, see here and here.

What Everett REALLY said... and what he didn't

2009-11-23T16:21:00.001-08:00

Somebody once told me that the average child today (meaning the "today" of maybe twenty years ago) knows more about medicine than the average physician of the 17th century. I am not sure that is entirely true (and even less so today "today", with functional illiteracy on the rampage); but undoubtedly something similar could be said about the common knowledge of physics today.

Of course I am not talking about solid technical knowledge; but certainly the terms "quantum", "multiverse" and "parallel" (as in: universes) seem to be on everyone's lips lately.
(I am surprised there aren't any ads for quantum detergents, quantum blenders, parallel-universe stain removers... It's probably just a matter of time.)

And it's no wonder. Quantum physics really has revolutionised the "mainstream" view about the nature of time-space - even before its actual findings could be properly verified. And one of its most revolutionary concepts is the "Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics", as it was called by its direct intellectual progenitor, Hugh Everett, III.

Published in 1957, in Nature (see the cover below), it has spawned and fuelled countless speculations and science fiction scenarios - but also inklings of new paths in our perception of the universe and of our interaction with all there is.

If you are interested in Everett's actual theory, you're in for a treat. Here is a fascinating collection of original documents (compiled by the journalist and Everett's biographer, Peter Byrne), including Everett's dissertation, so you can read it for yourself. Or you can read the more accessible but no less important "Amoeba Metaphor".

(By the way, you can also read about the scientist's son and his "quest" for his distant father. And here is a veritable text fest, courtesy of Nature and its various authors, commenting on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Everett's seminal article.)

However, many - probably most - of the people who now speak of "parallel universes" with such ease and apparent familiarity, never read a word of what Everett actually wrote.

So, what is the reason for the mass appeal of this theory?

The perceived end of a one and only, finite "fate", of course. The glimpse of endless possibilities. The hope that what was not but could have been is. All we have to do is observe it.

That's the underlying assumption. (And how valid - or simply compelling, on a human level - this assumption is, we'll see at the end of this post.)

But here's the catch: "observation" seems to imply consciousness - our consciousness.
And Everett, apparently, never said anything about the role of human consciousness. He simply wasn't interested in it.

This may sound bizarre, considering that "observing" sounds like an action of human (or human-like) consciousness.
Here's what Byrne says about it:

Everett, like all good physicists, did not give theories of consciousness any magical powers in quantum mechanics. Because of the intractability of the measurement problem and several other similar paradoxes in quantum mechanics, some people, especially philosophers, have been attracted to the idea that human consciousness collapses the wave function. That human consciousness is the major actor in the universe, and that without human consciousness, the universe would not exist. Physicists like Everett who are materialist and realist thought that was bunk. They think human consciousness is a quantum-mechanical system like any other quantum-mechanical system.

Not all agree, of course. And not all the water that has passed under the bridges of science and culture in the past 50 years is necessarily "bunk".
(The star of the last two posts, Larry Farwell, is just one of the more popular names among the dissidents; what makes the experiments he writes about relevant and so interesting, of course, is precisely that they seem to demonstrate that human-like consciousness does come into play. And, frankly, Michio Kaku doesn't sound opposed to the concept of consciousness as an intervening factor, either.)

Philosophically, human(-like) consciousness is, of course, separable from the act of observation needed for the "split" to occur.
But is it, really - I mean, in reality (as multifaceted as it may be), the reality that transcends the rational limits of philosophy - the reality that our scientists (not to mention the myriad mystics of all persuasions) are keenly "observing" as we speak?

Here's what Kaku says, in this must-read interview:
"Consciousness is one of the great problems facing science. Most scientists cannot even define it, let alone explain it."

Is it possible that Everett really was all that oblivious to the depth and implications of this question?
Knowing a few physicists as I do, I'll venture an opinion: Yes, it is possible.
But that still doesn't necessarily mean that he - he, specifically - was.

Assuming Everett discussed this concept with his family (I mean, in depth), then the most eloquent, revealing - and poignant - "circumstantial" evidence of his conception is to be found in the farewell note that his daughter, Elizabeth, left behind when she committed suicide, in 1982:

"I am going to join dad in a parallel world," she wrote.

***

* As always, there is a considerable possibility that I'll be reworking this post, so be sure to check on it in the future.

Consciousness and Matter - a post scriptum

2009-11-23T09:16:00.001-08:00

Last night's post produced an unexpected flurry of emails (not all of them - but many - appreciative of the theory presented, especially because the author's thesis implies a specific method of "transcendental meditation" and the somewhat controversial figure of Maharishi), so I thought it might be a good idea to put this subject to rest - temporarily - by adding the following passage from a website (Truth About TM) that those of you who found last night's post interesting might find even more interesting:

Erwin Schrodinger, who received the Nobel prize for his development of the Schrodinger equation, the most widely used mathematical tool in quantum theory, put it this way, “Mind has erected the objective outside world of the natural philosopher out of its own stuff” (Schrodinger, 1958/1967, p.131)....The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture” (ibid, p.138). Supporting this view, modern neuroscience recognizes that size, shape, color, texture, visibility, and all other qualities of an object of experience are not uniquely determined by the external world but are features of subjective experience (Farwell, 1996; Farwell & Farwell, 1995).

Schodinger also argued for the primacy of consciousness from an analysis of volitional action: “So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises:
“(i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature.
“(ii) Yet, I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take responsibility for them.
“The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt ‘I,’,—am the person, if any, who controls the ‘motion of the atoms’ according to the Laws of Nature.” (Schrodinger, 1944, pp. 92-93, quoted in Farwell, 1996).

The conclusion from quantum mechanics is that our perceptual reality of the material world as well as our voluntary action upon that world is not structured “out there” but is structured “in here” in the mind. The apparent stability of the observed world and the high degree of agreement that is achieved between observers is because the most fundamental level of consciousness where perception is constructed, transcendental consciousness, is universal and eternally non-changing, infinitely stable.

(You'll find the articles and books referenced in this passage on the website.)

ANYTHING is possible

2009-11-22T15:24:00.000-08:00

Jesus replied, “Why do you say ‘if you can’?
Anything is possible for someone who has faith!”
(Mr 9:23)

This doesn't really belong here - or does it? - but being familiar with the "profile" and the personal inclinations of many readers who like to ponder about the mysteries of time and space, like I (and the rest of us "forget-me-nots") do, I feel the following might be of interest to many of you out there.

[...] By functioning from the level of unbounded consciousness that is the source of creation, one can potentially do anything, no matter how "impossible". Again, the Conscious Unified Field showed that we can indeed consciously choose to manifest phenomena that are improbable enough to be labeled "impossible" in the Materialist Paradigm. Since there is in the world of quantum mechanics a finite probability of anything happening at any time or place, the reality brought to light in the Conscious Unified Field Experiment has the potential to provide the experience that literally anything is possible.

Do you have a dream that moves you deeply? If so, your dream moves you deeply for a reason, and you can move nature deeply in the same way. The Conscious Unified Field Experiment showed that nature responds to our inner desires and intentions in "impossible" ways. If there is a single take-home message [...] it is that you can create the life you want. You can manifest your dream, no matter how impossible it may seem. If you have a dream, go for it. Go for what you really want, not just what you know you can get. The resources at your command are truly infinite. Anything is possible."

The passage above is from what I consider to be one of the most underrated books on the mysteries of consciousness and its interaction with matter (the spawn of time/space) published in recent times:

(A few words about its author, Dr. Larry Farwell.)

And there are more of such underrated gems to come.
Stay tuned. :)

A final word from your blog mistress:

You are feeling GREAT right now, right...?
Tomorrow you may still feel some afterglow.
And the day after tomorrow some petty annoyance will make you "face reality" and forget all about this.

That's what happens every time. Doesn't it?
And then you wonder why such philosophies "don't work"?

My friend, fortify yourself in advance.
Resolve NOW to ignore your own upcoming doubts.
Resolve NOW to ignore them day after day.

And THEN see what happens.

Your future, online

2009-11-22T08:27:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to see the "future"?
My strictly personal experience tells me, yes, it is possible; and the possible reason why this is possible is that the so-called future - as the so-called past - isn't "where" we usually expect it to be.

But whatever the truth - IF there is a single and absolute, "objective" truth - people will go on trying to peep into what lies "ahead". Some use Tarot cards, other coffee grounds or tea leaves, still others resort to "psychics". And since the advent of the internet, there are also online "oracles" available. Some of these are well known, others are hidden gems. And here are two of the hidden gems that I plucked from - where else? - Cynthia Sue Larson's website. Both are based on the notion of synchronicity, introduced by Carl Gustav Jung.

Odyssey of Life Oracle

Simple, unpretentious - and it actually makes sense.
(Whether it really "works" or not is difficult to gauge, but at least it makes sense.)

