Experiences involving Jim Unger's Herman, Theodore Reik and learning to read in a new way.

Notes 11-28-00  

How an 'irrational' string of events that happened over several years built an instruction from afar  

In the early 1980’s I read a Jim Unger cartoon of Herman, cut it out and taped it to my refrigerator. This is not something I usually to but I didn't think anything about it. The act was done automatically and without questioning why I did it. It remained there for a couple of years. 

One day I removed it from the refrigerator and taped it to the doorjamb between our kitchen and dining room. I had never done that before but nobody said anything about it and again I gave no thought to why I would tape a cartoon to the doorjamb. 

It was not often I cut out a cartoon for any reason and a cartoon taped on the refrigerator isn’t too strange. But taping it to a doorjamb was unusual. I don’t remember that anyone ever mentioned it. Whenever I glanced at it I, noticed that I felt a mild irritation because I did not understand the cartoon and usually I laugh at Herman's doings. The cartoon remained there for another year or so.

One day I stopped to re-read the cartoon's caption then jerked it off the doorjamb and threw it away. I had never understood the caption which seemed to have nothing to do with the picture. The words didn’t seem to me to apply to the drawing. Apparently I gave up this time. 

Still another couple of years passed. They were extremely uncomfortable years because an immense change was under way in my personal life. I could not have guessed how immense this change was going to be when I first read the cartoon, nor why a peculiar kind of blindness prohibited my ‘getting the point’ of the cartoon.  

Trying to understand what was happening in my changed mind, dealing with the new and unexplainably uncomfortable body condition and also handle my drastically altered life situation at home absorbed all of my attention.  

By 1985, I’d gotten a job at Boeing and been on the job for nearly two years when the cartoon came back into my mind one day as I went about my work. I can remember the exact moment it came back into my mind. I was walking towards a door into the 'cold room' and was ready to open it when the memory resurfaced into my mind.   

Walking towards a door, ready to open it, the cartoon memory was regenerated suddenly, complete with its history except that I could not remember the words in the caption.  

I felt compelled to remember them. 

Knowing how long it had been right in front of me, it seemed absurd that I couldn’t remember the words. What I remembered most vividly was that the cartoon had not made me laugh and there was no reason to clip it out then keep it for so long.  

Let me describe the cartoon at this point: The drawing showed Herman standing in front of a closed door and his wife was standing on the other side. A clock showed it was the wee hours of the morning. Her body posture indicated she was very, very angry.  

I couldn’t remember the words of the caption in one day, or the next day or for several days. And I couldn’t avoid trying to remember them. 

A compelling impulse kept the cartoon in the forefront of my attention as it had at times operated in a slightly different way.

One of it’s manifestations was that a simple word or a few words would flicker into my mind, persisting for days. At this particular point a small body of experience had already built up.  I was watching without knowing it, a steady accretion of experience in a ‘new vein of thought’ that was oddly connected to what was outside of my eyes. The 'new vein of thought' was at that point not close to speech, it was visible to me but I didn't know it was literally inexpressible because it was in a depth of mind, far removed from speech. (Examples are at the end of this story.) 

After the cartoon and it’s history came back then remained to haunt me, I went about my job with a divided mind, pre-occupied constantly with trying to remember the actual words in the caption and secondarily doing my work. 

At one point while the cartoon plagued me, something I'd read recently came to mind. It was a single incident abstracted from a book that impressed me very much because it seemed the authors way of writing was familiar to me. Theodore Reik, the author of Listening With The Third Ear had devoted an entire chapter (Love and the Despot) about how a few lines from a poem came into his mind one day. He couldn’t remember the rest of the poem or where he’d read it. The lines from the poem haunted him the same way I was being haunted by a line I’d forgotten. He was compelled to try to remember the poem just as I was being compelled to remember the caption on a cartoon. When I remembered how he was plagued by a persistent need to remember the poem I felt a kinship of sorts with him. 

