this plant bloomed in 1990 in a flowerbox full of self seeded foxgloves from one plant that had bloomed in 1989, which I thought of as the mandala foxglove because the word 'mandala' emerged spontaneously in my thought as noticed its very unusual shape and the variety of topper flowers on one plant. The Appearance of the Mandala Foxglove in 1990 surprised me very much because it was the beginning of physical evidence of an idea that had grown in my mind since 1989 within that year. I had a glimmer of understanding about how my mind and a loss of personal volition were creating information about that idea, and even bringing the words to understand it into my life. In 1989 the plant on which the topper flowers in the picture grew, was an object that generated thought as I looked at the plant, noticing it's various attributes and differences from 'normal' foxgloves. I've had a foxglove plant every year since 1989 that has been a physical manifestation of an idea that was growing, and becoming manifest in changes in the world, on this planet. A mandala is a closed circle but in 1996 I had an incredible plant that had a door in it, representing the idea that a door had opened into a mental realm, that had been closed. I've had several chrysalis shaped (the nautilus shell)blooms and I do not know of any other flower with that shape. I used to read garden catalogues and have never seen a bloom of that shape. It was a stunning new color, an ultra violet that did not photograph. The foxgloves have been an ongoing physical manifestation of a purely mental experience since 1989, evolving and changing it's form as the idea evolved and became evident to me. Last year which was 2006 I did not have a foxglove in my own garden and I was somewhat unhappy about that until I happened to drive by a woman's house where I'd seen a plant that was somewhat similar to mine in 1995. The impulse to stop by that house was disappointing because i didn't see any foxgloves in her yard. As I unlocked my car I glanced over my shoulder and saw some foxgloves growing in the neighbor's yard, one of which clearly had a topper flower on it's stalk. I went back and was astonished to see a bloom that was more unusual than I could have predicted, but it still manifested perfectly one attribute of the idea: Three worlds blending, merging and something new, a new world view was blooming from that integration. Three levels of bloom were in the topper flower! The first level had already bloomed and was fading and the second level was in full bloom then with a new level of buds emerging from the center of that one.
It was so unusual, and because it was not mine I had difficulty monitoring it afterwards, but I did take pictures of it as best I could.
8888888888888888888888
I was mowing our barnyard for the first time in the spring of 1989 when I noticed a foxglove seedling growing directly in the path of the mower. I paused thinking that it had been several years since I’d seen a foxglove anywhere in our three and a half acres. Then a thought occurred into my mind: “Dig it up and plant it in your flower box.” The words caused me to turn the mower off and without hesitation go to get a shovel, dig it up and plant it in the flower box I’d made in the fall. It was filled with soil but I’d not planted anything in it.
Then something quite unusual happened: I forgot about it completely until two or three months later.
I had washed dishes every day during that time. I’d looked out of the window over the sink but until this particular day I had not thought about the foxglove nor had I noticed it. Now my attention was drawn to it so then I remembered that I’d almost mowed it down. It seemed very odd that I’d forgotten it; that wasn’t like me.
From the window I saw that it was rather bushy, unlike the wild foxgloves that were familiar to me. They’d had only a single stalk of flowers growing from the rosette of leaves. This plant had quite a number of stalks of bell shaped flowers blooming on it, from bottom to top but I saw something quite different at the top of several stalks. There was another bloom, not like the typical foxglove bloom above buds that had not yet bloomed.
I went outside and saw that this was not like any foxglove I’d ever seen in many ways. I counted about 27 stalks. There were 5 stalks that had the typical foxglove blooms but at the top of each of these stalks was a round flower about 4 inches or so in diameter. It was very complicated around it'd edges, unlike anything I'd ever seen, and I used to read garden encyclopedias.
As I looked at them noticing the very unusual shape around the edge of the bloom, a word came into my thought: ‘mandala’. My attention was riveted on the ‘mandala’ toppers, so I didn’t notice at that point that the other stalks had a different ‘topper flower’ that was not yet opened in some of them.
I remember a thought occurred to me at that point: “ This foxglove will change all foxgloves.” In 1989, this thought as well as the appearance of the word ‘mandala’, a word whose meaning I didn't understand into my mind was barely noticeable, but it was visible enough that it remained in my memory afterwards. The word ‘mandala’ remained attached to the lovely round topper flowers. It was the ‘mandala foxglove’ in my mind afterwards and I remembered the word had somehow emerged without my thinking about it.
Then I did something impulsively because certain memories came into my mind that caused me to act on that impulse. It was something I regretted as soon as I’d done it: I remembered how I’d clipped the tops of chrysanthemums to make them produce more blooms. Without hesitation I broke off the tops of these 5 stalks, believing this would produce more blooms. They fell to the ground. It was then that I noticed the other stalks did not have the same kind of round topper flower and these 5 stalks were the only ones that had this very complex looking topper bloom.
