TIME SLIPS

A funny thing happened on the way to the checkout

2011-10-23T14:45:00.003+02:00

A fresh story from one of our European readers.
I believe it's still warm. ;)

This happened just about an hour ago, on October 23, 2011, at around 13:50 CET. I decided to write about it right away so I don't forget about it.

I was waiting in a queue for the checkout in my local supermarket. Being early Sunday afternoon there were not many people in the store.

But, there were three queues for checkout. I joined the queue that seemed to have the fewest people, obviously. There were a very short lady in a beige vest and an elderly man right ahead of me.
I had time to observe them well because the checkout employee was taking her time. Then the man dropped a few coins, and the lady ahead of me and I helped him pick them up.

I noticed that the checkout employee wasn't only slow but it was an employee that is usually slightly unpleasant (I shop there every single day, I am familiar with the employees) so I decided to join the other queue, on my left, that seemed to be going faster. The checkout registers are very close to each other, no more than two meters apart.

As it usually happens to me, the woman that was right ahead of me in the new queue suddenly had an enormous amount of merchandise that I hadn't seen earlier. Drat!, I thought and I glanced at the earlier queue, to see if it would be a good idea to return there. I noticed that there were now two or three youngsters behind the lady and the elderly man, so I decided to stay put.

Each of the customers from the other (earlier) queue walked by toward the exit, as there is no other way to get out, so I saw each of one of them. I was vaguely surprised that there were so many walking by - maybe four or five - because I had thought there were only two more people ahead of the lady and the elderly man. So I turned around to see how the earlier queue was progressing, and noticed that the unpleasant employee, right behind my back (like I said, the space in that market is tight), had been replaced by another one, a lady who is usually very nice and fast enough.

I was surprised because I couldn't figure out how this could have happened. To enter the register space and replace her colleague, the employee would have had to enter the boot from my side. She would have had to brush past me and she would have had to ask permission from the people in my queue to do so, because otherwise it would be impossible to enter her boot.

But I forgot all about that when I noticed that the old gentleman and the lady that had been ahead of me were nowhere to be seen! The youngsters that were behind them were still there (I think, or maybe they were different youngsters).

This I can't understand.
The lady and the old man were not together. They would have had to leave the queue independently of each other - but it was almost their turn - and they would have had to walk past me, either towards the exit or towards the third queue (that was further removed from the first two registers).

I wasn't distracted or anything; in fact I was trying to determine which queue was being processed faster, so I was watching attentively. And there weren't all that many people in the shop anyway. Each queue had no more than five or six customers waiting.

I don't understand what happened. When and how did the employee replace the first one? And where did those two customers go?
All of this happened in a matter of five minutes or so.

Interesting. :)
Obviously I have no idea what happened, so I can't help you with that.

If anything similar has happened to any of you reading this, do let us know.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

The Shock

2011-09-24T00:39:00.002+02:00

Scientists appear to have broken the speed of light.

What's next? The speed of thought?

Even the speed of thought isn't faster than... something else.

If nobody else does, I know what I am talking about. :)

Wot strange wordes thou speke... AGAIN and AGAIN

2011-08-17T11:53:00.003+02:00

Well, well...

While checking the status of links in old posts, as we do from time to time, I was suddenly confronted this morning with the following account from the BBC H2G2 website.

We don't normally post entire stories from other websites, but in this case we'll do an exception.

Before reading it, you may want to scroll down and read the words we've marked in orange...

Watch your computer! It may be haunted!
Nearly all industry relies on computers of some sort to do their work. The computer is a revolution - if you want to get somewhere in life, get a computer! Everyone is using them now, - even Ghosts, it would seem.

In May 1988 Alice, a cleaner working in an architect's office, was about to start her shift when she noticed one of the staff computers had been left switched on. She didn't know much herself about computers, but knew it was on from the flickering screen. She stepped closer to the flickering screen but realised it wasn't part of her job and if she switched it off, she may get in trouble as unsaved information might be on there.

The next night she noticed that the same computer still with the same flickering screen was on again, but still ignored it. She made a mental note to ask a higher staff member, when she could, if there was any reason for its late night activity. When she asked Rob, an architect who worked there, he replied that it shouldn't be on. All computers and machinery are shut off after work. The only electricity being used should be the lights and vacuum cleaners!

So, Alice the cleaner remembered what Rob had told her as she went about her nightly cleaning work and, as she came up to room 1b, the office where the computer was, she walked in and reached for the plug. She went to switch it off by the mains but... there was no plug inserted! That was the only wall socket in the small office, so she followed the cords from the back. There was one leading to the keyboard, one leading to the printer and when she eventually found the thick black mains cord, she followed the cable to the mains plug. She startingly came across the machine's plug... not in the mains socket! Confused, she made another mental note to ask about this strange machine.

She made her way for the door and, looking back, she noticed a typed message on the screen, 'Hello'. Now she was even more confused, thinking she must be dreaming, but tripped by the mop bucket and felt it, so she assured herself she wasn't. The next day at closing time, she bumped into Rob, about to leave the building, when she remembered what had happened. She told him

'I Don't know much about computers myself, but I know they're not meant to work when they're switched off!'

Confused, Rob asked what she was referring to, so she explained what happened the last night with the computer in office 1b. He told her this shouldn't Happen; she was right, so he stayed back and watched the computer, and was startled to find that at precisely 9:18PM on May 11th 1988, the screen flicked itself on and displayed this message: 'Thou!'.

This made Rob sit up from his coffee and pay more attention to the computer. 'Thou!' it repeated. Suddenly, it changed its 'tune'...

'Thou hathe comited a grate cryme.'
Confused, Rob wondered what it meant.

