This is a quotation from the introduction to Pi In The Sky by John Barrow about the 'mysterious' as a mathematician understood it which I didn't 'get'. That clue that there is something mysterious about mathematics caused me to write to Mr. Barrow::
"A mystery lurks beneath the magic carpet of science, something that scientists have not been telling, something too shocking to mention except in rather esoterically refined circles; that at the root of the success of twentieth century science there lies a deeply 'religious belief'--a belief in an unseen and perfect transcendental world that controls us in an unexplained way, yet upon which we seem to exert no influence whatsoever. What this world is, where it is and what it is to us is what this book is about....."
Chapter 1: From mystery to history
"If we could discover the little backstairs door that for any age serves as the secret entranceway to knowledge we will do well to look for certain unobtrusive words with uncertain meanings that are permitted to slip off the tongue or the pen without fear and without research; words which having from constant repetition lost their metaphorical significance, are unconsciously mistaken for objective realities. " Carl Becker
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I wrote to Mr. Barrow last month, May 2002 to ask him what exactly he had in mind concerning: 'unobtrusive words with uncertain meanings that having lost their metaphorical significance are unconsciously mistaken for objective realities'.
His answer was:
"Dear Betty: Becker's quote spoke to me about the idea that might be around, unrecognized in any time, that if pursued opens a new world of truth. Einstein's simple questions about the speed of light and why everything falls under gravity in vacuum with the same acceleration are examples.
It was nice to hear of your interest in my book and in these questions more generally. You might like my latest book 'The Book of Nothing' which is about all aspects of nothing, including the mathematical, philosophical, physical and theological. Best wishes, John"
"the idea that might be around, unrecognized in any time, that if pursued opens a new world of truth."
The idea I have had to learn to understand is about what happened in 1984 on this planet. It was an event that does open a new world of truth, at least to me, possibly to others. Although it begins in the most mundane everyday level of events it proved to me in a way I can never doubt that: we are not alone in the universe, we are receiving information from an intelligence that does not physically exist on Earth except in 'man'. Whether it's a biology based 'feed back' of some kind (which is most likely) or otherwise I don't know, but there is such specificity of content the, that the body must in some way be 'information' and there's something that ' looks like' or which 'seems to be' 'non-verbal communication' between individuals. The reason I use the term 'looks like' or 'seems to be' is that I have found out that people can forget what they've just said, very rapidly!
My experience was built around unique memories of my own, of a few events that happened when I was very young. That's a factor that is especially difficult to describe. This specificity is the factor that validates the experience of discovery, day after day of ideas that were new to me as though a non-present instructor was directing everything. I could not have imagined such a complex interface of physical world people, the circumstances in their lives at the time, world events, my unique past and certain mental content as well as words in books that sometimes fell from a shelf in front of me, opened to a certain page!
But more than that: My name was 'said' to me in a most unusual form, and many times what I was doing physically was 're-iterated', 'echoed back to me', in a particular form that I did not recognize for several years.
The reason I cannot doubt it, is that the information that I understand now, was created in my mind, in a visible way, based on my memories, certain of them having been re-generated throughout my life for no reason I could see. I know decades passed before their unexpected re-appearance as a 'flash', caused me to wonder to myself about them! (These memories of events that occurred early in my life varied. Many of them were like a short video, a vivid life photograph of a moment that replayed complete with what I was looking at, how I felt, what I was doing, whatever thought was created in my mind by what I was doing as well as the feelings in my body. All the content of that moment was actually re-played and re-lived in a flash of time. The 'video' was compacted into a tiny increment of time, so rapid that it took years to notice each one of them, they were quite different in content, then wonder to myself about them. A few of these 'retrievals' were words, just words, one of which was 'The Missing Link'. That was the name of a movie serial I'd seen when I was about 9 years old. But the plot of the serial was always regenerated with the words, 'the missing link' which seemed 'whispered as thought' into my mind, for no reason I could understand. From all the events in my life these few events were 'highlighted', they began to 'stand out', by this retrieval and replay. Now I realized they were saved for later use and I suspect Emanuel Swedenborg's term 'remains' as he defined it in his Doctrine of Remains can be used correctly to speak about them. . This 'highlighting mechanism' sorted them out and made them significant, made them objects to look at, and to wonder about, although they were 'within my mind' . I cannot think of any way a 'different location' or a different memory could be made distinct except by such a subtle interface. This and I suspect nothing else could have caused me to wonder to myself about them. They were very specific memories and their content in each is quite important.
Other memories from my past and certain events that I knew were unique to me were clearly retrieved and displayed for no reason I could see after 1984, it was constant and confusing to me for about three years. Then quite slowly I began to grasp that there was a symbolic relationship that I would not have been able to imagine between the retrieved memory, and the content embedded within the event that I later named a 'mindquake in 1984. In some circumstances, what was outside of my eyes was clearly being 'used' and related to!
The precise timing involved was not distinct for several years, The content of my mind was primarily visible to me, rather than what was outside of my body! There was a symbolic relationship that I had to recognize when certain memories from my past began to move through my mind, like 'ghosts riding along the backroads of my mind'. I did not recognize they were attempts to convey to me, a kind of description of what was happening to me overall in a general way, and at times in very specific details.
