visible, plural thought

What I mean by visible, plural thought now, after 23 years is simple to describe. I began to experience thought that contained plurals, addressing me as though another person were speaking TO me. "Let's do..."; 'We could..." "You should..."; Why don't we...?"

This was new to me, I'd never experienced it in my life. I was curious about it, wondering if I 'thought' it, although even now with so much of life behind me, there is no memory of any "I" thought either.  "I'm going to..."'; "I can...".

There's an example of plural thought  in the first version of the creation of 'man' in the bible, in Genesis 1."Let US make man in OUR image according to OUR likeness and let THEM have dominion..." ..so "God created man in his OWN image, in the image of God created he him: male and female he created he them.

I remember thinking: "but God is just one,  who else is he talking to?.  That's absurd."  As a young girl I thought with disdain that using plurals that way was incongruous, but that was one of my thoughts that was aimed towards the future.

 I didn't know there was a second contradictory version of the creation in Genesis, until I chanced to read The Creation of Woman by Theodore Reik. (It was almost impossible to find in the days before the Internet.) In that book, his detective like mind produced a credible version of the second creation, in which Eve was 'made from Adam's rib while he slept'. He analyzed the second version told in Genesis 2, (which I'd not noticed myself until he mentioned it)  using one event that had happened when he was about 9 years old as the foundation of his investigation: He'd been listening to his grandfather and other Jewish Talmudic elders talk about that version when, as he writes on page 70, "I heard my voice say: "Tomer verkehrt!" I had the impression that not I but someone else had spoken, and I was terrified...." ., building his theory from  his particular Jewish background, he became convinced it was a typical example of a Jewish 'form- story' that could be understood only by  a reversal of the genders. "Tomer verkehert" as he interprets it stands for: "The shoe is on the other foot." or 'the situation is reversed" .

 (That incident was also aimed at his future, he wrote the book. But it was aimed at my future also, That event is in my opinion from experiences of my own with similar events, s what Emanuel Swedenborg described as 'remains' I have reason to believe. They are memories installed early in life for later use, and they become distinct because they re-occur, or more correctly stated, the memory is 'regenerated' at times for no apparent reason. That's what makes them distinct, eventually. P. D. Ouspensky also experienced them, and many very famous authors begin a book by reciting some incident that happened when he or she was very young that triggered their book.)

He gave a credible reason to believe that the second creation version is not about Eve but about Adam's 'second birth' out of the world of women, into the world of men. His background of being Jewish as well as his having worked with Sigmund Freud when psychiatry was being 'written down' was not what ultimately  convinced me that the second creation of 'Eve' was in fact really about Adam's initiation into the world of men. It was personal experiences in which I found out I as a unique,  female was truly invisible to men, excepting as a kind of mirror of some inner content. That hasn't altered at all, in my personal life.

This factor as I experienced it personally, without suspecting it myself for more than 5 decades was old when the Greek story of Narcissus was written. Then the Roman version which followed it added a female, Echo who repeated the last words Narcissus said to his own 'reflections'. I heard myself repeat the last words a real Narcissus said to me, sporadically just before July 1984 and continually afterwards,  unawares then of the myth of 'Echo'. I'd read the Greek version, but knew nothing about the version that Nathan Salant Schwartz wrote about in Narcissism, Character Disorders and Transformation until about 1987 as best I can date it.

When I read his version of the myth, I had many memories of 'hearing myself' repeat back, not what I wanted and intended to say, but something else! And this material which was spoken by my mouth, words that  I 'heard myself say', as Theodore Reik had 'heard my voice say' did not at first register as evidence of lack of my own will, and intentionality for a period of several years!

 In the early 1980's I had begun to experience being unable to initiate communication with one man, who was not a significant person in my life, it puzzled me that I felt a very strong need to talk to that man, to get to know him and that proved to be impossible, I felt prevented, stifled, prohibited literally. There was a reason which I found out over a period of more than a decade. But the same  lack of being able to initiate communication with a man drifted without my noticing it myself into my personal life:  a person that was very significant in my life.  Being 'side tracked' had always been there but I'd not noticed it, but being constantly thwarted when I needed to say my own words, only trying to address the painful situation in my body and the changes in my mind, caused me to establish that the sense of being stifled, prevented from speaking about my personal situation had been my 'normal life' always. Then in about 1983 I went into therapy and over a period of time became aware of not being able to initiate and maintain any kind of communication about my own specific life situations with psychiatrists either. I left sessions without having said anything I'd intended to talk about, to try to get information about, and it took several years to realize this was the same sense of being 'prevented, prohibited and restrained' from being heard and related to by them, that I'd experienced with the first man. There was a number of therapists,  even a Jungian psychiatrist who validated my hunch that there is really a process of  human individuation and that the 'symptoms' I'd read on a medical chart of mine were non-Jungian terms for what Jung had named 'meaningful coincidence' or synchronicity. I had become aware that these 'symptoms' were creating a kind of information, using my memories, my experiences and my very, very unique private moments when no other person was present as material.

That's a simplistic way to put a very complex situation, because inner content seems to come from one mind, from one memory and it would never have occurred to me to consider that all 'thought/memory retrievals' and intentionality was not generated by 'me'. That which was 'transmitted' and what was self generated was not easy to distinguish!

There is a kind of truth in the story of Eve being made while Adam slept, from a part of his own body so that Adam said she was 'bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, there seems to be a bond where the two are really one, when they are working in the drama of the Big Picture. The inner content that is 'reflected', or 'projected' is almost impossible to detect and it seems to be impossible to explain this to a very, very highly projective individual that literally 'projects' certain inner content onto the outer world.

It's the kind of inner content that is not 'logical, rational, orderly, sequential' but it does have information in it, sometimes symbolic, quite often in a parable like relationship to the specific life, sometimes quite literally true in certain aspects, also to the specific life. There's such specificity involved that it's virtually impossible to describe one event, in isolation. I've had a few however, seemingly trivial events in which the very specificity spoke to me more than an encyclopedia could about my life on this planet.