'Thou art a godly man who hathe fanciful woman'

Rob smiled.
...'Who Dwelth in myne home' it continued.
'twas a grate cryme to hathe stolen myne home'

So, just think next time you wonder why Does that monitor light stay on for just a few seconds long after I switch off my computer by the mains?...

True Story.

Deja vu?
If not, clearly, you have not read our last post...

Wot strange wordes thou speke...

2011-08-16T21:18:00.023+02:00

Forget John Titor (oh, you already have? never mind, then) - meet Tomas AKA Lukas.

But first let us preface this by an open statement that we do not really believe this story. Of course it is not the only story published here that we have doubts about; it's just that in this case the odds of the story being genuine are even slimmer than in other highly dubious cases.

Still, it is a reported "time travel" case - or rather, a case of transchronological communication (is that a word? - well, now it is) - so there is no reason to exclude it from this florilegium of dimensional oddities.

It was November 1984, and schoolteacher Ken Webster, living in Meadow Cottage, in Dodleston, England, had brought home a computer that he had borrowed from the school where he worked.

A few days later, upon his return home - after having left the computer on - he was greeted by the following message appearing on the screen:

Wot strange wordes thou speke,

although I muste confess that I hath also bene ill schooled...

(Believe it or not, this was not the usual computer lingo back in 1984.)

But there was more:

Thou art goodly man who hath fanciful woman
who dwel in my home...

'twas a great cryme to hath bribed myne house.

Apparently the computer was channelling the mind or spirit of an earlier dweller of Webster's home - or rather, of the inhabitant of a house that had once stood on the site of Meadow Cottage.

The computer-literate spirit introduced himself as Tomas Harden, from 16th century Dodleston.

You can read all of his communications in this fascinating article about Instrumental Transcommunication, by Ernst Senkowski.

Word must have spread in the Yonderworld about Ken's hospitality, because on February 16th, 1985, another old-timer popped in through the overtaxed computer. His name was Lukas Wainman, he wrote, and he had a lot to say about Chester, among other places.

A photo of Lukas' computer-generated message across the ages.

Taken from here.

There are several online websites carrying this story. I know you won't be sorry if you visit this lengthy and highly interesting article by Dr. Adrian Klein and Dr. Robert Neil Boyd, about Suppressing Time Constraints. There is much in it that I don't agree with, but it certainly is extraordinarily interesting.

However, if you are interested in this story, then Ken Webster's own book about it, The Vertical Plane (1989), is a must.

I haven't read it - it appears to be extremely rare - but here are a few excerpts, via this website.

'What would you do if something very strange and bewildering happened to you; something uninvited yet benign; something which happened over and over again and which involved your friends, lover and colleagues? Would you want people to know ? Would you want help in understanding it ? Yes, yes! But my experience suggests you would be wasting your time.

I was living with `D' (my girlfriend) and, for a short period, Nicola (a college friend) in Meadow Cottage, a small terraced house in the village of Dodleston, near Chester. Beginning in the Autumn of 1984, a series of poltergeist events took place, focused on the kitchen area, including the stacking of objects, noises, marks on the walls and `thrown' objects. Although we did not know it at the time, poltergeist events are relatively frequently reported `anomalous' phenomena and are, frankly, rather tedious and disruptive over a period of time.

What made this different was the appearance of `direct' communications in hand written form and, unusually, other communications mediated through a primitive computer. Personal computers were only just appearing in 1984 and, as a school teacher, I had access to primitive BBC `B' computers at school. These machines had around 32k of memory, a word processor on an installed chip and the only means of saving files was to a 5.25" floppy disk on an external drive. No networking, no modem, definitely no Internet.*

One evening, the computer was accidentally left on and, on our return, there was a `message', a poem of sorts. It was treated as a joke of course, but saved to disk anyway. The computer returned to school and we to our sporadic poltergeist events. A different machine, borrowed on another occasion resulted, unexpectedly, in another communication. This time the language had an archaic flavour, seemingly of 17th century Elizabethan English. It wasn't right, linguistically as my colleague Peter Trinder pointed out but the tone was threatening and we felt the joke was now in bad taste.

Setting out, deliberately, to try and catch the hoax meant borrowing yet another computer, checking the disk for preloaded material, checking the house was secure and leaving the computer in the kitchen as before. Another message appeared in the same quirky `mock Tudor' style. In a matter of fact way, over a coffee, a friend suggested, well, replying ... and the results were surprising.

The reply was met with a further response and the two-way communications began in earnest. At the same time Peter Trinder's language investigations into the language style pointed up a coherence and subtlety which was not easily dismissed. But they were not perfect and in one message soon to become notorious in following investigations Peter felt particularly uncomfortable both with the history and the language.

We increased our efforts to uncover any deception; but there was a positive side effect of the computer in the kitchen ... it seemed to calm the `poltergeist' activity. Over a period of around 16 months, other associated phenomena included altered states of consciousness for D and evidence of other communicators (besides the main communicator, one Tomas Harden). Some of these other communications were unreadable (their messages were child-like nonsense and often angry); others were coherent but seemed completely contemporary and designed to unsettle. Not all messages were on the computer; they appeared on paper that was lying around, the walls or the floor. Some messages seemed unfinished unsigned as if the writer had been disturbed.'

Admit it: it's a fun story.

And, I must say, judging by the excerpts, Ken's book must be highly entertaining, too. I mean this sincerely, with no double meaning anywhere.

I am more than ready to believe that he did not perpetrate a hoax.

Someone else did.

But, in the name of intellectual honesty and spiritual freedom, I am also as happy as ever to admit that:

a) anything is possible;

and

b) I know nothing.

* Judging by this mention of the internet, these words, apparently spoken or written by Ken Webster himself, most definitely aren't from his 1989 book.

ADDENDUM: see the next post.

That strange feeling...