The Synchronic Divination Book

This unusual oracle is a relatively recent addition to the online presentation of the Federation of Damanhur, an extraordinary "country" that you may have heard about (and if you haven't, go visit it now).

For those who prefer Tarot cards, here is a website that we like when we're too lazy to pick up cards with our own fingers...

Byzant

And by the way, feel free to come back and comment how they worked for you!
(Needless to say, we wish you nothing but health, riches and fabulous dark, tall strangers in your future... ;-))

Where have all the good socks gone?

2009-11-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

This peculiar "anomaly" you surely know - or know of, at the very least: you put a pair of socks in the washing machine and only one sock reemerges. You go back and palpate the raspy entrails of the washing machine drum, as deftly as a gynecologist, to find the sock: nothing.
You look around the floor to see where the sock might have fallen out of the bundle of freshly washed clothes: nothing. You go back and search the washing/drying machine once more, this time taking care to look under and all around the machine. Nothing.
Then, months later, the sock reappears in the pantry or behind some remote radiator, in a place where you would never expect to find it - sometimes even in the same space where you keep your washing machine.

By Motorenmano

I must admit this has never happened to me, although I have seen it happen to other people (and certainly heard about it). What's more it seems to be an epidemic! (For details see the bottom of this post.)
And so, I have always thought this "phenomenon" must be simply the consequence of careless handling: it's very easy for a small thing like a sock to get stuck in some other piece of clothing or linen. Think about it: why socks, and why in the washing/drying machine? You don't hear about T-shirts or sheets disappearing in the gargantuan jaws of washing machines: it's always socks or, occasionally, some other small clothing item. People are a notoriously inattentive species. Aren't they? Aren't we?

Well, yes.
But that doesn't explain the sudden disappearance - sometimes followed (a long time later) by the inexplicable reappearance - of all sorts of inanimate objects even at times when attention, or the lack thereof, clearly wasn't the issue.

I for one have long suspected there must be an itinerant black hole on the loose in my home, sometimes invading my handbags, like a stowaway, to displace itself around town.

I have seen a contact lens (several times; I'll be returning to them in some later post) fall to the floor and somehow disappear while in full view.

In the past ten years or so, several of my clothing items have disappeared from my home even though nobody had access to the space where they were kept, there was no robbery (and they were not valuable anyway, except sentimentally, to me), I have never lent my clothes to anyone, and I know for a fact, beyond any doubt, that I would not have parted with them voluntarily (i.e. I did not give or throw them away); nor am I afflicted by any type of temporary amnesia. Those clothes never left the apartment except on me - and yet they are gone.

What's more, this condition seems to be contagious.
About two years ago, I suddenly developed an intense craving for Barilla tortellini. So I went to a store and bought them. I did buy a few other things, too, but the pasta was my main point of interest. At the checkout counter I put it in the shopping bag first, then the rest of the things I bought, before returning home to have a good plateful of tortellini.
The shopping bag had no tears or holes in it; I had no physical contact whatsoever with anyone during my short journey home, so nobody could have stolen them; the bag of tortellini could not have fallen out without my hearing it happen.
And yet, when I came home, the tortellini were nowhere to be found.
Two years later I still haven't found them.

(But then, pasta is notoriously misbehaved. For a supernatural adventure involving spaghetti see here.)

Another item I am still missing is an eyelash mascara, brand new. It disappeared on the day it was bought, from a little plastic bag that had no tears or holes through which the mascara could have slipped; furthermore, the little bag with the mascara was tucked within another, bigger bag. (It also would have made a noise if it fell out, and I heard none.)
A hypothetical mascara-loving pickpocket's intervention is out of the question, since s/he would have had to not only bump into me or make very close contact with me, but would have had to worm his or her grubby hand through a scatter of other objects that were also in the bag at the moment, all the way down to the bottom of the bag where the mascara was. But no other items were missing. And I had no close contact with anyone on my way home, anyway.

Taken from here.

But sometimes wayward objects do reappear. Such was the case with a pair of sunglasses my mother had bought for me years ago.

I use contact lenses, so my eyes are somewhat more sensitive to bright light than they would be in normal circumstances. Which is why I always use sunglasses in the summer and whenever there is bright light outside.
So I was understandably distraught when one summer's day a few years ago I could not find my sunglasses anywhere. (I had two other pairs of sunglasses, but the rims were not of the right colour for me to use them with the predominant colour of the clothes I was wearing that summer.)
At the time I used mostly one handbag, and while it was relatively big, I always found whatever I was looking for in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. Furthermore, I always put my glasses in the main compartment, so I never had to even look for them: I simply felt around the bag with my hand and retrieved them.
Until one day I could not find them anywhere.

I was sure I must have lost them, but could not figure out where.
The next time I visited my mum I told her about the sunglasses, and she looked for them around her home. She didn't find them.

I could have bought another pair, of course; but I was sentimentally attached to those sunglasses; and I hate shopping more than words can express. (Yes, you remember correctly: I am a woman. :)

Anyway, to make a long - three weeks long - story short, one day, as I was walking down the stairs in front of my mother's home, I opened my handbag to take out my wallet... and there were the sunglasses, their golden clasps shining in the sun. I went back and asked my mother had she found them and put them in my handbag. She was surprised - no, she didn't - and she laughed.

So did I.
What else could I have done?

And by the way, about a year later, it happened again - with the same pair of sunglasses. This time, they went missing for only a few days. And wherever they were, they must have decided they had a better time with me, because they returned on their own accord...

I am sure something similar has happened to many of you out there.
But I am also sure that many of such occurrences really are just a matter of inattentiveness. I am not posting these stories to encourage anyone to immediately jump to the conclusion that a dimensional anomaly or some paranormal activity must have taken place, if they can't find something that "should" have been where expected.
Remember: people can be remarkably absent-minded.

Also, if you are taking any pills, be aware that some can produce amnesia as a side effect. (The sleep-inducing substance called zolpidem, sold in the USA under the name of Ambien, is notorious for producing amnesia. People have been known to raid their fridges at night, or make midnight calls to people they would otherwise never dare calling - and most dangerously of all, to take extra doses of the medication - and not remember it the next day.)

In short, be sure to exclude all possible "logical" explanations before attributing any odd occurrence to something anomalous. And not just because it makes sense, but because not doing so diminishes the value of truly extra-ordinary experiences.

Anyway, here is a treat for all of you who are hoping to find a lost object: a few tips from one of our favourite writers on the subject, Cynthia Sue Larson:

Top Six Tips for Finding Lost Things

But if your main concern are socks and their fate, here is a foundation that is working towards the welfare of all socks, big or small, black or white, old or new. I am sure they would appreciate your help.

The Lost Sock Foundation

Schrödinger's cat on my doorstep

2009-11-05T06:37:00.000-08:00

Time for a personal confession...
I use the word "confession" because, unlike the other personal experiences I have reported so far (which came uninvited), the event I am about to describe seems to have been directly related to something I did - or tried to do. And it is an activity that is often best left unmentioned, unless you are willing to risk being considered a kook. A mad(wo)man. A lunatic. Someone who is not to be trusted with the simplest tasks in life... You get the picture.

The outward appearance of the event was anything but spectacular; if you're expecting the time-shift equivalent of some "mother ship" appearing, you're in for an anticlimax, to put it mildly.

Still, it boggles the mind.
And while I usually don't mind letting go of my (rational) mind, there is something about this event that makes me want to keep silent about it.
Hence the term "confession".
(And don't be surprised if I later change my mind about publishing this and take the post down.)

Something odd happened on the evening of July 23, 2008.
It had been a breathtakingly beautiful summer day, with all the colours burning bright in the sunlight that filtered through dark grey stormy clouds. (There had been a storm the previous night, and there was another coming later that day.)

I had been out for a coffee with a relative of mine. It had been a most interesting meeting: we had a conversation that, I feel, directly pertains to what I am about to describe, but would rather withhold it, for fear of "tainting" the thought process (and possibly even clouding the memory itself). Let me just say that it was a conversation about a dream that might indicate that dreams perhaps could be more than just "processing" of our daily rubbish (garbage, if you're an American ;) - that perhaps they sometimes could be a very real meeting point of different levels of Reality.

As I was coming home that evening, maybe ten or twenty metres from my doorstep, I suddenly saw my neighbour's cat. It was sitting by the rubbish bin, looking at me.

There aren't many cats loose around my neighbourhood; in fact, that was the only cat I ever saw in my street.
And this cat had a very distinctive appearance. Its fur had a colouring and pattern that I hadn't seen on any other cat; and most of all, it had a very visible patch of discolouration around its nose, the consequence of a disease he had had years before.

My heart leapt when I saw him.
I slowly approached him.
He didn't move; he just kept looking at me.
"Is that you?" I asked him, calling his name.
If he ever replied, I didn't hear or understand him. But then, there was no need for a reply: I could see quite clearly it was him.

It was my neighbour's cat - who had died two years before.