Mr. Reik describes the process by which he begins to remember the poem, describing the mental process of retrieval in great detail. He observed the processes of his mind and the route that led to his remembering rather suddenly the entire poem. It was not a direct route but I remembered thinking that his mind seemed to cooperate in the search by retrieving appropriate memories, apparently randomly until he got the 'sense' of what they meant. One event led to another and finally he remembered where he'd read the poem. It seemed to me he was led towards remembering what he had forgotten by a process of his own mind. His mind had slowly built towards bringing back the original memory of the poem and where he could find it.

I also began to retrieve the words to the caption, but quite gradually. At first my thought dwelt on the ‘sense’ of what the caption contained, trying to remember the precise words. Finally I remembered one word: hypothesis. I knew that one word was ‘hypothesis’.  

Over a period of time I 'guessed' at various other words that didn’t seem to fit, but finally remembered 'theory'. The caption was about a hypothesis and a theory. 

One day all the words flipped into my mind and I knew immediately these were the correct words.  

“Formulate a hypothesis then construct a theory to fit the facts.”  “That's it. That is the caption!” I thought. 

At that moment I ‘got’ the cartoon, understanding after all that time that Herman was drunk. He knew his wife was waiting behind the door so he’d better have a good reason for being out so late. He was thinking up a good excuse.  

Why it was not ‘funny’ to me and why I could not ‘see’ a drunken man’s plight is still a long story. I would have to write about blind spots, double binds, mixed signals and a condition of 'induced psychosis' that I knew nothing about at that point,  as well as about stereotypes we used to believe about alcoholics until recently. It was about that point when the word ‘co-dependency’ entered our common vocabulary. There was a condition that I had begun to realize just barely by then, that 'bonded' me mentally with another person, whom I had not suspected was an alcoholic because none of the symptoms defined in the ‘commonly known pattern’ was in evidence. Those stereotypes have almost vanished now in 2000 as I write.  

Yet there was another reason, more real that explained why I couldn't relate to a very simple cartoon depicting an alcoholic trying to find a reasonable excuse for coming home so late. There was a factor beyond my control at work, and 'it' whatever it was, intended to become distinct.    

 Remembering the words did not explain why the memory resurfaced so suddenly and then why  I was driven to try to remember the caption. Only then I realized it was a very strange situation. What could account for my ‘strange act’ of taping it to the doorjamb ,suddenly removing it, then a few years later I'm plagued to remember the words.  

There was no reason I could see that explained why I was prodded insistently to remember the caption. And why did the memory form an association with a book I'd recently read, where Theodore Reik wrote about a similar event that had happened to him? And who was Theodore Reik anyway? I'd never heard of him although I felt a distinct affinity for his way of describing in detail his mental processes and long trains of thought that led him to sudden moments of insight into his patients problems. 

I had noticed a similarity in that I talked the way he wrote. I recognized that immediately after I'd read Listening With The Third Ear. “He writes like I talk.” 

And how odd that only afterI remembered the caption, I understood the 'funny' aspect of the cartoon. That was unexplainable.  

Having remembered the words of the caption, they took up residency in the forefront of my attention after that day: “Formulate a hypothesis then construct a theory to fit the facts.”  

But the words detached themselves from their actual origin.  

Now they did not seem to have anything to do with the cartoon or the original context in which I’d first encountered them.  

The words re-occurred many times a day and after a few days I didn’t think about the drawing, or its history, just the words in the caption.  

They did not at that point seem to be spoken to me by an artificially generated ‘voice’ that was using those words which I knew had such a strange history. They had been abstracted so oddly from my past and in a unique way. Other events that were soon to occur built up an awareness of that unexpected attribute, that the words in the caption were displaced from their original context.  

After a few months, and two extremely important events happened, very slowly I related to the words in the caption as though a person was speaking them to me, through the ‘event’. Because several other events happened that I slowly realized were not random, purposeless events, I noticed distinctly something that I had somewhat vaguely noticed and wondered to myself about.

Something was affecting thought that occurred into my mind, changing it. There was no way to describe it even then but I had already heard/seen a constant belt of thought streaming through my mind, concerning a dream. This stream had been continuous since the end of 1981. That was new also but these new ‘events’ were also different. One of the events had made it quite distinct that thought generated by every day situations was somehow regenerated, i.e. ‘heard again’, or so it seemed to me. I had become aware (over a two year period!) of an 'effect' that seemed to be there, but I could not grasp it. One day something happened that made it distinct.  