2011-08-09T01:25:00.004+02:00

An interesting comment by a kindly visitor to our blog, Kev (see the previous post), mentioning "eerie half forgotten memories of childhood like a person a place or a TV show, music. Things that were but also never were" (our emphasis) made us think that such feelings have never been explicitly discussed here.

If you have such feelings yourself, there is a text that offers a tentative explanation of such feelings, fragments of dream-like memories, and fleeting shadows of a vision. As a matter of fact, the text has been the subject of an entry in this very blog, but it is likely that many have missed it.

It is a long text, and beautifully written, by Philip K. Dick.

It is not science fiction (although it does mention it).
And it is not for readers afflicted with a short attention span.

But most of the people who are seriously interested in the topics discussed here probably are unlikely to suffer from it.

Here's the part that might be of interest to those harbouring the feelings described by Kev:

I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called "alternate presents," is continually taking place. The very fact that we can conceptually deal with this notion -- that is, entertain it as an idea -- is a first step in discerning such processes themselves. But I doubt if we will ever be able in any real fashion to demonstrate, to scientifically prove, that such lateral change processes do occur. Probably all we would have to go on would be vestiges of memory, fleeting impressions, dreams, nebulous intuitions that somehow things had been different in some way -- and not long ago but now. We might reflexively reach for a light switch in the bathroom only to discover that it was -- always had been -- in another place entirely. We might reach for the air vent in our car where there was no air vent -- a reflex left over from a previous present, still active at a subcortical level. We might dream of people and places we had never seen as vividly as if we had seen them, actually known them. But we would not know what to make of this, assuming we took time to ponder it at all. One very pronounced impression would probably occur to us, to many of us, again and again, and always without explanation: the acute, absolute sensation that we had done once before what we were just about to do now, that we so to speak lived a particular moment or situation previously -- but in what sense could it be called "previously," since only the present, not the past, was evidently involved? We would have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present, perhaps in precisely the same way, hearing the same words, saying the same words. . . I submit that these impressions are valid and significant, and I will even say this: Such an impression is a clue that at some past time point a variable was changed -- reprogrammed, as it were -- and that, because of this, an alternate world branched off, became actualized instead of the prior one, and that in fact, in literal fact, we are once more living this particular segment of linear time. A breaching, a tinkering, a change had been made, but not in our present -- had been made in our past. Evidently such an alteration would have a peculiar effect on those persons involved; they would, so to speak, be moved back one square or several squares on the board game that constitutes our reality. Conceivably this could happen any number of times, affecting any number of people, as alternative variables were reprogrammed. We would have to go live out each reprogramming along the subsequent linear time axis, but to the Programmer, whom we call God -- to him the results of the reprogramming would be apparent at once. We are within time and he is not. Thus, too, this might account for the sensation people get of having lived past lives. They may well have, but not in the past; previous lives, rather, in the present. In perhaps an unending repeated and repeated present, like a great clock dial in which grand clock hands sweep out the same circumference forever, with all of us carried along unknowingly, yet dimly suspecting.

Do not miss the rest of it.
Science fiction sometimes can come closer to science than to fiction.

What's with the Moon?

2011-07-21T06:22:00.010+02:00

A dear and highly respected friend has let us know that a number of individuals around the world have noted they had seen something odd about the position of the Moon on or around July 19th of this year. There is a thread dedicated to this on a website that used to be quite popular in these woods, but not lately. What's more, the very fact that the thread was posted there was reason for severe scepticism and mild eye-rolling.

However, it turned out that our friend had experienced this "phenomenon" herself (and posted about it in a reply to the thread).

She said she had been "startled" by the position of the Moon compared to where it "should" have been, taking into account the normal trajectory of the Moon. It appeared to her that it rose earlier than it should have, and significantly more to the North and to the East than she would have expected.

She checked it against her faithful Stellarium, but did not notice anything particularly eye-catching. If there was an anomaly, it wasn't apparent at first sight.

That she, of all people, would claim something of the sort is unusual. It is so exceptionally unusual that we decided to record it here just in case anyone reading this may have experienced the same thing.

If you have, let us know.

Our friend said it well herself: whatever it was, it couldn't have been physical (or everybody alive would have noticed it... and not only by the position of the Moon!). Something must have affected the perception and/or perceptual memory.

N.B. There have been heavy clouds for the past few nights where this blog is currently being written, so no such observations could be made here. The only thing that could be interpreted as unusual is the fact that time - you know, the stuff that does not exist but we measure it in minutes and hours? - seems to have been surprisingly long-lasting for the past day or two. What felt like an hour turned out to have lasted no more than 15 - 20 minutes or so.

ADDENDUM (August 20, 2011):

We still don't know - and haven't really researched it it, not in depth - what could be the cause of the perceived anomaly of the Moon on the date described in the post. But it appears that something is amiss with the "secular eccentricity of Moon's orbit" (check the search results). A reader who, for some reason, wishes to remain anonymous, pointed us to a PDF article by an Italian researcher. (Beware: it is highly technical, as it to be expected.).

I must admit I am not into deciphering the technical lingo in fields that I am not particularly interested in. But somewhere a reader of this blog could be interested in it and able to understand what exactly it all means.

We were also pointed to a YouTube video bearing the illustrious name of Cornell University.

I wish said university's findings were explained in the video, but they are not. It's just images of the Moon, embellished with a few personal remarks by the video uploader, I assume.

The video, however, seems to allude to the findings of the same researcher who is the author of the article above, Lorenzo Iorio (not "Lorio"). But judging by the details provided in the article, he works for the Italian ministry of Education and Research - not for Cornell University.

Anyway, here you go.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

A portal to another world?

2011-07-10T00:50:00.025+02:00

There seem to be quite a few of those lately.
But this one - the village of Bugarach, in the south of France (near Rennes-le-Chateau)- has the distinction of fast becoming one of the centres of the approaching culmination of the 2012 frenzy. In case you miss it, a film is being made about it.