I stood there looking at him for a while; and then I slowly walked away and into my home.
The next day I didn't see him. Or the next.
I did see his (former) "owner" a few days later, and I inquired - as breezily and "by the way" as I could - about his cat. Oh yes, it had died. How did he know for sure? Because he saw him die. Did he get another one? No, no way - too much trouble. "I thought I had seen him," I finally added. Didn't he see a cat just like his around lately? No.

I know what I saw.
Maybe the man, for some obscure reason, didn't tell me the truth: maybe he did not see him die, so he could not know for sure that the cat was dead.
But that was the only time I saw the "late" cat (who had been quite elderly at the time of his purported death) in more than two years, ever since I had stopped seeing him around and later learned he was dead.

Until a few days ago.
It was late in the evening and I was returning home.
When I walked past my neighbour's door, I saw the cat again, sitting where it had been the last time I saw him.

This time, I walked even closer to him, to have a good look at him: yes, it was him. There was his unmistakable patch around the nose. And he seemed to know me.

I know I said I wouldn't talk... but now I think I might as well admit to you openly (after all, you already suspected I was a kook, right?) that the first time, on July 23, 2008 - or rather, the night before - I had been doing an "exercise", the aim of which was to switch to a different timeline.

It certainly resulted in an occipital headache that defies description. No industry-strength pills could relieve it - and that's saying something, considering that: a) I hardly ever get headaches, and b) an aspirin is usually enough to dispel my headaches.

Then, later that day, when I met with my relative, she told me about a dream that she could not get out of her mind: it had been a "Technicolor" dream (something that, in her own words, never happened to her, as she only dreams in "black & white"); it felt as vivid as any present reality; in her dream she was perfectly aware of the obvious change between the waking reality as she remembered it and the (also "waking") reality of the dream.

I am not usually interested in dreams, but this time I was impressed.
I didn't tell her (but she may find out now) that while she was sleeping I had been suffering the mother of all headaches, after having tried to "immerse" myself completely - mind AND body - in a different timeline: a timeline that corresponded exactly to what she had dreamed.

Did this have anything to do with the cat?
I don't know. I just felt it had to be mentioned, considering that both events were highly unusual, to put it conservatively.

What baffles me is this: IF (and it is a big "if") my mind-forcing the boundaries of time/space had somehow provoked the apparition of that cat... what was it that made it appear a few days ago? My mind frame and activity had been totally different from what they were on July 22/23, 2008.

I may be editing - or just removing - this entry in a while.
But in case you just like reading about phantom cats - nah, let's call them Sc hröding er's cats :) - here's a short mention of a similar event.

The Chronovisor

2009-11-03T04:47:00.000-08:00

People have been obsessed with the idea of a time machine ever since H. G. Wells wrote his classic novel. Perhaps even longer than that: since the beginning of... well, machines.

But did you know there already is - or was - a supposedly functional time machine?
To be precise, a machine that allegedly shows and photographs the past.

Certainly its alleged inventor was a real person: Father Pellegrino Ernetti* - a Catholic priest, no less.

Father Ernetti - who was an exorcist, among other things - may (or may not) have been a kook; but he was also a serious scientific researcher. He was a highly respected authority on archaic, pre-polyphonic music.

Ernetti was apparently also very interested in physics (some say he actually had a degree in quantum physics), and his curiosity knew no boundaries, especially after a curious incident that is said to have happened on September 15, 1952, in Milan.

Ernetti was trying to filter harmonics out of Gregorian chants, in the company of the renowned physician and psychologist, Father Agostino Gemelli. (The famous teaching hospital in Rome is named after him.)

At one point during the work, the two men apparently heard the voice of Gemelli's late father speaking to them on the wire recorder they were using. (Gemelli - a noted skeptic - later confirmed this incident).

This propelled Ernetti's research into the present timespace location of sounds and sights that seem "gone", a thing of the past, to us. His quest led him to speculation about the possibilities of constructing a machine that would capture the sights of the past: a chronovisor (literally, a "time-seer").

Later, Ernetti claimed that in the 1950s he had contacted some of the most prominent physicists of the time - Enrico Fermi and Werner von Braun, among others - and that they had actually produced such a machine.

But the story gets weirder.

Ernetti claimed that in January (12-14) of 1956, the team managed to produce "live" images of Christ's crucifixion, in 36 A.D. - and they had a photograph to prove it!

The photo in question was published on May 2nd, 1972, in the Italian weekly La Domenica del Corriere.

Does it look unconvincing or just plain awkward to you?
I don't blame you.
To me, it looks like a painted statue - and not a terribly accomplished one, at that.

And that's exactly what it turned out to be: the copy of an image of a s culpture kept in the sanctuary of Collevalenza, a 1931 work by the Spanish sculptor Cullot Valera.

And this is precisely what makes this story so utterly strange.

If Ernetti were an unsophisticated (and dishonest!) third-rate kook, nobody would even remember this story anymore.

But Ernetti was a highly educated man.

Furthermore, not one of the people who knew him ever doubted his personal integrity.

Why, then, did he allow such a preposterously obvious hoax to come out and smear his name?
Surely it would have been easy to make up a plausible excuse for not presenting any photographic "evidence". Of course most people would not have believed him - but at least it would save him from the ridicule that ensued.

Be that as it may, the Chronovisor is said to be kept in the vaults of the Vatican.

And, by the way, there is a book about it.

Father Ernetti's Chronovisor:
The Creation and Disappearance of the World's First Time Machine

(There should be a hyperlinked book cover visible above. If you cannot see it, try viewing the page in a different browser. And I am sorry for the inconvenience. Blogger has been having A LOT of issues lately, and I am this close to switching to a different blog publisher.)

I really wish I could recommend it, but I am not sure I can.
It is a translation - and, arguably, an adaptation - from the German original.
I haven't read the original, but I doubt it would make that much difference.
You see, the problem with this book is not (only) in the language, the unnecessary - typically journalistic - hyperboles and stereotypes ("There is no city in the world more beautiful than Venice, and no view in Venice is more beautiful than sunrise from the basilica and the Benedictine abbey on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore"... Oh really?), but in the organisation and treatment of the material itself. It goes in all directions, with digressions that have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject itself.

And there is more: the American translation has an "appendix" that does not contribute to the quality of the book. It seems the editors (of the American translation, interestingly - not of the German original) received a purported unsolicited "confession" by an unnamed distant relative of Father Ernetti's, who claims the priest confessed to him on his deathbed that he had made the whole thing up - but that "it is possible" for such a contraption to work.

Let me tell you: as a journalist and as a reader I do not approve of such appendices - especially since their authenticity is absolutely impossible to establish. It is neither ethical nor stylistically elegant.

But, sure enough, some webmasters and other online scribblers (yes, of course I am an online scribbler, too ;)) who lack a discerning mind are now quoting said "confession" as if it were the gospel truth.

It isn't.
For what it's worth, personally I do not really believe that the Chronovisor ever worked (although I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out it did); and it is painfully obvious to anyone that the "Christ's photo" was nothing but an awkward fake.
But that doesn't mean I am going to rely on other possible fakes to make up my mind.

And I do think such a thing as Ernetti's chronovisor could be possible.
What's more, there seems to be a group of Russian scientists who are, if you'll forgive the pun, looking into it.

Whatever you think - and I hope you do think - never forget to be a healthy skeptic.
Which, contrary to popular opinion, means keeping an open mind at all times.

(For another version of this story go here.)

***

* A totally and utterly and disgustingly irrelevant bit of trivia: Father Ernetti was born at the exact same point in time - on the same day of the same year (October 13, 1925) - as the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher. :)

Your mind, your time

2009-10-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

If you like reading about the "mechanics" of perception, of your mind's interaction with time-space, you may have read the following (very recent) article already.
If you haven't, do - you might like it.

Timewarp:
how your mind creates the fourth dimension

And don't forget to read the comments.
Some of them are no less interesting - and certainly no less entertaining - than the the article itself.

Come again?

2009-10-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had the peculiar sensation that you're re-living, moment by moment, something that had happened before?
Of course you have.
Most likely you even know what it's called: deja vu.
(More - much more - about deja vu in a future post.)

Typically, it involves a sensation of a situation being repeated, without any sensory evidence that a repetition of any sort is taking place; and the time of the supposed "original" event is usually perceived as unidentifiable. In other words, people don't usually get a feeling of a deja vu about an event that took place a minute ago. (Unless, of course, you are participating in a mind-numbing board meeting - but I digress...)

But since the advent of the internet people have become aware of another, apparently similar type of event, often - and perhaps incorrectly - also described as deja vu: the apparent exact repetition of an event, involving the same factors (people, circumstances, etc.), within a time frame that would normally make the repetition of said event physically impossible.