Each stalk did have a topper flower but they were just developed enough for me to see they were a variety of bell shapes or of some completely different form. I have pictures of them. None of them were like the one’s I’d just broken off. If they had bloomed I would have had seeds from them but now I could not have seeds to reproduce this particular bloom. As I took in the variety of differences I wondered what kind of seeds a topper flower like these would produce. The plant had branches growing from the leaf nodes which is unusual in wild foxgloves. This plant was not the typical foxglove plant.
I felt deep anguish that I’d picked the most unusual blooms so hastily. They seemed to be very lovely, almost glowing as I looked at them laying where I’d tossed them. The sense of shame I felt at how thoughtlessly I’d broken them off was worse than being scolded by a parent. I felt in my body my impulsiveness in a real way that I’d not felt before as I realized how useless it was to apply the rules for 'topping' chrysanthemums to a foxglove.
Many thoughts moved through my mind, all of them scolding me in a way that was not familiar to me then, even in 1989, which was 5 years after 1984. So many unusual changes had taken place in that five years and I had not yet begun to understand much that was happening, I felt like an observer, almost comatose, distanced from everything in my life.
The foxglove generated 'thought' as I looked at it, that in it's content was about the foxglove in the beginning, but within a short time the 'object generated thought'[ began to veer away from the foxglove, and overlay a flow of circumstances that even in 1989 still caused me to feel almost inert at times. and at other times driven as though wolves were after me and I was constantly trying to save myself from them. I had recently read Tertium Organun by P. D. Ouspensky, an author whose name I'd never met in my life until one day I chanced to see a tattered copy of a book, The Fourth Way that was authored by him. I paid a quarter for it, and without understanding even one idea in it, read it. Several years later I realized I'd read another book in which a certain idea had caught my attention, I remembered thinking for some time about it, and that book had been authored by a student of Ouspensky's: Rodney Collin's book Theory of Eternal Life had mentioned a young man who was told that he had inadvertently 'guessed a very great secret' by a magician and he was offered an opportunity to learn to use this secret. Somehow this idea that an idea that was a very great secret, or had been a very great secret emerged in connection to the continuing flow of events that arose from what I was actually doing, or trying to do, in my real world life.
I just felt somehow driven to keep going and try to do as much as I could but nothing was easy, nothing was familiar. I became aware that what I had believed was the cause of the changes in my head, in my body, in my thought now seemed to be merely ‘ways’ to get my attention.
I'd had a terrible blow on my head in an accident in 1981, and a year prior to that I’d had a complete hysterectomy after which my life slowly veered away from my ‘normal’.
I’d believed those events had caused the changes but as I listened to other people at work talking about something that had happened in their life, it seemed the change itself that I 'felt' was also happening to them. I had not connected the change or the problems I was having to any person in my life, or to any circumstance brought about by any person, I’d believed the accident and the drastic surgery had caused the changes. The idea that something else was at work dawned slowly between 1986 and 1989 and it 'dawned' because I began to see a psychiatrist,. who began to give me 'hints' that my marital situation was what he was focused on, not what I was trying to describe.
It took me several sessions to grasp that I was being given 'clues' as to what the psychiatrist was conveying, that I did not understand the man I was living with. There was never any thing said about the accident, the blow on the head, or the surgery which was what I was believing was causing the problems.
By 1989 I had begun to be confused at the way new kinds of thought had emerged in my mind. A band of ‘nonstop thinking’ had begun moving relentlessly through my mind shortly after the 1981 accident. But within two or three years I noticed other kinds of ‘thought’ that I’d never experienced before, and I wondered where it came from. This ‘new kind of thought’ was spoken TO me, as though it came from another person, and in the beginning it used plural pronouns: “You should…. you could….we should….Why don’t you…why don’t we….?”
In 1989 as I stood looking at the foxglove, having forgotten the strange thought that had told me to ‘Dig it up and plant it in your flower box.”, much that had happened between 1980 and 1989 backed up the thought that occurred: “This foxglove will change all foxgloves.”, as well as the word that I had not the sense of generating myself: mandala.