However, it is the nearby mountain, the Pech de Bugarach (or Pech de Thauze, as it was previously called), that is supposed to be the centre of power - (another) magic mountain.

The Pech de Bugarach (or Pech de Thauze) as seen from the village of Bugarach.

(The village is just behind your "back". Turn around and you'll see it.)

At least one person, Daniel Bettex - a Swiss airport security officer - did enter "another world" at the Pech de Bugarach. Quite literally. He died there.

If you travel almost exactly 100 kilometres to the west, however, you will find another suspected "portal to another world": the castle of Miglos. Little seems to be known about this particular aspect of the picturesquely ruined chateau; the information comes from this website you have already visited (we hope).

But, if nothing else, the link above, leading directly to the castle, will provide you with glorious panoramic views from the castle itself. And time spent for beauty is always a good investment. :)

P.S. Most of the (at the time of this writing still relatively few) websites that carry the story about Bugarach mention the apparent similarity between the place names Bugarach and the Bogogorch alluded to by Nicholas Roerich, a famous Russian-born traveller and mystic (not to mention a fabulous painter), in his description of a particularly dangerous mountain range in the Altai.

This speculation appears to be quoted verbatim from Michel Lamy's book, Jules Verne, initié et initiateur (1984), p. 203.

I do not have Roerich's book, so I don't know whether he ever explained the etymology of this place name. However, it strikes me that it sounds uncannily similar to the Russian words bog (бог, God, with the final o possibly acting as a possessive pronoun, i.e. belonging to) and gora (гора, mountain): God's mountain(s).

Please, note that I am by no means knowledgeable in Russian; nobody in this team is. But I thought I'd mention it all the same. If others can speculate, why shouldn't we?

Anyway, I doubt very much that the vague similarity between these two place names is anything more than that: a passing similarity.
But I could be wrong. Of course. It wouldn't even be the first time.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

The Art of Jumping Timelines

2011-06-22T03:01:00.006+02:00

The title is not ours, it is borrowed from this article by Tom Kenyon. The article explains, in detail, how to go about it, in the author's opinion.

The "secret", in a nutshell, is this:

The task here is to be true to your vision while paying attention to what the current reality is showing you. It is not about pretending. It is about facing reality as it presents itself to you while simultaneously holding a higher vision. In other words, you deal with the reality of your life while simultaneously holding the vision of a different life. This is the art.

But do visit the page and read it in its entirety.

It probably has the type of information that you came here looking for.

P.S. No, she is not back.

Perhaps some other time. :-)

The Sicily Times

2011-06-16T04:40:00.007+02:00

A few days ago, an odd phenomenon was reported from Sicily, specifically from Catania. An unusually multitudinous quantity of its inhabitants arrived on time for their appointments.

Naturally, such deviant behaviour caused some alarm, and upon investigation it was discovered that apparently many personal and household digital time-keeping devices - all too many to attribute it to a "coincidence" - had jumped around 15 to 20 minutes ahead. Other domestic appliances malfunctioned, too.

The anomaly was explained (in Italian) - sort of - by a biophysicist, Settimio Grimaldi, who speculated that the phenomenon may have had something to do with the electromagnetic emissions from the M.U.O.S., which may have interfered with time keeping devices.

Others have tried to blame it on solar winds and/or electromagnetic activity associated with the Etna volcano.
Still others, of course, have offered other, more or less colourful explanations, among which the imminent end of the world features prominently.

But of course. If Sicilians happen to be on time, the end of the world is nigh. Everyone knows that!
Gotta love those patriots. :-)

To read a first-hand report on seriously misbehaving clocks, do not miss: Lost (in) time.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

How to switch to another time-line

2011-06-02T19:07:00.007+02:00

Since we published our post about Inelia Benz's claims - and then the addendum regarding her past affiliation with Scientology - the tone of the emails coming in has changed. Now, most of the relevant comments either begin or end (and understandably so) with this all-important question:

"But how, how, HOW do you shift to another time-line?"

Frankly, I don't know how Inelia Benz does it. You may find out - or not (I really don't know) - on that website we linked to in that earlier post.

However, this blog is full of stories with subtle hints indicating how to do it - or attempt to do it.
You could start here.

You might also want to read a very relevant post on our sister blog.

You also should remember this: exertion, force (of "will") will get you nowhere.

A totally relaxed, un-thinking state of mind following persistent, unwavering and fully felt visualisation - or rather, relaxed immersion, with all your senses, in the situation visualised - might get you somewhere. (And I don't mean the madhouse - not necessarily.)

Time does not exist?

2011-05-27T20:08:00.014+02:00

Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door.

Now I know that I could have walked through walls.

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn (1963)

The phrase has become something of a mantra of the brave new world that many people feel we're heading to but nobody really knows where it is, what it is, when it is. You'll find it plastered all over different forums and blogs and websites dealing with the enigma of Time (or rather, with our unwillingness to accept the seemingly inevitable loss of everything and everyone we hold dear): Time does not exist (often accompanied by a jubilant exclamation mark or two).

It is understandable that the discussions ensuing such a statement rarely lead to a satisfying answer. Semantics gets in the way.

You see, "time" most definitely does exist. If it didn't, you wouldn't be sitting in that chair of yours right now. Or anywhere, for that matter.
For what we call "time" is our perception of duration, of sequences in which any given event unfolds.

There is no "time" outside our perception; that much appears to be true.

But we are bound - perhaps not inevitably (which is the whole point of this blog) - to this mode of perception, and "time" is the name of this mode of perception - no more, no less.

What a bore this post is, right? :)

Still, if it can help you avoid unproductive pitfalls and wild goose chases in the future, the time I invested in it will be more than worth it.