For example: you see a person come out of a house - a house that you know without a doubt has no back or lateral doors -, stop for a moment to look at his or her wrist watch and then walk down the street.
A minute later, you see the same person come out of the same house, through the same (and only) front door, stop for a moment to look at the wrist watch, repeating every gesture in minute detail, and walk down the street - again.

Interestingly enough, many people seem to have experienced this. And even if some of these experiences could undoubtedly be attributed to insufficient attentiveness (or worse), others baffle the mind.

This delightfully illustrative short account comes from Cynthia Sue Larson.

The Lady Appeared... Twice

In fact, something seemingly similar happened to me, in early January 2008.

I was watching a live newscast.
I watched three segments in a row, then I stepped out of the room (I don't remember what the reason was, and it's not important). When I came back, I sat behind my desk to do some work. The TV was on all the time.

Not a minute had passed when I heard the anchorman announcing the first of the three segments that they had already shown. I remember thinking to myself "Oops...", but didn't bother to even turn the head. After all, even the best of journalists can make mistakes and reread an announcement or whatever.
But then the segment began - and it was the same one as before.
So were the following two.
To convince myself beyond reasonable doubt that it wasn't a "false memory" or anything like that I started repeating word for word the sentences that I had remembered from before. They were identical - even the anchorman's jokes were the same!

But still, no big deal. I was merely surprised to see the network switch to what I naturally thought to be the replay of the newscast for audiences overseas - before the live show was even through!
They had never done that before.
But, as I found out soon enough, they hadn't done it on that occasion, either... It had been a LIVE broadcast, just like on every other occasion I had watched it. And the anchor is a very reputable journalist who would have noticed if he were rereading the same segments that he had read a minute before - including the jokes he improvised.

Or would he?

Whatever it was (or was not), in retrospect this occurrence seems all the more remarkable because around the same date - give or take a day - another odd thing happened:

I was standing in my living room doing a yoga exercise. It was shortly after dawn break, and I saw the line of street lights being turned off. A few (perhaps five) seconds later - I saw them go out for the second time.
Naturally, I was somewhat startled: after I had seen them go out for the first time they hadn't been turned on again (to be then turned off again), of course.
I suppose this must be very difficult to grasp; and I certainly know it isn't easy to describe.
It was as if someone had hit a "replay" button - with no visible interlude (no visibly different state) between the two apparently identical events.

I am observant. Not much escapes me, I must say. (Literally: I must say it, because only I know myself, and so I know this wasn't simply an "attention" issue.)
That's what makes it so puzzling.

I usually like to speculate on the possible causes or sources of various phenomena - and the "weirder" they are, the better.
But in cases like these I really don't know what to say. Jumping to conclusions - any conclusions - would be counterproductive and possibly deceptive, at best.

The wisest thing to do, in my opinion, would be to keep collecting accounts of such events - and keep an open mind - and see where the evidence takes us.

Lost (in) time

2009-10-21T05:54:00.000-07:00

I have always, even as a child, suspected that there may be something quirky about "time": that it may not be all that it seems to be - or not to be.

But before I discovered the internet, I had no idea that so many other people had occasional... »issues« with time/space. And it took me a relatively long time to google for »lost time« - just to see what would come up (apart from Proust, of course.)

Nor did I have any idea that so many people seem to associate this phenomenon (be it subjective perception or something else) with UFOs and/or with "spirit activity" (scroll down to "lost time").

But the odd occurrence I am about to describe has nothing to do with either "spirits" or UFOs, even if they do come and visit us and/or influence our perception of timespace. That much I (seem to) know.

What exactly it was, I don't know.
You decide.

Salvador Dalí, Soft watch at moment of first explosion, ink on paper, 1954.

It happened one mid-afternoon in the summer of 1999 or 2000.
I was waiting, somewhat impatiently, for a re-run of a TV documentary which was scheduled to start about 25 minutes later.

I checked the hour, turned on the TV to see whether there was any change in programming - no, there wasn't (checked it against the printed programming in the TV guides, too) - and turned it off again to do some work at the PC.

As I sat down to work, I glanced at my PC clock and then at another clock in the living room. (Both were always on time.) I opened a document file... and closed it again, almost immediately (certainly before writing a single word) - I decided I was in no mood for work, after all.

So I got up, sat on the sofa and turned on the TV again - just in case... But of course the documentary I was waiting for was still some 20 minutes away, according to both the schedules and my clocks. And obviously there had been no sudden change in the programming; the channel where the documentary was coming up was still showing a different programme, exactly according to the schedule. I turned the TV off. (Yes, I have this mania of never leaving the TV on if I am not watching - sue me.)

So I got up again and went to the kitchen, to have a drink - but not before checking the hour on my monitor screen and on the other clock. (Needlessly - about a minute, at most, had passed - but automatically.)

I crossed the two or three metres that separate my sofa from the kitchen. I opened the fridge, took out a drink, closed the fridge door and went back to the sofa. Still bored, I switched the TV on again... and there was my documentary, WELL under way!
(How do I know that? Because I had seen the programme before, but had missed the first part of it - that's why I wanted to watch the re-run. What I saw when I turned on the TV was the part I was already familiar with.)

At first, I was incensed (at the TV station, for its highly irregular programming - or so I thought). I took the TV guide again, checked the schedule, checked the clocks... and discovered that, somehow - I have no idea how or when - 20 minutes had passed since I last checked the hour.

What happened there?
Or rather... HOW did it happen?

I have no idea.

I do know that it was NOT a »seizure«, as some people are quick to suggest.
I mean, who on Earth has seizures standing in their kitchen and not even notice it?
Besides, what kind of "seizure" exactly - and I emphasise: exactly, i.e. am asking for a scientifically rigorous definition - would that be, especially considering I had never experienced any before?
(But then, the most »scientific«-sounding explanations are usually the most ridiculous and in-credible ones. The often flippant tone that comes with them doesn't help either.)

I was under no influence of drugs (don't use them), alcohol (I rarely keep even a drop of booze in my home, and that wasn't one of those rare occasions), or any type of medications. As far as I can remember, I had slept normally the night before.

The weather, by the way, wasn't unusual in any way - not that I can remember. (I mention this because an electrically charged atmosphere seems to be much more conducive to time/space anomalies.)

Whatever it was that happened, I do know I am by no means the first, the last or the only person to have experienced this.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of accounts of this kind.
To read more about such experiences, go here and here.
(And if you had one yourself, be sure to drop us a line.)

But if you'd rather forgo timespace speculation and invest your time in Marcel Proust's quest (always a wise investment, if you ask me), go here.
It is a totally delightful website; I could not recommend it warmly enough. The time you spend there, or indeed with Proust himself, may be lost - but never wasted.

Levels of consciousness: our dimensional identity

2009-10-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

I have no less than four posts brewing, stewing, whatever you want to call it.
And yet, I cannot bring myself to post them.

Certainly, one reason is that they are rather long, they deal in contentious subjects, and so they require a lot of references - all of which requires a lot of... well, time.

But there is also another reason for my procrastination.
I don't know what exactly it is, but something in me feels as if my own, private and personal perception of time/space - and of my place in it - were sliding fast towards the brink of an unsuspected, uncharted fault-line. (I wonder, does the fact that it is Columbus day have anything to do with my wording...? ;))

Maybe I am just losing my marbles.
But whatever it is, I feel I'd better give it time - and by "time" I mean silence, the absence of words - to develop and manifest itself. (Preferably in a kindly, non-abrupt way: in a way and manner that I would be able to understand in a timely fashion, without it crushing my spine and feet in the process.)

So, instead of forcing my thoughts into molds that might not fit, I'd rather offer you other people's well articulated ideas on the subject.

Among the authors that we - the captain and crew of the fleet of blogs of which this one is a member - like the best is Cynthia Sue Larson.
I have mentioned her and her website, Realityshifters, on various occasions.
This time I'd like to draw attention to her interesting article about "levels of consciousness" - a subject that is arguably in direct correlation with time/space anomalies.

Levels of consciousness & our dimensional identity

Read it carefully - as carefully as it was written.
And do not forget to read the readers' comments: they are among the most thoughtful - and thought-provoking - of their kind I've seen in a long time.

Beautiful, isn't it? It was taken from here.

P.S. If you require sound to dub your silence, I propose you read - or dance - to the beat of the "music of the spheres".

Here's Jupiter, the bringer of good luck and prosperous expansion, speaking directly to you, my friend.

Dark pitch

2009-09-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

After several of our cunning plans to trick the authors of the spam siege against our "time slip" mailbox went awry, we recently discovered that a few of our readers have experienced unseemly "time slips" of their own - thanks to us and to our apparent callous unresponsiveness...

There is no way we can express our regret for this time (banana) slip. But we can - and gladly will - publish some of the best personal accounts sent in by readers.

What follows - verbatim - is a personal account from S. E., England.
(And it is almost exemplary in its completeness. It's not often that people record the weather - even though they absolutely should!)

Photo: The Unpredictables, 2006

In their own words...

