Daughter of Time

When I was in my late twenties I worked for the Seattle King County Health Department. An elderly woman who had retired  volunteered  to work with us three days a week. She mentioned her favorite book one day, Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey of whom I had not heard. She offered to loan me her copy then brought it in for me to read. I began to read it but could not get interested in it.  I intended to bring it back to her but every day I forgot it. Finally she asked me if I was finished with it and asked me to return it.

I kept forgetting the book, even after laying it out so that I could not fail to see it when I left for work. A period of months passed, during which she reminded me a couple of times that it was a book she wanted to keep. Yet I could not remember to make sure I had the book with me until finally one day I did pack it with my lunch, and I never forgot my lunch. She was gracious but I didn't tell her that it was not common for me to have such  a strange 'forget-fullness'. I felt strangely inert in not being able to return the book immediately. I'd had it for several months when I did contrive a way that would force me to return it. I felt very embarrassed .

I forgot the incident until one day in 1987. The memory of that event came into my mind one day, and then periodically afterwards it flashed into my though. The title of the book, Daughter of Time somehow lingered in my mind, for a reason I couldn't figure out. If I'd not found it so difficult to do a simple thing  like bring the book back to it's owner for an unusually long period of time,  that incident would never have made enough impact on my memory. It was a 'singular event', one of only a few other incidents that were as I found out later, had been installed for later use.

By that point in Time events in my life had become strangely intertwined with this kind of 'haunting regeneration of a memory, of something that had happened years ago. But at that point, I had not figured out the connection between the content of that retrieved 'memory' and it's relationship to what was happening in my 'now'.  I had realized by then that an enormous amount of information about my life had erupted into my mind, as thought, without imagery of any kind in the 10 days the Los Angeles Olympics had been played in 1984. July 31 through August 11. This reads as very strange, that something could happen in my own mind, that  I had not been able to 'relate' to when it actually had happened. It, that event had to be discovered. It had occurred I believe in a memory not connected to 'now', the moments during which it emerged. But it was visible to some part of my mind.

In 1987 I had barely begun to understand the changes in my mind/body/ physical life and thought, but I was aware by then that when I read certain books I experienced a sense of recognition, of familiarity as though somehow what I read was already  known, vaguely but not explicitly. and specifically. The best way I can describe how I felt was that it seemed the words I read were somehow already there as words in some form in my mind/body because there was a body effect.

After a few more years passed (1987-1989)  that memory remained somewhat in the forefront of my attention, I began to to have an impression of myself as being 'spoken to' by the memory. It was saying something to me; the words in the title were being 'said to me'. I had grasped that very strange and unexpected attribute in a few other events where it was much more distinct. But there had been probably millions of them happen which I'd not noticed in my past.

There had been a change in my mind that by 1989 I had become aware of distinctly: there was a mechanism that altered the direction of my thought, turning it towards me, as though a person were speaking to me.  It had caused me to hear my thought differently, and in this new 'vein of thought' I heard  words that ordinarily would not have registered with any extra authority or significance,  in a very new (to me) way.

I had the impression a mental highlighter had 'abstracted words out of embeddedness' in some other context, putting them into a new context, and that the content was talking to me though them, as though person were saying them to me. 

Many somewhat similar events happened before I realized what was causing  the title of the book to have this 'literal sense', Daughter of Time' of being 'said' to me. A mechanism of mind that 'reflected' that content took a few years to identify distinctly until during 1986/1987  when a few events happened that caused it to be quite visible and distinct,  as an effect caused by a 'switch' that created 'self reference'. This 'switch' seems to me to be one that establishes significance, but it's a 'me/not me' distinction that is not simple in it's effects although it is a very simple switch itself. .

The literal words "Daughter of Time'  meant something specific in relation to a flow of experiences I was having, which I had not related to a broader scope than my own personal life. The abstract sense of the words in the title of the book described  something about me, to me, in relation to 'work' I was doing, for another level of life in Time itself. That's not a grandiose idea, I knew nothing about philosophy or other 'esoteric' ideas that were written very much about long before I or anyone I  knew was born. The situation in my family and a number of people we were involved with at that point began to be a model for a change that was taking place on a broader scale than a personal family change. Since 1984 everything has changed.

Those words and the idea had come from reading P. D. Ouspensky's books in which he mentioned doing 'work for another level'. I had been somehow 'forced' to read his books,  particularly his Tertium Organun. But before reading anything he wrote,  I'd had an experience of myself, sitting up suddenly in my bed, looking upwards, and sobbing: "I'll do it. I'll do the work." It was before I read about 'work done for another level' in one of Ouspensky's books, but the words in his book,  followed the  incident  rather soon.

 There were many reasons why I felt like a Daughter of  Time, inserted into Time at birth in 1932 to accomplish a definite task, one that had been revealed quite gradually between 1984 and 1989. By then I understood to some degree how my mind was at work, creating from my own memories, a kind of conversation aimed directly at me based on what had been told to me in the 1984 event.

 I had become aware of a 'switch' in the mind, that caused thought to be 'repeated back' to me, as a person would speak to me. The 'switch' became quite evident, slowly, over a period of time between 1984 and 1987.

THIS WAS NOT EASY TO NOTICE, NOR TO DEFINE, nor to relate the regenerated memories to what was actually right in front of my eyes because so many changes had occurred in me. When I recognized for the first time without doubt, that the 'thing itself' was explaining it's self to me and creating a kind of conversation aimed at me through these 'abstracted memories from my past', when they related to what was happening now in my  I was almost literally 'floored'. That is, it felt like the floor had become Jello, wobbly and unstable. I felt literally unbalanced.

The same flow of events that created information that explained what was happening at the moment often enough to be very astonishing, was describing back to  me what I was physically doing!! This was not easy to notice.

A few years ago I chanced to come across the book Daughter Of Time on audio tape and listened to it. The story was a kind of 'detective story' in which a hundreds of years old crime was 're-viewed' and  the crime was completely restructured in the light of a new viewpoint on that crime. This is a particular kind of 'coincidence', in which something in my past was being also completely restructured, in the light of a new viewpoint. The plot of the book had become more than significant at that point in Time. In my own life, a Rare Event, one that could only happen once had happened, one that had to be witnessed by a mind without preconceived understandings and without prior knowledge, so that it could make distinct what had been at work for centuries and thousands of years.

What is ever- present becomes invisible. It is likely that any individual could be a 'son' or a 'daughter' of Time in life, having to become aware of what I named, the Larger Domain's particular interface with their individual life.