And if it can make you think - really, really think - about the true weight of words, the building blocks of the stage on which we perform our lives, both internally and externally, the building blocks of the prison that makes our physical existence possible, I will have earned some serious bonus points in eternity. :-)

Just in case you do want to read an interesting discussion about the (non)existence of Time, go here.

And, of course, do not miss this post: The End of Time?

You have control over your timeline

2011-05-22T18:17:00.030+02:00

That's what a woman called Inelia Benz (among others) is claiming.

It's the first time I've heard of her. She comes across as quite likeable, but I am reserving judgement on the veracity of her claims. (Not that the timeline part sounds particularly outlandish to me.)

She does talk about "them" and "enslavement", which is not necessarily how I see things (conspiracy talk usually repels me). Then again, there are many things in this blog that I do not necessarily advocate or even believe, but are presented here for your consideration (or just entertainment).

If you're interested - and she does speak in a lively manner, easy to listen to - go here.

"Each individual on this planet has control over their timeline"

The part about timelines starts at 12:46 and ends at 14:00.

P.S. The link works in some browsers and in others it doesn't.

If it doesn't work for you, go to this address and find the link to the interview within the quote in the very first post.
And by the way, you may find the thread in question contains many very valuable, intriguing and well thought posts, (~~relatively~~ not at all) free of ignorant and aggressive adolescent bickering to be found on some other websites.
I know I found it very interesting.

EDIT (May 28, 2011):

We have received a number of emails telling us that Ms. Benz is/was associated with Scientology.

Personally - and I know I speak for all of us here - I don't mind anyone being associated with any movement, as long as the affiliation in question is not demonstrably and unambiguously harmful to the individual or to others.

However, since this blog covers a subject that has direct bearing on the mind/consciousness, we feel we should alert our readers to Ms. Benz's past association with Scientology.

Here is what she had to say when asked about it (not by us):

My relationship with scientology is very different. I was in the Church in the UK for a year in 2003-4 as a staff member. I basically went in on a personal mission to learn as much as possible and then get out fast. It was pretty tough, and I emerged bruised (as many do). But I do not regret the experience. I agree with Bill that Hubbard was a brilliant man to begin with, and was compromised after the Church was fully established.

I've also practiced Buddhism for 14 years, I've practiced martial arts, meditation, and have conducted a lot of my own research into the best tools and methods that a person can use to raise their awareness and overall vibrational level.

No-one has a monopoly on truth, and it's all available to everyone who wants to look. Wise men and women have been teaching this for thousands of years.

Taken from here.

EDIT (June 4th, 2011):
Don't miss our latest post, How to go to another time-line.

In God's Good Time

2011-05-04T06:08:00.009+02:00

Here's a teaser - an excerpt - from a very interesting text (a lecture delivered in 1977) by Philip K. Dick, titled "If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others".

It will tease you, certainly; or it will comfort you, annoy you, intrigue you. You decide.

The great medieval Arabic philosopher, Avicenna, wrote that God does not see time as we do; i.e. for him there is no past nor present nor future. Now, supposing Avicenna is correct, let us imagine a situation in which God, from whatever vantage point he exists at, decides to intervene into our space-time world; i.e. break through from his timeless realm into human history. But if there is only omnipresent reality from his viewpoint, then he can as easily break through into what for us is the past as he can break through into what for us is the present or future. It is exactly like a chess player gazing down at the chessboard; he can move any of his pieces that he wishes. Following Avicenna's reasoning, we can say that God, in desiring, for example, to bring about the Second Advent, need not limit the event to our present or future; he can breach our past -- in other words, change our past history; he can cause it to have happened already. And this would be true for any change he wished to make, large or small. For instance, suppose an event in our year A.D. 1970 does not meet with God's idea of how it all should go. He can obliterate it or tinker with it, improve it, whatever he wishes, even at a prior point in linear time. This is his advantage.

I submit to you that such alterations, the creation or selection of such so-called "alternate presents," is continually taking place. ...

Want to know more?
OK, just one tidbit more:

Often people claim to remember past lives; I claim to remember a different, very different, present life. I know of no one who has ever made that claim before, but I rather suspect that my experience is not unique; what perhaps is unique is the fact that I am willing to talk about it.

Want more still?
You know where to click.

EDIT (May 18, 2011):

The link now points to an archived copy.

The original article appears to have been teleported to a parallel dimension.

The Last of the Romans

2011-04-16T15:16:00.024+02:00

The Romans conquered half the world in their time. Everybody knows (or should know) that.

But the more I read the more it appears they weren't content with simply securing the glory (such as it was) of Rome for a thousand years, give or take a hundred. They're still there.

Still where?

In York, for example. And in a region of England called the Norfolk Broads, with particular attachment to Wroxham, the "Capital of the Broads".

I learned about the ongoing Roman occupation of the Broads from Colin Wilson's Mysteries which is an almost inexhaustible mine of juicy data. According to his meticulous endnotes, Wilson learned about it from (or at least refers to) the book Unsolved Mysteries: a Collection of Weird Problems (From the Past), published by Valentine Dyall, the actor, in 1954.

But there is extensive mention of Wroxham in a much more recent book, Mysteries and Secrets of Time (2007), by Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe. Most accounts about this mysterious site available on the internet seem to refer to this latter book.

And it is a highly interesting book, enticing, intelligently written, endlessly fascinating.

However, it has, in our opinion, one major flaw. It has no reference notes. Which means that we can only relate what supposedly happened there by using borrowed words and interpretations. None of the literary sources mentioned in the book is available (or even mentioned, for that matter) online; and at least one personality discussed as a first-hand witness is strangely missing from The Peerage and other sources where one would expect him to be listed. (But the online availability of many archival resources still is very limited, of course.) And because there are no reference notes, we don't even know where those sources are available.

And what if the authors relied on Dyall's book, as Wilson did?