"DATE: I can only be very vague. It was possibly 1994, in either late spring or summertime.

TIME: early evening, it would have been around about 6.40 to 6.45pm.

LOCATION: a cricket pitch in the grounds of a mental hospital in central England (it was a mainly staff cricket team but with additional friends & family to make up the numbers - my father had got me involved - I swear I wasn‘t a patient!!).

WEATHER: a storm had recently passed over no more than an hour earlier. It had left the ground quite wet but the sun was now out and it had become a pleasant evening.

Unsure if the rainstorm would mean the cricket training for that day was cancelled or not, I decided to chance-it and made my way to the ground arriving at the cricket pitch around 6.30pm. In the middle of the pitch there was a rope held up by small poles which marked off the main playing area (the square) and was designed to discourage people from entering there in order to preserve the playing surface.

As I arrived, I saw that someone had lifted several of the poles from their holes and dropped them on the ground (it wasn’t unusual for things like this to happen - the very nature of the hospital meant that patients would often do quite odd things for no apparent reason). I made my way to the middle of the pitch and replaced each pole (there were only 5 or 6 of the 8 poles removed) and looped the rope back onto some of the poles as it’d become dislodged.
Having done this, I continued across the pitch to the far side where there were two small huts a small distance apart, one of which was used as a changing room (Hut 1) and one of which was used for storage (Hut 2).

Nobody else had so far arrived so after a few minutes I was pleased to see a friend of mine arrive on his bicycle. Cycling around the pitch, he dismounted and leant his bike up against Hut 1 on the side which faced Hut 2.

After some discussion we agreed that it appeared training had been cancelled, however with 20 minutes or so until opening time at our local social club (where the team met after training), we decided to try and find a ball we could toss to one another to kill some time. My friend decided to search in the hedgerow where we were knew many balls had been lost in the past while I tried my luck at forcing entry to Hut 2.

The door to the hut to was a split door - rather like you’d find in a stable - and being wooden and exposed to the elements wasn’t in good condition. Using a stick I was able to prise the two door sections apart and push the lock on the inside of the bottom half of the door open allowing me to crawl inside.
I knew there was a kit-bag under a table to my left, so crawled that way and fumbled around in the darkness for 30 seconds or so until success, I found what I’d been looking for. However, I could feel it was a bit gnarled and old and generally not in good condition and after backing out the way I came and back into the light, this was confirmed.

Standing up, I turned to face the pitch and was a little puzzled. The sky had darkened and there were now grey clouds rather than it’s previous sunny blueness. The poles in the middle of the pitch I had returned to their holes not 10 or 15 minutes earlier were once again on the floor and in exactly the same positions they‘d been in as I first arrived.
Turning to my right I could see that my friend’s bike was now gone. I quickly scanned the hedgerow but he was not in sight and moving toward Hut 1, I could see through the windows neither he or the bike were on the far side of the hut. I looked to see if he was cycling away but there was no sign whatsoever.

At the time, I was unable to grasp what I was seeing and assumed it to be a practical joke being played on me. I felt very angry over the events - probably more so than was reasonable and I recall swearing before heading back to Hut 2 and crawling back inside to return the ball I’d found.
Backing out of the hut once again I stood back up into sunshine, turning to see the poles back in their holes. My friends bike was once again against Hut 1 and he was coming from the hedgerow having given up his search.
I remember asking him what he was playing at and why he’d moved his bike and the poles, not once but twice. My mind initially seemingly ignored the sudden weather changes and the shortness of time in which he’d had to carry out the supposed practical joke! Of course, he could only deny any wrongdoing but he had experienced some oddities…
In conversation as we left the pitch my friend told me that while searching the hedge he’d noticed a sudden change in the weather, that it’d become gloomy and cold. He’d also turned to witness me come forward from Hut 2, take a look around for a few moments (including looking right at him), mutter something and return to the hut.

Over the years I’ve tried to explain the events of those few minutes without success and a time slip is the closest to an explanation I’ve ever come. And if I did experience one, how far backwards I saw I cannot say, though it was more likely minutes or hours rather than days or years. Whatever it was, it was highly unusual."

***

It certainly was unusual in the sense that such things do not happen - or are perceived - very often. But within the context of timespace distortions it sounds quite typical: the "unsettled" weather, especially, seems to have played a role, even though one can only guess how.
Was this oddity in the perception of timespace somehow influenced by the discharge of the storm that had recently passed?
Did this discharge perhaps affect the neural paths - and thus the perception of timespace - of those involved?
It does seem more than a coincidence that such experiences are often - albeit not always - associated with stormy weather. (See, for example, this story; or this one.)

More (speculation, of course ;) on the possible influence of electricity on neurons in a future post.

The scream

2009-09-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

This happened to me approximately three years ago, on a seemingly ordinary evening of a seemingly ordinary day.

There is a short underground passageway under a city street (not an avenue, nothing particularly wide, just an ordinary two-way street) near my former home that I used to cross every day for many years (until two and a half years ago, when I moved). I was so familiar with it that I could walk through it blind-folded, if necessary.

The early evening that I am talking about I was walking towards the stairs that lead down, into the underground passage. There were two or three girls hanging around the entrance to the staircase. Nothing extraordinary so far.

When I was about 15 metres or so from the entrance, suddenly a blood-curdling scream came out of the passageway. The girls obviously heard it too, because they all turned around and looked towards the stairs, to see who would emerge or what would transpire.

What immediately struck me as strange was the fact that, after the scream, NOTHING, no sound whatsoever, was heard - and this is a passageway where the echo of every single step resonates right to the top of the stairs.

That worried me: I was afraid that I would find somebody lying there - and I didn't even have my cell phone with me (to call for the ambulance, if needed). The girls just stood there, as if frozen, and watched me descend the stairs.

But there was something else that I also found very unusual: unless the person who screamed had been alone all the while, I should have heard the steps of whoever made her (it sounded like a woman) scream like that, even if that person was going in the opposite direction.

Moreover, I should have seen that person emerge on either side of the passage. The passageway is not a very long one - there was time enough for me to see him/her come out on either side while I was still walking towards the stairs.

But I didn't see anyone coming out - and I didn't hear anything.
That worried me even more. As I descended the fifteen or so stairs that lead underground, I braced myself for a possibly unpleasant encounter (cursing myself all the while for having left the phone at home).

There was nobody in the passage.
It was completely deserted, and no steps were audible anywhere. There was no sign of any unusual going-on anywhere; and certainly no sound.

As you can probably gather at this point, I only mentioned the girls because they were my only "witnesses", my only proof - to myself - that they had heard it, too, and from the very same direction. (There was no other place around from which an echoing sound like that could have come, anyway.)

I have tried to reconstruct the event, going as far as making a friend of mine take off his shoes in the underground passage and run (because such a swift disappearance from the place would only be possible with almost preternaturally speedy running), while I positioned myself in more or less the same place where I had been when I heard the scream (i.e. above ground, a few metres from the entrance to the staircase): even when he was barefoot - and we live in an urban environment where nobody has been seen barefoot in public for hundreds of years, I would imagine - I still could hear the clapping sound of his running feet from where I was standing, above ground.

To this day I have not been able to solve the puzzle of that scream. And I am only posting it here because - for all I know - it might have been a spacial/temporal distortion of some kind. Certainly I can't think of any plausible ordinarily "logical" explanation for it. Still, I am keeping my mind open.

But I have read about similar events since. One is too elaborate to explain it in detail here; and another one bears only a partial similarity. You can read about it here:

Heard accident before it happened

Edvard Munch, The Scream, cca 1893-1910 (here digitally altered).

In Its Image and Likeness?

2009-09-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

(Obviously, this cannot be perceived as a "time slip" story or a musing on it, but I feel it does pertain to the wider context that is the main subject of this humble blog.)

Does nature with its terrestrial phenomena mirror a wider, cosmic (perhaps not necessarily physical) reality?

Or is it perhaps even the materialisation – a condensation, if you will – of the forces underlying the unceasing (re)creation of the world and their dynamics?

I have always, even as a child, detested the »animistic« view of the cosmos (our world included). I found nature »as is« (as IF we ever observed it »as is«... ;) interesting enough without men trying to read into »her«.

But even I – even then – had to wonder sometimes. I have noticed often enough that sometimes, rarely, there seem to be »signs in the skies« that for some reason cannot simply be dismissed as our »reading into« them. (It would take a lot of time and effort to describe some of them, so let me just mention the extraordinary aspect of the sky on January 25, 1938, and on August 23rd, 1939: the day of the signing of the Molotov-von Ribbentrop treaty.)

And now, I have come upon a website that claims the river Nile actually conforms to the shape of – the Milky Way.

TIME RIVERS

To be totally frank, I am not sure I subscribe to this theory.
But I got to give them - specifically, the author of the theory, Goro Adachi - credit for observation and »lateral« thinking.
Brainstorms seldom pass without yielding at least a single drop of valid and useful information.