I was certain after that event, there was no doubt about it, this new mechanical operator was really happening all the time. It had almost certainly been an 'operator' at work for years, but it had begun to change at that point so that it's effects were more distinct, there was a 'hearing again' of content and this content was changed so that it seemed spoken to me, and there was a literalness that made this content real and true. I had begun to feel very strange when I saw movies such as Thoroughly Modern Milly and laughed at young girls being drugged and kidnapped. Such 'funny' movies were beginning to make a different impression on me.

In this Herman ‘event’, very specific words had been brought forth from my past, through an event that was very easily remembered because it had been such an unusual thing for me to do.  It was an event that had been 'abstracted' from many events, but why?

Gradually after several other events happened, I had a remote awareness that a kind of ‘voice’ that was being generated by this ‘abstraction’ of words, from a distinctly memorable event and that was was being 'said' related to the enormous package of information that I'd begun to think of as my 'mindquake'.

There were other memories that for no reason I could see began to haunt me at about the time I got my job in 1985.  Images flashed into my mind, of myself when I was a very young girl, stringing beans, (tubs of them) shelling peas, peeling tomatoes, peaches, seeding cherries (mountains of them) for my mother to can. Images of shelves in our basement of food I’d preserved myself suddenly flashed into my mind, vanishing so quickly that I wondered about this new kind of ‘inner content’ and it’s apparent ‘speed’.  

There came a point when I realized the words in the caption were 'told' to me, as an instruction, something I was to    do. I was to do myself, what the words said. By then (1987) I had begun to feel like I had caught a glimpse of something strongly linked to some memories I'd had that had flickered briefly into my mind from the time I was very young until I was in my mid forties. Those memories were different in many ways, they had re-occurred for decades before I wondered to myself about their strange re-generations periodically, apparently for no reason.  

Let me say at this point that I have become aware that  there is a rational connection between what I'm physically doing when such memories re-occur and the content of the memory, believe it or not! My 'opening a physical door' when the cartoon came into my mind after two years, had a relationship to 'opening a mental door' that day. But I didn't realize that immediately, in fact such a connection would never have occurred to me, normally.                                                                          2

I remembered quite frequently during the following weeks  one sentence from an article I'd read about intelligence when I was in my  mid teens. "Intelligence is the ability to identify isolated but related facts and to form them into theories that explain the universe."  

It had emerged in my mind before I settled on the word 'theory' having been in the caption. It probably brought the word 'theory' back to the cartoon. I had felt amused at that sudden 'thought', knowing where it came from because I remembered distinctly that the article had affected me in many ways afterwards. But I had not thought about this particular sentence after I'd read the article. When the sentence flipped into my mind, I knew where I'd originally met the words years previously, reading them as a teenager, in a magazine.  

The long train of memories behind the search for the words in a Herman cartoon would fill 30 or more pages if I wrote them down, which Theodore Reik at times did. I'd never heard of Theodore Reik but in reading his book Listening With the Third Ear I had noticed within myself what seemed to me to be a kind of similarity between us. I often got lost when I tried to recite a 'string' of events, intending to set a context for what I was saying,  forgetting what point I wanted to make because each 'event' reflected to another, and that to yet another like a hall of mirrors.  

But this happened: Remembering the words to the caption caused me to feel somehow rewarded, praised as though I had accomplished something. But where did this 'praise', this sense of being told: ‘You have done well.” come from?                                                       

More About Theodore Reik: 

One day a very vivid color image of a man's face flipped into my mind, just like a movie image filling an inner mindscreen not merely flashing briefly, but lingering so that I saw distinctly a man’s face. The face seemed to be looking directly at me and it was a face I recognized.  He was a fellow square dancer in our mainstream club. This man's alert, lively looking face appeared in my mind more vivid than a picture. He seemed to be flesh and blood looking right at me. Then it disappeared. This was new to me. 