None of us has read Dyall's book (it's been out of print since the 1950s), but a quick check of said book's reliability reveals there is some cause for worry. Apparently at least one person (Francis Clive-Ross, a respected publisher on the "occult" and a critical thinker) deemed it to be "so heavily fictionalised as to be historically virtually useless".

It's not that we do not believe the authors. Perish the thought. But I, for one, have read Borges - in fact, I am more than a little Borgesian myself - so you will excuse me if I do not jump on this succulent bone of a mystery as enthusiastically as I normally would. Show me the sources, then I'll jump.

So, does that mean there will be no story at all - just the rambling intro about books and Borges? That's it?

No. It is simply a caveat that the story that follows - or rather snippets of stories - will be told relying on other people's accounts of what allegedly happened to other people, with no readily available sources for you to study them yourself.

If you're OK with that, read on.

Apparently there is an army of what appear to be Roman soldiers - from ancient Rome - to be seen around the lake of Wroxham Broad.

As far as we can deduce from the books above, the earliest preserved mention of a possible anomaly in those waters seems to be the report by a Benjamin Curtiss, published in The Archives of the Northfolk, in 1603.

Mr. Curtiss and two friends of his were getting wet "in the great Broad of Wroxham, near unto Hoveton St. John" (see map below).

They were swimming across the lake when "strangely enough we felt our feet touch the bottom". That would have been strange because the water was usually much deeper there - from 12 to 14 feet, according to Curtiss.

Next thing they knew, they found themselves surrounded by an arena - an amphitheatre - with seats and all. The water had disappeared from beneath their feet; and they were themselves dressed as Roman officers. "What is more astonishing still," writes Mr. Curtiss, they were not surprised at all; in fact, they felt quite accustomed to it all. (Yet I did not wonder...)

Assuming all of the above really happened as described, it certainly opens a fascinating problem.

There seems never to have been a Roman amphitheatre at the location of Curtiss' swim - as far as we know. (But that could very well change in the future.)
If so, that would mean - as the Fanthorpes noted in their book - that Curtiss and his friends displaced themselves not only in time but in space, thereby violating the laws of the world as presented by the Minkowski equations (see We'll always have Paris... or whatever it was for this strange apparent phenomenon).

If so, my guess would be they entered somebody's memory field.

View Larger Map

According to Curtiss' description, the part where they saw the Roman arena emerge from the lake would have been the upper part of the lake as seen on the map above. They were swimming from the river bank, on your right side, towards Hoveton, on the upper left side of the map. (You can enlarge or navigate the map from within this post.)

Fast forward to April 16, 1709, when the report by the Rev. Thomas Josiah Penston of an odd picnic is said to have been published in The Gentleman's Gazette.

Rev. Penston and his friends were having a picnic by "a beautiful lake in Norfolk, about eleven miles from the ancient city of Norwich", when they were rudely interrupted by a procession of no less than 700 or 800 Roman horsemen, followed by several hundreds of men in chains. The noisy parade, complete with trumpeters and drummers, included ballistic machines, prancing stallions and lions. At the lakeside they vanished, says Penston.

But that was not the last of the Romans.

In 1829, Lord Percival Durand abruptly met a "curious old man" while he was on his yacht, Amaryllis, near the eastern entrance of the same lake.

There follows a sentence in the Fanthorpes' book that I find exceedingly puzzling:

"The weird old fellow who appeared to Percival Durand's yachting party on July 21, 1829, claimed to be Flavius Mantus, the Custos rotulorum..."

Claimed to be? He spoke to them?

Apparently. Not only that but he warned them that they were trespassing!

The incident was completed by the apparition of the same old amphitheatre in all its glory.

Incidentally, there appears to be a strangely worded poem, The Legend of the Lake, "attributed to Calvert" and published in the early 18th century, we're told.

While through the trees of yonder lake,

There comes a cavalcade of horsemen near.

Gaze not upon these Romans, friends,

For fear their eyes may meet with thine.

Stand back, well back, and let them pass...

(The poem continues, but in a nutshell: they're dead.)

If you think the poem is weird, wait until you read this news item that was allegedly published in Day's Chronicles of East Anglia, in 1825:

The Royal Progress of Carausius ... has passed... through the village of Wroxham... on its way from Brancaster.

(I don't know about you, but the last part cracked me up. It still does. :))

Unfortunately, there is no mention of what has been omitted and substituted by the suspension points. Usually it is the irrelevant - or perhaps overly lengthy - parts that are excised in this fashion.

But what piece of information could be irrelevant to such a weirdly anachronistic report?

We simply cannot tell.

More on the unending Roman occupation of Britain in one of the next posts. Stay tuned.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Fasten your seatbelts, the Time vortex is coming

2011-04-14T07:18:00.028+02:00

Well, according to this website it is, so don't blame us if you happen to file your taxes too late.

Apparently there is a "time vortex" hovering above Antarctica; and not just any time vortex, but a huge and deadly time vortex - the consequence of some unidentified (and possibly unidentifiable) technology, that may or may not be of terrestrial origin.

Supposedly a spy satellite discovered an ancient man-made structure or apparatus under the ice of Antartica, exactly ten years ago, back in April 2001. The news was "quashed", they say, but an excavation project was started by the USA military, to which other countries objected - formally, no less, which normally means through official channels. Rather startlingly, "an aide to Nicole Fontaine" - the latter was the president of the EU at the time - allegedly issued the following statement:

"If it's something the US military has constructed down there, then they're violating the international Antarctic Treaty. If not, then it's something that's at least 12,000 years old, which is how long ice has covered Antarctica. That would make it the oldest man-made structure on the planet. The Pentagon should heed the calls of Congress and release whatever it's hiding."

However, said "aide to Nicole Fontaine" remains nameless (as far as we know), hence fairly suspect.