And, after all, according to Sufi mystics, the entire world, with all its creatures, is nothing but a mirror created by God and observed by God's unblinking eye, to see the image of »Himself«.

»God created the world because He wanted to see His image in the mirror.«

Bold passage

2009-09-10T14:35:00.000-07:00

There was in the 1990s a well-loved BBC series called Goodnight, sweetheart.
The plot of each episode was more or less irrelevant (to me); what I - and, I suspect, many other viewers - found so fascinating was the basic premise of the series: a young man, living in London in the early 1990s, strays into a backstreet and finds himself in - 1940. What makes the story even more interesting is the fact that he can walk in and out of 1940 as he pleases: the "passage" is open all the time, in both directions (although he seems to be the only one benefiting from it).

What I didn't know at the time, is that the series was supposedly (or so I am told) inspired by a series of apparently real incidents that purportedly happened on the - now almost famous - Bold Street, in Liverpool.

The most widely publicised of these incidents is said to have happened one Saturday in July 1996 (so it could not have inspired the series, which started in 1993). The accounts vary (here is a nice version of the story; and here is another one); the story was originally told during a radio programme, either by the man who experienced it (that's one version I've heard) or, more likely, by Tom Slemen.

It appears that this man - a Merseyside policeman (off duty at the time of the incident) - and his wife were shopping in central Liverpool. Near the Central Rail Station the couple parted company: the wife went to the Dillons bookshop (to buy Trainspotting, the novel) and he went to a nearby shop selling CDs.

Approximately twenty minutes later the man left the store and headed back towards Bold Street, to meet with the wife. As he was walking up the incline near the Lyceum Post Office, he suddenly felt as if he had stepped into an "oasis of quietness". Then he heard loud honking: a small boxvan - a veritable antique on wheels, with the inscription Caplan's - narrowly missed him. At the same time he noticed that the street pavement had changed its appearance: in fact, all of the sudden he found himself standing in the middle of the road. As he looked around, in a state of utter confusion, he noticed that people were dressed in a distinctly old fashioned manner; their clothes seemed like relics from the 1940s or early 1950s. And when he looked towards the bookstore where his wife was supposed to be shopping, he noticed that the sign Dillons had disappeared - the store displayed the name Cripps, and it didn't seem to be selling books at all: there were ladies' shoes and handbags in the windows.

Then - much to his relief, I imagine - the policeman saw a girl wearing a distinctly NOT "vintage" attire: a lime green sleeveless top and an unmistakably modern handbag. She was heading towards Cripps. He followed her and saw her stop in her tracks before reaching the shop (some accounts say she did enter the shop and then came out): the ladies' outfitters shop had "changed" back to a bookstore. Dillons was there once again, along with the rest of 1996.

"Did you see that?!" the policeman is said to have said to her.
"Yeah," said the girl. "What was that? I thought they were selling clothes, but now I see it's a bookshop... Weird."

Weird, indeed - and on more than count. Such "hybrid" timespace displacements, with mingling of people from different eras, are seldom heard of (but not totally unheard of, witness this head scratching-inducing story.)

Later it turned out that other people had experienced unsettling temporal and/or spatial displacements around the same area.
More on that some other time.

And by the way, since Dillons has been defunct since 1999, I am sure many people would love it if the bookshop reappeared again - or at least be comforted, as the many grateful customers of old Cripps are, by the thought that, somewhere in time, it still exists... :)

Alive again? Dead again?

2009-07-23T04:09:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been surprised by someone whom you thought dead being apparently alive "again"? Or dead "again"?

It happened to me once. However, judging by the number of accounts collected on Cynthia Sue Larson's delightful website dedicated to "reality shifts" and elsewhere (like here), it seems to be a relatively widely spread phenomenon.

Or is it?
A bona fide (para)physical phenomenon, I mean.

That is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine, simply because the accounts are based on what basically amounts to hear-say - on the assumption that the "alive again" person really was reported dead, as the person who supposely experienced the discrepancy claims.

Also, the great majority of accounts seem to involve celebrities, i.e. people whom the majority of people do not know personally. In other words, it's not often that a "my grandma died and is now alive again" account comes up (not often, but occasionally it does).

Here is what I think is going on, at least in very many cases.

Generally speaking, people usually don't seem to be too acutely aware of the way their mind works. They don't realise, for example, that often what they remember is their own thoughts in reaction to any given situation. Even more to the point, they are often unaware that the brain - or the mind - tends to process the world (including memory functions) in images.

Let's illustrate this by the example of the recently deceased legendary American jornalist Walter Cronkite, who was also the subject of "alive again - dead again" accounts.
There were other very prominent reporters who died in the past few years.
Now imagine a person who isn't really listening very attentively hearing the news about (just an example) Peter Jennings' demise. This person knows that Jennings was a very famous reporter, but was never a regular viewer of Jennings' programmes. As s/he hears the news, the mind - being unable to operate without imagery - starts frantically browsing through the images of famous reporters archived in that individual's mind. The better known image of Walter Cronkite comes up - and, for whatever reason, gets "stuck".
Because the person isn't really all that profoundly interested in this piece of news and possibly goes about his/her business immediately after hearing or reading (not seeing) the news, the mind passively accepts the image proposed and forms a conglomerate: Cronkite = dead.

It could also happen that the person did see the appropriate (i.e. Jennings') image in their mind- and perhaps even on the TV screen - but their mind, for whatever subjective reason, impossible for any third person to determine - immediately wandered off on a loosely relevant tangent, ending up with Cronkite's image, which then, through inattentiveness, remained associated with the news item (the report of Jennings' death).

The mind normally does keep a record of such "conglomerates" being made (in other words, if you wanted to and tried, you could remember how the association was formed) - but only up to a certain time. After a few weeks or months, people tend to forget the details about their intricate mental processes. And when Cronkite dies "again", they are hugely surprised, perhaps even alarmed. (And how could they not be? ;)

I definitely think this is what probably happened with all those people who seem to remember that Jane Goodall had died: they probably confused her with Diane Fossey.

And that is what I think happens in most of the cases.
But not always.
Or if it does happen every single time, then the intricate ways of the brain are even more mysterious than anyone could dare to imagine. So much so that science as we know it today is almost worthless in matters of the mind.

The reason I say that is my - so far, one and only - personal experience with this sort of "confusion".

When I was a child, I heard some teenagers discussing the death of singer Karen Carpenter. I remember them mentioning drugs, although I don't think it had anything to do (directly) with her death.
At the time, I wasn't too sure who Karen Carpenter was - I mean, I knew she was a singer, but couldn't identify her voice in my mind - so after hearing the news, I was very interested to hear her sing. Of course when I heard her on the radio - after hearing about her death - I immediately recognised her distinctive manner of singing, and from then on, my reception of The Carpenters was inevitably tinted by the awareness of her demise at a tragically young age. (In other words, whenever I heard her voice, the first association that sprang to mind was: "Oh, that's her... she's dead.")

This was in the mid-1970s.

Some ten years ago, while browsing the internet, I remembered her and thought to myself that it would be a good idea to see what really caused her death.

Imagine my shock when I found out she died in - 1983.

There is no way I could have confused the time. Not only is a decade a long, long time, especially in a very young person's life, but I was living on an different continent at the time when I first heard the reports about her death. I can still see in my mind the boys who talked about her - and they most definitely belong to my past on that other continent.

Of course, there is the possibility of inaccurate - or, as Mark Twain would say, "exaggerated" ;) - public reports about her death. But such a false report would inevitably require a retraction. Maybe there was one - but I have yet to find any record of it.

Furthermore, there is the possibility that her death was only speculated about or anticipated by the media (possibly on account of her being so thin). I certainly don't remember it that way, but it is possible those boys talking about her in my childhood misunderstood the report and mistook speculation for fact. (Although I should stress they were teenagers, not some little children.)

And lastly... could it have been a false memory?
Could it be that actually I never heard of Karen Carpenter dying when I was a child, but for some obscure reason my mind, at the time of my reading about Carpenter's death in 1983, fabricated the memory of those boys talking about her?
This would be far-fetched to the point of near-impossibility; furthermore, it would open a humongous can of worms, because it would imply that there could be countless other such "factual" memories which, in reality (?), are nothing of the sort. But since I like to weigh all and every single possibility, I thought I'd mention it. (And for good measure, I'll throw in this very good article about manufacturing memories: How memories are invented and distorted.)

Anyway, after being initially extremely upset with what seems like a major lapse of memory - and I am rather famous for my accurate (and unusually long) memory, especially regarding dates and such - I forgot all about it and hadn't given it any thought... until last summer, when I read this.

"One clear example of this, for me, occurred in 2006 when a friend asked me when did Karen Carpenter die? I told them that she passed away in 1973 of anorexia nervosa. A couple days later my friend informed me the date was 1983 or 10 years later than the date I remembered. However, I clearly remember hearing the news on the radio and reading it in the news paper. At the time I was living in Santiago California and in 1983 Miami, so there is no way of confusing the two locations."