After some unusual experiences in this new to me kind of experience, it was so obvious I couldn't ignore it or fail to notice it: I realized the memory related directly to what was happening in my life, they were attempts to 'describe' to me, what I was trying to understand! (An example is that after the 1984 event in July, I noticed over a period of months, probably almost a year (??!!!!??) that memories from my past came into my mind apparently randomly and for no reason: of myself doing the stringing of tubs of green beans, pitting cherries, slipping skins from tomatoes and peaches, going through fields to pick pails of berries. There were memories of jars of my favorite berries my grandmother had "put up' for winter, stored on shelves. A memory of going through the first automated car wash haunted me. I relived being in the car, guided onto a track, where my dad told us we didn't have to do anything but wait, the car would be washed and we'd drive out clean. And a memory of a situation in a job working with computer output, in a job that was just converting from hand posted bookkeeping to data entered into a computer. At the end of the month, the programmer (a very handsome young man named Larry) told us he had to use a computer 'dump' to find an error we couldn't detect from our printouts. I asked what a 'computer dump' was and he told me it was an printout of every thing in the computer. It was a breakthrough moment when I heard myself say one day, probably in 1985 after I got my job at Boeing, 'It was a dump". I heard the words as though someone else had said them, without any understanding then of my spontaneous words, and without any curiosity about why I'd said them!
One day in a psychiatric session with Dr. Terrance Chinn, in Bellevue, Washington, I was trying to talk about what was going on, of how I seemed to be being haunted by frqagments of memories from my past. He leaned towards me and said: "It sounds to me like you are trying to describe a 'process'. Is 'process' the word you want to say?" It was the word. The word 'process' was being 'said' to me in those memories, of my self harvesting, preparing for preservation for future use! This psychiatrist had managed to grasp the 'conceptual word', which at that point I simply could not say or grasp myself from those memories. But much more was also being 'said' In a symbolic form in the image of the first car wash, fully automated and requiring nothing of me except just go through the process. When I understood more and had read quite a lot more I realized the retrieved memory conveyed in it, all the information about a process of life, that both Emanuel Swedenborg and Carl G. Jung wrote about! To clarify what I mean by that I mention the movie, The Truman Show with Jim Carrey in which he begins to discover certain repetitions in his every day life, then he realizes he's being watched and even held captive. Then on a higher level, the movie of Schindler's List. It's about a man who undergoes a transformation of character, very slowly and over a period of time so that when he's presented a gold ring by people whose lives he's saved, he weeps: "I could have saved two more with this gold."
At times, there was a direct relationship to what was in front of me at the moment, describing' (I also use the word 'echoing back') to me a detail about my specific life at that moment. This is not an easy idea to grasp, it took me about 3 years after 1984 to even begin, just barely begin to 'get the message being spoken' myself.
A few incidents happened in which the relationship was impossible to not see. It was and still is a process of instruction but it's also a naming process, and an identification process, 'like' a Global Position Satellite in that where one is exactly at times, is made quite obvious. In 2000 I went back to my home town and had an experience there that I could not possibly have caused to happen, and that event clearly revealed that what I was doing was not really of my own 'will', that day. That story is in The Hill link and the Majesti Watch link.
Yet there were events unconnected to what happened to me that involved other people, real living people whose lives somehow formed a kind of living 'class room', These people spoke words that gave evidence that they were participating knowingly, acting out the 'plot' of a drama they were to present to an audience of one person, me, who did not know the 'plot' myself. It was concerned with a 'secret about the insane, just around the corner, just out of sight'.
This idea brings into focus a completely unsuspected new idea about certain kinds of experiences that have been cast into the categories of 'psychotic' as events that are really understandable but not in a process that uses ordinary logic, i.e. the Aristotlean form.
C. G. Jung wrote: "My aim was to show that delusions and hallucinations were not just specific symptoms of mental disease but also had a human meaning."
This kind of experience is not evidence of 'mental derangement', it is part of the 'language' that can actually teach itself. They are in fact not irrational events, they do generate authentic and factual 'meaning' to that person's life.
There is a process of human individuation (C. G. Jung) as well as a more intense encounter with the content of every day life situations, Emanuel Swedenborg's regeneration. How I became aware of this 'connection' is the most difficult thing to try to describe.
I've not written to many authors to ask for clarification about something they wrote. The first time I was curious enough to write to an author happened a few years after 1984, when I felt a response in my body from words I read in a book by M. Scott Peck. Somehow one sentence in the book stood out because of this body response, and the words lingered in my mind so that I wrote to him to ask what he meant when he wrote: "The affairs between one man and one woman can be of cosmic significance." I wondered then if the circumstance between my husband and myself, and the continuing flow of 'strangeness' that I could not find a name for in our life was what he meant. His secretary answered. She mentioned that Josephine had an influence on Napoleon as an example. I felt ashamed that I'd not been able to think about that myself, but then I'd not read much about actual history either at that point.
Reading a few words in a book that I chanced to pick up somewhere that had an 'effect' on my body was something that was just beginning to happen in 1982; it was part of the new 'strangeness'. I could see no reason why a few words or sentences in a book could affect my body and arouse enough curiosity to think about them. It was a new kind of 'event', being affected that way by words in a book. But this new effect was more easily detected than being affected by a new way of seeing lights at night. Or understanding why hearing trains in the valley that I'd been hearing for years suddenly began to make me feel sadness and a terrible sense of grief. More than 15 years scrolled through my life before I knew the real reason for the terrible sense of loss and the greater almost devastating reason for the grief.
However odd it may read, when I was attracted beyond the normal to the words in this sentence: "The affairs between one man and one woman can be of cosmic significance." they were actual facts about my life at that moment, describing what was just beginning to demand to be understood.
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