It appears that the USA military hauled a giant earth borer, Subterrene (that's original... but hey, at least they didn't call it Spot or Sparky) to the Antarctica, specifically to a secret USA base there.

Subterrene, the giant earth borer

Thereupon followed "a mysterious medical emergency that forced an evacuation of unnamed personnel during the depths of the Antarctic winter" (I may be totally wrong - haven't checked this yet - but wasn't that the woman who discovered she had breast cancer?) and an "unusual" earthquake. Supposedly its epicentre was right where the ancient structure had been spotted.

Then, in November 2002, after much hectic activity in the area and magnetic anomalies galore, a California TV crew filming in the Antarctic went missing.

After more bizarre events, the scientists on Antarctica allegedly "witnessed the creation of a time vortex". They became aware of a "spinning gray fog" which spiralled overhead, apparently displacing clouds and air currents. (This according to an alleged statement by a physicist who was there, Mariann McLein.)

The vortex did not disperse. Instead it ate the weather balloon they sent up to investigate it.

After a few minutes, the team decided to retrieve the balloon. After much effort, they did. And - here comes the climax - the chronometer attached to it read: January 27, 1965.

My guess would be that something messed up the chronometer all right - but it doesn't necessarily follow that, somewhere in that vortex or anywhere near it, was January 27th, 1965.

Nor is the website to which I am referring claiming that it was. My tongue-in-cheek notwithstanding, it is a very well written article, so I'll borrow their conclusion:

If indeed a magnetic time vortex is appearing and disappearing over Antarctica--and if the phenomena [sic] is not natural, but generated by some unknown technology deep under the icecap--it may reveal the physics of time and could potentially allow control of the past, and by implication the future.

The size and location of the alleged "time vortex" on March 20, 2011.

Taken from here.

So, if this was published before it becomes news, and the Time vortex really is there and operational... perhaps this will never become news? :-)

The only way we can determine that is by checking whether this article was intended as an April Fools' joke. If it was, then there is definitely a time vortex fidgeting with our time(s)!

P.S. Don't forget to come back, because I can tell this is going to be SOOO edited in the next few days!

P.P.S. Let the record show that other members of this team are opposing my tone (even though it's quite benevolent!).

"Must you be so cynical?" asked one of them.

Yes, I must. Somebody has to be, unless we want legitimate wonders to be diluted by a deluge of fake ones.

And nobody would be more willing or eager to admit the error of my ways than myself.

ADDENDUM (September 9, 2011):

Yes, finally - here's the edit I promised.
Of course, it's highly probable you won't like it... unless you're a fan of finding your path by the light of the truth, instead of being bogmired in a morass of fiction or deceptive half-truths.

Here are my preliminary findings so far.

* Mariann McLein may very well be a USA physicist, as claimed, but it seems somewhat odd that her name should appear only in search results that lead to this "time vortex" story. No bibliography, no resume, no nothing... She appears in versions of this very story only.
It may be too hasty of me, but I have concluded that: a) either she is not a particularly prominent - hence credible - member of the physicists' community; or b) she does not exist at all.
If you have evidence to the contrary, by all means, send it to us, please.

* The second discovery is as dismal as it is amusing (and I am kicking myself as I type this, for not having searched the web before writing this entry in the first place).
Judging by the date of this article, the story above was first reported no later (but probably sooner) than January 2004. It is seven years old at least.
Why did it only make a splash now? (I know, I know: it's the time vortex's fault.)
Worst of all, it appears that it originally appeared on the English Pravda website.
Need I say more?

Possibly.
I just can't think of anything else to say right now.
If and when I do, I'll be back.

On the bright side, however, at least the article mentions a few people, like Nikolai A. Kozyrev, or Lavrentiy Beria himself, whose identity has been firmly established, and we have history - in the latter's case a very bloody one - to prove it.

It is an interesting article, I'll give it that. It is much more interesting than this rant, that's for sure.
Go ahead and read it. You probably won't be sorry.
Here's a teaser:

A tragedy occurred on August 30, 1989: an extremely strong explosion sounded at the Institute's branch office on the Anjou islands. The explosion destroyed not only the experimental module of 780 tons but also the archipelago itself that covered the area of 2 square kilometers.

According to one of the versions of the tragedy, the module with three experimenters collided with a large object, probably an asteroid, in the parallel world or heading toward the parallel world. Having lost its propulsion system, the module probably remained in the parallel world.

The last record made in the framework of the experiment and kept at the Institute archives says:
"We are dying but keep on conducting the experiment. It is very dark here; we see all objects become double, our hands and legs are transparent, we can see veins and bones through the skin. The oxygen supply will be enough for 43 hours, the life support system is seriously damaged. Our best regards to the families and friends!"

Then the transmission suddenly stopped...

I told you it was interesting.
Too bad it was published in English Pravda.

Yet I did not wonder

2011-04-09T21:38:00.013+02:00

"... but I was beginning to feel as though we were walking in a dream".

Another Garden, Another Time

One would expect a person to be very confused, perhaps even alarmed, when experiencing a "time slip", an incongruous displacement in time(space).

Yet often that seems not to be the case. There are cases where an odd state of acceptance seems to overcome the "slipper" at the time of the experience.

I find that particularly interesting and somewhat - if still mysteriously - revealing of the mechanisms underlying (mis)perception of timespace.

Among the stories posted here, two are very explicit about this oddly calm state of mind.

Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me.

The Ultimate Tourist

Out of Mind?

Now think: aren't you yourself familiar with such an all-accepting state of mind?

Of course you are. You react like that quite often - in your dreams.

The most extraordinary things can happen, yet you accept them because you know - in your dream - why they make perfect sense, or are for some other reason acceptable to you.