One day soon afterwards I walked past a bookshelf in my house and noticed the picture of the author on the back of a book. The man's eyes looked at me, directly at me but the author was unsmiling and very serious. That's odd, Theodore Reik seems to be looking right at me I thought. Then the memory of the image returned and I realized Theodore Reik seemed to be looking at me from the jacket the same way the face in my Technicolor 'image' had done. Then I recognized the man in my image had a striking resemblance to Theodore Reik. They were both balding, about the same age and wore glasses but it was the penetrating gaze, looking directly at me that was most startling.  

The eyes were intently focused it seemed and very serious. The real man that I knew had an easygoing light hearted face but I believe his resemblance to Theodore Reik would not have come to my attention if I'd not had the image flip into my mind before I glanced at the picture on the back of the book as I walked by. The man in the 'vision' was not the heavy thinking kind of man his look alike was. Mr. Reik didn't make jokes. The vivid image and the way it came 'just out of the blue' seemed somewhat purposeful at that point. 

I was now aware of Theodore Reik in a different way. 

The same picture of Theodore Reik is on several of his books. It creates the impression he is looking back at whoever is seeing the picture. In this case he was looking seriously at me; I experienced a heightened sense of that. Why? 

I could see that I had been forced by a strong compulsion to recall the caption's words, now this new event linked to it, so whatever was underway had been an unfolding 'event' staged at long intervals of time.  These incidents 'meant' something, but what did they mean?  

After another incident happened, I understood what I was to do. The words told me precisely what I was supposed to do as though a person had said them to me. I was supposed to ‘formulate a hypothesis and construct a theory to fit the facts’ about the almost imperceptible to normal ways of seeing, flow of events that had been happening to me. Each ‘event’ was obviously perfectly timed, precisely timed to happen yet I knew one fact about this astonishing flow of events.  

I realized that my 'understanding' of them even my noticing them could not happen to anyone but me.  

And a third factor startling and unsuspected by me had begun to emerge: I was reading a book, the title of which as well as the contents seemed also perfectly timed to relate to these uniquely personal physical events.  The titles of the books actually described what I was doing at the time I read the book more often than could be purposeless.  

The timing was genuinely awe-inspiring. Feeling 'amazed' all the time was getting to be very common. 

One day after the incident I just mentioned above happened, I understood what was going on, because it was laid right in front of me, through a strange experience. This event relates to another 'string' but at this point I think it will help understand what some of my points are.

This singular event happened within a year of the other event. This is what happened: 

I owned a tattered paperback book that I'd not read although I’d had it for several years. I had bought it and began to read it but after a few pages it didn't interest me. We'd moved twice and I'd thought several times about throwing it away when I cleared out unused items but I kept that tattered worn paperback book thinking I would try again to read it, which I did try to do.  

Each time I read less than 20 pages into it before putting it aside because I couldn’t grasp what it was about. There were two characters in the book whose relationship to each other and to other characters in the book I could not ‘get’.  

I don’t remember how it happened to be so handily nearby the day I started out the door then realized I’d nothing to read. I ALWAYS had a book to read at that point, it was in 1987. I know that date precisely because of what happened that day. It was somehow critical to always have a book to read in any spare moment I had.  This tattered book was so handy I thought grimly I’d take THAT book rather than have NO book to read.  

I began to read it before work started and progressed further than I’d gotten before. At morning break time I’d read 40 or so pages and I’d begun to get a glimmer of the nature of the relationship the two characters had to each other as well as to other characters in the book. I had never read a book like this one. The book was beginning to make sense finally; I was interested in it now. 

A safety meeting was scheduled which I knew would end at lunchtime so I carried the worn paperback with me to read in the lunchroom. We saw a film that was different in comparison to the boring safety films we usually had to struggle to stay awake through. It was more like a story than a presentation of facts about safety on the job. A man got up late and rushed through getting ready for work, hustled into his car narrowly avoiding an accident, arriving unprepared for a presentation he was to give that morning. He decided to skip a safety meeting to prepare the presentation but first he would make coffee. He stepped into a puddle of water as he plugged the coffee maker into the wall. 

The next scene was heavenly, literally; he stood before a man who was obviously an angelic type in a business suit, pleading that he couldn’t die because he had a family. "Give me another chance, please give me another chance. I want to go back to my family." 

He was given another chance to go back to life but there was one condition. He was told he would have to learn for himself the 'secret of safety." He wouldn't have to return by himself; the angel/business man would go with him. 