My mind had become a place I looked at, listened to and tried to find words to describe during the 9 years that had passed since Mt. St. Helens blew her dusty inner material over where I lived. I had noticed quite a lot of activity going on in my mind without really thinking or realizing that my attention had been 'shifted' so to speak, or 'twisted around', focused on the interior 'world' rather than the 'exterior world', to put yet another way. It was a 'shift' that had taken place without announcing itself in a way I could have understood, although now I realize it had certainly always been trying to get my attention in it's own unique way of 'speaking' to me. I was beginning to be able to grasp that a kind of 'voice' was being created, due to a 'reflection' of content, , a 'reoccurrence' of content another way to say the same thing, along with an immediate association that formed so rapidly that it was barely discernable until one day in 1987 when I clearly see it and identified what it was accomplishing: this reflection had the effect of being 'spoken' to me, although it was not always using words, it also 'reflected' events and circumstances back to me, with some attributes that I didn't understand even in 1989. This was just the beginning of a new phase of experiences that had begun to be noticeable, and they were themselves 'new kinds of events' that slipped into my every day life.
I picked up the five stalks and put them into a vase. As I worked with them I noticed there was no pistils, no stamens in the middle of the mandala topper bloom! Without a pistil and stamens it would not reproduce but something was growing in the place where the reproductive part ought to be. It looked like a stalk of typical foxglove buds was trying to push through where a seed producing pistil and stamens would have been.
Within a couple of days it was obvious that was a fact, because the center matured enough to produce a stalk of bloom that was growing where a seed pod would be.
The next work day I took the vase with the flowers with me to work. As I walked into the building a young man I’d never talked to before asked to take a look at them. I told him I didn’t know for certain what it was and how I’d come to plant it thinking it was a foxglove. He recognized the foxglove bells but when he saw the round topper flowers he said: “What you have is a natural polyploid. Do you have any autumn crocus growing near the place you found this one? There’s something about them that can produce a polyploidness, which means they are extra vigorous and extra healthy. Sometimes marijuana growers soak seeds in autumn crocus extract so they get more leaves and seeds.” It occurred to me later this man was very likely the only person in the building that would have recognized a natural polyploid and been able to tell me it had ‘extra’ everything.
The flowers I’d clipped fascinated me, I found myself looking at them for long periods of time. Also I was very curious about what could have produced this plant when I noticed how many different kinds of topper flowers there were on it. I was drawn to it quite often, sitting near it, walking outside to stand near it thinking about it. As it matured I saw some of the topper flowers fully develop into different shapes and colorations of bells. Some were like Canterbury bells, others were unlike anything I’d seen. I was amazed to see several lower nodes produce stalks also that had a different shape of bloom at the end.
As I drove to church one Sunday I noticed a hillside covered with blooming foxglove flowers. I stopped to walk through them trying to find a plant that had more than one stalk and verifying that none of them had stalks growing from the leaf nodes. There were thousands of foxglove flowers on that hill, I took a picture of it and it’s on this page. Not one of them was different than the ordinary foxgloves that had grown wild in our barnyard. There was a variety of colors, white, pink, rose color and one that was somewhat yellow.
As I looked at the plant and took pictures of the mandala shaped blooms I was aware of thought in my mind, about the plant different characteristics of it. I noticed the thought in about the same way I noticed the plant, as ‘objects’ that I was ‘looking/listening’ to. I would not have used the word ‘mesmerized’ to describe how I felt about the plant. Nor would it have occurred to me it had become an object on which I meditated to the extent nothing but the plant existed for a time because I knew nothing about meditation then. I was unaware then as I am now of this new ‘object’, my own thought.
I became aware this plant would have had three tiers of flowers on some of the stalks if I had not picked the mandala shaped stalks. The third tier, growing from the center of the round topper flower was very clearly like the bottom tier, the normal foxglove. The mandala as I thought of it had a very complicated border, unlike any single petalled flower I’d ever seen. And I used to read seed books and garden books for amusement.
This is what happened soon after this plant bloomed, but it happened within the context of a fascination with learning challenge level squaredancing. An interest in a fun hobby had grown between 1975 and 1984 into a consuming interest that left no space for my normal interests. I was unawares then of how this interest had slowly evolved.
Nor did I have any hint that the only two square dance clubs in our area that were attempting to ‘leave the mainstream’ and enter ‘higher levels’ were drifting towards doing something physically that had a symbolic semblance to a change on a very large scale that was timed perfectly to interface with what they were bringing into being on this small personal scale. I had begun to notice something about my mind when I realized one day, that I could not visualize my position in the square. This was a moment that passed barely noticed but it was a moment that changed my life. In order to dance with phantoms, imaginary people that the caller could add it was necessary to learn to dance with ‘phantoms’. In challenge levels there are ‘concept’ movements and one of them was the phantom concept. Whenever he initiated this concept he said: “In your phantom set up…” the dancers had to take a look at their formation, which always had open spaces into which the phantoms were to be ‘imagined’ and they had to be interacted with as though they were really moving about the square. I couldn’t move, because I had not even begun to pay attention to the fact that there were ‘formations’.