(Be sure to read the other posts, too. One person remembers her death in - 1978.)

That gave me the chills.
I mean, Karen Carpenter, while very well known and loved, was never a major "star" - the point being that minor stars are naturally much less subject to public speculation and false reports about their death than mega-stars. The very fact that there don't seem to be a lot of people who seem to remember her having died back in the 1970 - but there are some, myself included - makes it all the more interesting (and a little eerie) to me.
Why Karen Carpenter, of all people?

Do you know?
If so - if, perhaps, you saw a false report and such - please, let me know.

Anyway, if there really were something afoot with the fabric - or rather, with our collective perception - of time, and the person who now appears to be alive really had died, in some other timeline perhaps, there would be no record of it in the past of our present timeline (assuming - and it's a huge assumption - that there really is a single "our" timeline)... Right?

Maybe.
Maybe not.

Last year, there was another mildly interesting discussion going on at ATS, involving this very phenomenon.
Among the people who were allegedly reported dead - without a later retraction or correction by the media who would have reported it - was, unsurprisingly, Arthur C. Clarke. (I say unsurprisingly because he was advanced in years.)
Nothing too strange about that; after all, it is quite possible - as one of the posters aptly indicated - that some people confused him with Isaac Asimov, who had died in the early 1990s.

And then, somebody produced this obituary from the newsletter of the G.R.A.A. (the Goddard Retirees and Alumni Association):

OBITS:

ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Died in Colorado February l0, 2000 of pulmonary fibrosis.

The (famous) A. C. Clarke had been closely associated - possibly a member (we didn't check) - of NASA's Goddard Institute.
Still, it could be a namesake, I suppose. In fact, I am 99% sure it was.
Or it was a bizarre mistake.
Be it as it may, there never was any retraction or correction published, so I am assuming it was a namesake, after all. A colleague of mine made a direct inquiry, asking the editor of said newsletter about it. She never got a reply.

Anyway, I included this just as an example of what we're talking about here.
So, what are we talking about here: time slips... or memory slips?

I honestly don't think there is a one-size-fits-all answer to that.

We as a society know next to nothing about the mysteries of time/space beyond our usual linear perception.
And this is one case where ignorance - the acknowledgment of it - can work as a liberating force. Because individuals can - if they have the right frame(lessness) of mind to do so - swim at will (but bear in mind the human "will" is very feeble and easily frightened) in the deceptive "chaos" of time/space from whence shapes and forms and, perhaps, timelines are born by our observing - acknowledging - them.

Keep an open mind at all times: you never know what may swim in. ;)
It is dangerous, yes.
But the quest for it - and whatever it is, it lies beyond the horizon of our "normal" perception, AND at in its very heart, all at the same time - is what ultimately this life journey of ours is all about.

Isn't it?

History in the Making

2009-07-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

»Arnold Toynbee was here«

If you like history, like I do, then you probably know that many textbooks suffer from what could be politely described as... actually, there is no polite word for it: let's call it tediousness. Fastidiousness. Being boring. Sequences of numbers and names and alleged political and/or economic reasons – as if people and their all-too-human urges didn't exist at all, let alone be, as they are, at the very core of History.

But every now and then, there is a historian who shows a feel for the vividness and uniqueness of every single moment in time/space. It is as if they cast their minds back in time, to try and pierce the veil that seems to separate us from what has been.

And then there is Arnold Toynbee.

Toynbee's writings captured the imagination of many people. Which is why mentions of him appear in popular culture, from Indiana Jones to computer games – and the great sience fiction writer Ray Bradbury called one of his stories The Toynbee Convector. (Which is also the name of a blog dedicated entirely to our Arnold.)

Arnold J. Toynbee piercing the veil of Time.
(Actually, I have no idea of what he was doing or what he was looking at at the time. But I suspect nobody else knows it either, so my theory is just as good as anyone else's...)

As you may know, he was one of the most influential - and maligned - historiographers of the 20th century, known chiefly for his monumental work, A Study of History (finished in 1961), comprising 12 (twelve) volumes. (You can find fascinating excerpts here.)

It's a huge work, both physically and intellectually, which is why usually abridged versions are used for study. But however fascinating - or controversial - his take on history as-we-know-it may be, it is what's been omitted from the abridged versions what interests us here.

In volume X, there is a section called The Inspirations of Historians, and therein a subsection (E) called The Quest for Meaning Behind the Facts of History (duh - no wonder it's being omitted...!). In it, Toynbee reveals a set of extraordinary experiences with what he called, very aptly, "local annihilation of time". It turns out, his vision of history was, quite literally, a vision (or two).

Here are some of the sights Toynbee sighted during a travel to Greece, in 1911/1912. (The accents in colour are mine, to emphasise the questions that are of greatest interest to us here.)
Not having access to the original text, so I could read it in its entirety for myself, I am reduced to copying excerpts from other sources, relying (justifiably so, I believe) on their integrity and precision of reading/typing. ;)
Most of the information was taken from here, as it is the best internet article on Toynbee's peculiar journeys though history I have found to date. (You'll notice it's a cached version; the original doesn't seem to be available right now.)

It seems that on March 19, 1912, Toynbee (who regularly refers to himself in the third person, just so you don't get confused) "stood staring" at a Jacobean, i.e. Baroque, country villa in Crete, when...

"the spectator had an experience which was the counterpart, on the psychic plane, of an aeroplane's sudden deep drop when it falls into an air-pocket. On that spot on which Time had stood still since the eviction of the Venetians by the 'Osmanlis in the War of Candia (gerebatur A.D. 1645-69), the spectator was suddenly carried down in a 'Time-pocket' from a day in the year A.D. 1912 to a day in the fifth decade of the seventeenth century on which History, in that house, had come abruptly to an end in an evacuation without any sequel except solitude and decay."

Some of the sights were far more gruesome - if historically much more significant.
(After all, isn't the historiography - and, to a large extent the history itself - of the Western civilisation one long string of massacres and bloodbaths...?)

On the 10th January, 1912, as he (= Toynbee himself) sat musing on one of the twin summits of the citadel of Pharsalus, with his eyes ranging away to the peaks of Pelion, Ossa, and Olympus over the downs of Cynoscephalae <...> the middle distance of a sunlit landscape came, in the brooding gazer's imagination, to be overcast with the sinister mist that, on a morning 2,109 years back in the Past, is blindfolding the patrols of two armies as these nervously grope their way towards one another on those fog-bound slopes. When the parting of the mist reveals to the posthumous spectator's sight the right wing of the Macedonian phalanx already carrying all before it in the momentum of its charge downhill, he instantly feels the stab of anxiety that, at this moment, pierces King Philip's heart as he glances back over his left shoulder to look for the left wing of the phalanx that should have been following his own right wing up. <...> And now it is no battle; it is a massacre -- for these uncouth Italian troops have never been drilled in the humane rules governing the 'temperate and undecisive contest' in which the regular forces of a civilized Hellenic World are more or less innocuously exercised. Look, the outmanoeuvred phalangites are raising their pikes -- they are making the signal that they surrender -- but those murderous Roman swords callously complete their cruel work."

"As the harrowed participant from another world averts his eyes from an unbearable spectacle, they catch a glimpse of a despairing commander riding off, ventre a terre, with no more than a handful of life-guards still attending him. <...> Before the dreamer has time to refocus his diffracted historical vision, it all vanishes abruptly into thin air, and the landscape flickers back into a pastoral present in which sounds floating up from the slopes of Cynoscephalae to the heights of the acropolis of Pharsalus are, not the din of sword-blades nor the shrieks of wounded men, but the tinkling of goat-bells and the bleating of sheep peacefully grazing, to the strain of their shepherds' pipes, over the site of a double historic battlefield. Can the dreamer really have sunk, for that instant, those twenty-one centuries deep below the current surface of Time's waters on which he now finds himself riding, once again, in his normal waking life? He might doubt it if the poignancy of the momentary experience had not left a sequence of Greek elegiac verses running persistently through his head."

More experiences were to follow, including one - tremendously far-reaching - in the otherwise unexotic location of London town:

"In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer, once, one afternoon not long after the end of the First World War -- he had failed to record the exact date -- had found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide. The experience lasted long enough for him to take visual note of the Edwardian red brick surface and white stone facings of the station wall gliding past him on his left, and to wonder -- half amazed and half amused -- why this incongruously prosaic scene should have been the physical setting of a mental illumination. An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the every-day cockney world which was his native social milieu and of which the Edwardian station wall was a characteristic period piece."