They re-appeared in an office where a secretary worked. She opened a bottom file drawer, took something from it and walked away leaving the drawer open. The 'dead' man remarked that someone could trip over the drawer. The 'angelic business man' said: "Tell her to shut the drawer." to which the 'dead' man replied: "But she cannot hear me! She can't see us." Finally he spoke to the woman moving about the room. "Shut the file drawer, someone might trip over it."  

The secretary stops what she’s doing, walks over to the drawer and closes it. Her face 'reflects' that a thought occurs to her; she stops what she's doing to walk over and close the drawer. He understands then that what he has said appeared to her as a thought in her head.

That is when I nearly collapsed with hysterical laughter. I did make some sound because everyone looked at me after the sound of my hand slapped down onto the table drew their attention to me.  

Suddenly I recognized the connection between the characters in the book I was reading and the film I was watching. They were identical in one attribute and that seemed hilarious even before I thought about the timing and the unusual history of the book. 

I had just begun to realize the two characters in the book, The Education of Oversoul by Jane Roberts were invisible to everyone but each other. And that they appeared to other characters in the book as a ‘thought’, presumably of the character’s own generation. They were teacher and student to each other, and ‘teacher’ to characters widely scattered in Time, and in circumstances.  

I had just 'got' that fact, which was succinctly written in the book, that Seven appeared as a thought in the mind of certain people and that Cyprus was his teacher. He had 'charges' whose lives he steered very, very minimally and very rarely onto a definite path. He 'sensed' when they needed him and quite suddenly he was 'within them', actually he became a resident within each of them for a time.  

Quite suddenly I 'saw' that Seven appeared as a thought in the head of people who didn't know their thought was not their own.  

This which I had just grasped was precisely  similar to the way the 'angel/businessman' related to the 'dead' man who had to learn the secret of safety and the way the 'dead' man related to people he observed, helping them.  

That book which I'd put aside many times, just happened to be laying nearby today, the day I saw a film that had a plot that was distinctly the same plot in more than one attribute and aspect.  

At that point I thought it quite odd that I'd not 'gotten' what the book was about until precisely this day and that the same theme was 'echoed' in the film, Safety Secrets.  

The theme am referring to is that of 'a thought in the mind that the person believed was their own thought' was  really caused by some 'other'. That theme meant very little to me then, but still I felt quite strange for a few minutes.  

Something was making life 'weird'.  

The relationship between what I was reading and what I was actually seeing in front of my eyes, just emerging at that point was vague, not well defined until this incident. I had begun to be aware of a purposeful intent other than my own that had arranged the timing of reading the book the same day I saw the Safety Secrets film. That was the only explanation for my keeping that book so long, this ‘purpose filled Intent that was driving me. That feeling also was vague and not well defined but emerging through such precisely timed events.  

The relationship was just 'dawning' when this 'event' made that point quite obvious.  

There were other incidents of a similar kind that had happened in the early 1980's but only a few and I had not thought of them as significant, even then. They seemed to be miracles of precise timing but I had given them little thought after they happened. 

There was one incident that made a lasting impression on me, immediately when it happened. It caused me to know for certain that a mechanism of mind was at work, an 'operator' was at work.

I was assigned to a new area at work, where it was necessary for me to walk onto a floor of metal grid work such as bridges have. The area was larger than a basketball court and seven large vats were embedded in the metal work, with narrow aisles between them. They were deep, so they extended down to the lower floor which made the grid work seem suspended. There was a light in the area below when I walked onto it for the first time.  

I stepped onto the grid without any hesitation and walked a few feet towards the huge tanks embedded in the metal grid work. Then suddenly I felt as though I was standing suspended in air because the bright light in the room below nearly obscured the grid work. 

What happened next was that I felt very dizzy and felt faint, like the floor was moving around. I held onto a rail, steadying myself as a thought occurred to me. "It's just like being raised up, so that I'm standing on an invisible floor. I can see what's going on around me and I can see everything below me at the same time."  

