All you need is love

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)

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?

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.