The few "serious" historians who deign even discuss the subject of Toynbee's wildly peripatetic take on time and history, all too often dismiss his visions as being simply (simply?) mirages produced by a heady combination of knowledge and vivid imagination.
But were they really?
The sensation of slipping into an "air pocket" is all too peculiar, too specific to be attributed to flights of fancy. To dismisss that would be tantamount to calling his accounts - a bunch of lies. Either that, or the consequence of some brain disorder... the existence of which, of course, would have to be proven (which does not equal surmised.)
And any "theory" that necessarily requires the total and a priori annihilation of the "opponent" or reliance on unproven hypotheses isn't much of a theory.

***

* I'll be editing this entry in the near future, so be sure to come back.

The Eternal Now

2009-07-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

The "now" that separates my last visit to this blog and, well, now must seem eternal indeed... (At least two of my readers thought so, which I find as endearing as it is embarrassing to me.)

Ah - if only you knew...! My life has always been "strange" (dixit one of my elementary school teachers as well as several of my acquaintances).
But now it's stranger than strange.
(Only, not to me - and that's the scariest part of it. :)

So, how can I make up for all the lost time?
I can't.
Besides, it - unlike me (and yourself) - hasn't really gone anywhere.

No, really: according to the line of thought presented in the following interesting piece of writing - a person who found the mention of this blog on another site, brought it to my attention - now is now. And it doesn't exist anyway. :)

Since it has to do with time and its perception, I thought you'd enjoy it, too.
Tell me what you think about it.

The Eternal Now

Here's what I think about this:

If we are, as our old friend J. H. Brennan charmingly puts it, "timeworms" (p. 40, Time Travel), meaning that we are a single temporal extension of X years (= the duration of your lifetime), and if the findings of quantum physics, namely that information is non-local (forgive the oversimplified verbalisation; I'll be editing this entry as soon as I can), are correct, as they seem to be... doesn't it make sense, then, that information - in this case, information about everything on our perceived "path" or "flow" of life - could travel upstream as well as downstream?

In other words, IF we are (as I see us) nodules, "hubs" of information born out of the fabric of all there is, and interconnected with everything else, then surely we could causally affect not only our future, i.e. what-is-to-come (in our perception), but also what-has-been (AKA the past)?

Think about it.
Regardles of your findings - or the lack thereof - it's the one thing that is never a waste of your time. ;)

A fragrant night in May... of which year?

2009-02-08T07:08:00.000-08:00

What follows is the "perfect" time slip story - the kind of event that got me (and, I am sure, yourself) interested in this mysterious phenomenon in the first place.

It is the story of the extraordinary walk - down a brick road, no less ;) - taken by Laura Jean Daniels, from Dearborn, Michigan, USA. She told it to a well-known columnist on the "paranormal", Joyce Hagelthorn (1918 - 2001). The article was originally published by the Dearborn Press newspaper, on May 10, 1973.

"While I was walking home from work late one night, I had a very strange experience.

I was walking along, looking up at the moon and enjoying the evening, when suddenly I looked down, and everything familiar just vanished! Everything – the houses, the automobiles, the lampposts, the garbage bins, and the fences, even the streets – was gone! Even the sidewalk was gone, and somehow I was walking down a brick path. There were no houses on either side of me, just trees and bushes, but several hundred feet before me I could see a thatched-roof cottage. The moon was still high up in the sky, but now there was a scent of roses and honeysuckle in the air. Obviously, I was a little frightened, but I kept walking toward the cottage. When I got closer, I noticed a young couple sitting in the garden. They were wearing very old-fashioned clothes, and they were naturally in love; I could see the look of love on the woman’s face.Instead of while I was standing there, watching them, a small dog ran through the gate toward me, barking wildly. The man in the garden looked up and called to the dog to stop barking. I realized that he couldn’t see me, and yet I could smell the flowers and feel the gate beneath my hand – and the dog had obviously sensed that I was there.

While I was trying to make up my mind what to do, I turned to look back the way I had just come, and there was my street again! Even then, I could still feel the garden gate under my hand. But when I turned for another look at the cottage, it was gone, and I was standing in the middle of my own block, just a few doors from my own home. The cottage, the lovers, and the small dog were all gone."

I do wish she had told the exact date - by the mention of honeysuckle and roses I am assuming it was in early May - and other relevant circumstantial data (check the side bar if you've forgotten what they are ;).

Would it have made any difference?
I don't know. It might.
Would it have done any harm to include them?
(No need to answer that one.)

It would certainly be helpful to have available as many physical data as possible.
Personally I think it's highly unlikely that physical circumstances do not play any role at all in such temporal/spatial displacements. And even if they don't, having a vast array of such data might at least help us eliminate apparently irrelevant parameters.

And I wonder... did Ms Daniels ever have another experience of the kind?

You can find a (much shorter) version of this story on p. 40 of Leonard G. Cramp's curious book The A.T. Factor Advanced Time - Piece For A Jigsaw Part 3 (under the heading "Time and a little dog".)

And by the way, you might be interested in reading Joyce Hagelthorn's book I'Ve Never Told Anyone, But..., in which she compiled interesting contents from her column. I haven't read it yet; but according to the promotional leaflet (from 1987): "Stories told to Hagelthorn are from hard-nosed scientists, skeptics, and magicians about some personal psychic experience they had as a child or adult. Stories of the strange and supernatural blend with current psychic research and ARE EXPLAINED!" ;)

***

NOTE:

The original (vintage) graphic was taken from a delightful blog called The Graphics Fairy.

A poet's garden that never was

2009-02-07T11:10:00.000-08:00

When the winter has outlasted its welcome but for a single day - like today - I send my imagination out to graze on greener pastures, to lush gardens, real or metaphorical, that once fed the imagination of others.

But time slips being what they are - unreliable by their very nature, and still considered as a potentially reliable "symptom" of a disintegrating mind - there are still relatively few accounts of this nature about "celebrities" to be found on the internet (or elsewhere, for that matter).
And if it weren't for a hint found by chance on Alfred Ballabene's defunct and sorely missed (but at least partially archived) website, I might have never found the following, very interesting short account.

»Something marvelous happened to me today:
I had a dream while walking.«

Thus wrote Franz Grillparzer, a well-loved Austrian poet, one summer's day long ago. According to his diary, it was »mid-July – mid-August« of 1852, and he was enjoying a stay in the Bad Tatzmannsdorf spa, where he had gone to regain his health.

»I had got up early, drank the [thermal spring] waters, took a bath, had another glass of water and went for a walk.
All of the sudden I found myself in a part of the park that I had not visited before. It was so lovely, the tree groves were so charming that I could not stop wondering how could have I missed such a sight before. Alas, there were no benches there inviting me to sit down. Having been given the task [sic - those old Austrian spa nurses were to be feared!] to drink another glass of water, I proceeded to do so, with the firm intention of revisiting the spot immediately after having had my glass of water.
I did so [using] a short allée lined with small trees through which I had often walked before, but the garden was nowhere to be found – because it never existed.«

Now, this is somewhat hasty a conclusion, if taken literally (and he did say, literally: it never existed).

But we know better than to take poets' words literally... Besides, the conclusion of this passage sheds some light (however treacherous) on his state of mind and mental processes:

»It is [the fact] that this dream – for I must consider it a dream – happened to me while walking that is marvelous. I am no stranger to dreams or spontaneous visions of sights, especially in the evenings, when I am tired from reading; but during walking, and with such reality-belying force, it never happened to me before."

You see, he is not really interested in establishing the former reality (or the lack thereof) of that garden: he has already assimilated the possibility of what had happened; and he is is too busy marveling at it all. (And who could blame him?)

The passage above was loosely and hastily – and unpoetically – translated for this occasion from the German original (printed in the Walbaum-fraktur type, to boot). You can find it on pp. 136-137 of the reprint (2003) of his diaries and letters, Briefe und Tagebücher, originally published in 1905.

There is not much on the internet that could serve as a good illustration of how the spa gardens in Bad Tatzmannsdorf must have looked in Grillparzer's day. (I suppose you could always go there and hope for a direct vision...)

The best I could find was this photo:

(As you can see, there are benches there, so it's safe to assume he didn't see this part of the park, at least not as it is today...)

It was taken from the Hungarian version of Wikipedia.

(Surprised? Ha, I can tell you're not a Mitteleuropa native... True to the history of this area, Bad Tatzmannsdorf - Tarcsafürdő in Hungarian - changed national flags more than once during its existence; it once belonged to Hungary; and before that, to Austria-Hungary; and before that to the Austrian Empire; and before that... Right: don't think even for a moment I am going to recite its entire history - even if I knew it. ;)

And here is an appropriately stern image of the man himself, cast in bronze – and, even more appropriately, placed in a park or garden:

This was, after all, the man who said (among many other things):

»Friendship and love bestow flowers on us.«

And who saw gardens in all their glory where none existed.

***

P.S. I'll probably be editing this entry in the next few days. Right now, I am having a waking dream - sans garden - of my own, all due to the painfully prosaic fact that I haven't slept in some 30 hours or so...