Then I clearly saw something happen to that thought. It happened in a flash of time that this episode of thought was 'regenerated' as a unit, with no spaces between the words. Yet the entire package had ‘re-occurred’ and I understood and actually heard as though each word had been 're-spoken'. Noticing the effect of the regenerated unit was not difficult: the words of my thought were ‘turned around’ so to speak and were ‘heard again’ in that ‘flash’, an incredibly rapid ‘re-play’. (I had recently read an unusually book, titled Replay by Ken Grimwood.) 

But there was a difference: this time the words seemed spoken to me as though a person had spoken them, not as a thought generated by me about what I had just physically done. 

I had caught glimmers of this 'activity' in my mind at times, but I could never be certain it was happening. This time I saw that the words of thought clearly were derived from a real world incident, they were generated from what I was actually doing but in the 'regenerated' unit of thought they were redirected to another application and towards me, actually ‘said’ to me.

And this was distinct:  The words described actually what I was doing in two levels, perhaps two worlds. I had begun to see what was going on in my own mind, unawares at that point that what I was seeing was laying at depths where I could not speak aloud what I saw nor could I write down at that point anything that I experienced as thought. 

It seemed likely that a stream of thought, which I had tried to describe as ‘non-stop thinking’ must be meeting an exact match of its' content in the exterior world. I could not account for the precise timing of this in any way. There were other events that were as yet unconnected in my mind and in those events, this attribute of utterly precise timing had been more distinct. But I had so much going on then, everything was different and small details were lost.  

The first events that happened were less complex, they were immediately grasped, there wasn't any period of 'unfolding' or development of a string, they were each ‘singular events’, happening and seeming ‘unlikely’ to happen but not remaining in the forefront of attention. I had not thought about them afterwards, nor had I mentioned them to anyone else. The word 'coincidence' did not occur to me.  

This is one kind of experience that affects the body. Its possible to see that a ‘difference’ from ‘normal’ is potentially perceivable.  

"What you get used to gets to be normal." really means that 'normal' becomes invisible.  

Abnormal experience is more visible. 

I was 'told' by this string of events to 'Formulate a hypothesis then construct a theory to fit the facts." about the 'strange experiences' that involved such precise timing. 

I can give many similar examples now, 21 years after July 31, 1984. Irrational as it may seem, it is reasonably explained if anyone wants to take the time to understand someone else’s experience. 

That is not easy to do.  

(Examples: 1. The word ‘overt’ occurred into my thought, for several days, then the word ‘covert’ joined it and I wondered to myself why those two words had drifted into my thought. One day I wrote the words on paper, and noticed the literal ‘c’ in covert ‘sounds like’ the word ‘see’ which is the difference between the two words. The question formed: ”What is the difference between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’? It is a similarity that is also a difference. A ‘see/c’. That seemed interesting. 

2. Then also at work, the word ‘numinous’ occurred in my thought, quietly emerging, somehow quite distinct. I remember pausing to consider the word, and wonder what it meant. Then in the same quiet thought voice: “the numinous is hard to bear.” 

After looking for the definition in the new dictionary that had just been distributed to each of the factory clerks, it was not a word I understood. We had laughed about being suddenly ‘gifted’ with a paper back dictionary. It had seemed unusual. It was only a short time later that I read the word ‘numinous’ in Contact by Carl Sagan, remembering then, the strange appearance of the word prior to reading it anywhere. 

During the two years after 1985, ruminations of quite a variety often diverted my attention from what I was supposed to be doing and this kind of event was just one of them. It was very difficult to do many activities that I’d always done very easily. I had a memory such that I would glance at a 7 digit number and not be able to remember it. That was a distinctly noticeable change. Part of my job required finding job numbers and I was in distress constantly because it was so difficult to do.  

It seemed to me everything took a very long time to do because I had to work so hard to get past these intrusive thoughts that were pre-occupying my attention and hold my attention it captive where I needed it on my job. I was also  constantly reading some book I'd picked up somewhere and it was uncomfortable for me to read anything. My head felt like it would burst and it seemed that what I read actually hurt me but I couldn’t not read, probably because it was a habit of a lifetime. I believed the words fell into a black hole because I couldn't remember anything I read. This had been going on for about 4 years by 1987.So much was changed I could not isolate one factor then.