Dreams are a mystery, to be sure. For one thing, there are various kinds of dreams - sub- and superconscious expressions of your Self, wish-fulfillment dreams, even prophetic dreams, etc. - seemingly unrelated to each other.

The one thing that unites them is the brain wave frequency: the Theta rhythm. In other words, the frequency range between 4 and 7 Hz of electromagnetic waves propelled by your neurons. (Think of your neurons - there are billions of them - as the keepers of your brain's electrical powerhouse.)
The usual waking state wave frequency, the Alpha rhythm, falls in the range of 8 - 12 Hz. (You can read more about brain wave frequencies here.)

Am I implying that these people were somehow dreaming awake?

No, certainly not in the usual sense of this term, by which the dream images are "unreal", as distinctly separate from the waking "reality". But then, we must keep in mind that dreams themselves, even after centuries of exploration, remain a mystery. There is no one theory that explains them all.

Which also means that some of the dream images may very well be "real"; it's just the plane of that reality that escapes our daily wakeful reasoning.

Theta brain waves can be induced by various methods. This is not the time (and perhaps not the place) to discuss those methods. But certainly it is conceivable that some source of electromagnetic activity extraneous to the brain could provoke them. (Which is why the data listed at the bottom of this page are so important!)

It is also perfectly conceivable that the waking mind, by its own resources, can slip into the Theta rhythm. (After all, various meditation techniques can produce just that.)

Of one thing I am certain: these images are not hallucinations or dreams, again in the usual sense of the term. They appear to be simply glimpses of the surrounding, ever-present greater Reality that the waking mind usually keeps from us.

We will be writing more about this in one of the next posts, where we'll discuss the "markers of Time's undoing".

The vision in Fotheringhay church

2011-04-01T19:39:00.012+02:00

There is a fascinating - and now quite famous - story in Colin Wilson's wonderful book Mysteries, about a woman who was able to peek beyond the current "veil" of Time. And the cause of this seems to have been the shock provoked by an accident.

She was Jane O'Neill, an English school-teacher, who had been rattled by the sight of a traffic accident, after which she took some time off work to regain her spirits.

It was during this period of convalescence that she and the friend with whom she was staying visited a church in Fotheringhay (or Fotheringay, which appears to be more correct), the village famous for the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 (although I remain unconvinced that this gruesome historical fact absolutely must have something to do with what follows).

Jane took great interest in the church, taking in all the sights.

After she and her friend returned to the hotel where they were staying, the friend went on to read (aloud) some more about the church from a guide book.

It was then that this odd story really began. Apparently Jane and her friend, while they had been in the same church, had not seen the same church...

Here's how it all started, in Jane's own words (with a few minor omissions):

In October 1973 I was the first person to arrive at a serious accident; a car had driven head-on into a coach behind which I was travelling. I pulled the passengers from the wreck, waiting with them till the ambulances arrived. Afterwards, with my hands covered with blood, I drove to London Airport to pick up a friend.

Driving home later that night I began to 'see' all over again the dreadful injuries of the passengers. They continued for days. I am usually a very sound sleeper, but I now found I could not sleep at all. The doctor said I was suffering from shock. I was away from school for five days. A fellow teacher invited me for the half-term holiday to her cottage in Norfolk, where several inexplicable things happened. I would be sitting in her living room and would suddenly see very clearly before me a vivid picture. It would last a couple of seconds. (...) I do not remember the sequence of these sights, but I remember them very clearly. After one I told Shirley: "I have just seen you in the galleys." As I hardly knew her I was astonished when she replied. "That's not surprising. My ancestors were Huguenots and were punished by being sent to the galleys".

Two months after the accident Jane and her friend visited Fotheringhay church.

View Larger Map

Jane spent some time admiring a picture of the Crucifixion, which was arched at the top, with a dove painted in the middle of the arch. Later, in their hotel, the friend read aloud passages from an essay where it said that infinity is sometimes symbolised by a straight line meeting in arch. Jane remarked that the description sounded similar to the arch on the picture they had seen in the church.

As it turned out, the friend had seen no such picture. Jane decided to phone the vicar to ask him about the picture. She was told - by the postmistress - that the village had no vicar, but the posmistress apparently knew the church as the back of her hand, because she arranged flowers there every Sunday. And the posmistress had seen no such painting either. There was, however, a panel with a painted dove behind the altar.

Two years later Jane and Shirley revisited the church in Fotheringhay. The exterior was as Jane remembered it; but the interior, says she, was such that she had "no recollection at all of having been inside that church. It was much smaller than the one I had been and there was no crucifixion. The dove - to my amazement - was not the one I had seen; this one is in a cloud, and its wings are outstretched, not curved."

Naturally, Jane was much intrigued by these events, and started reading about Fotheringhay church. In Joan Forman's book Haunted East Anglia she discovered that there had been reports of people hearing music coming from inside that same church when it was empty of people.

Eventually, Jane received a written confirmation of what she had seen - or though she had seen. A historian, Tom Litchfield, described to her in a letter the history of the building. The present church was only a part - a nave - of the original building; the rest had been pulled down in 1533. And a print from 1821, depicting the interior of the church, showed arched panels joined by a painting with a dove with outstretched wings.

In short, what Jane O'Neill had seen seemed to correspond exactly to the appearance of the church as it once was.

This phenomenon is called retrocognition - literally "back-knowledge".

But what causes it?

In his book Mysteries, which should be essential reading for anyone interested in this sort of experience, Colin Wilson surmises (p. 364) that the key to this experience was the shock that Jane suffered when confronted with the horror of the traffic accident. It blew open something - some "channel" in her - that had been clogged up until then.

However, it is important to note that at the time of the "vision" itself Jane was probably quite relaxed. In fact, based on my own experience, I would go as far as to posit that a state of relaxed un-thinking only is conducive to visions (or in my case, auditory "precognition") - when it follows a strain of some sort.

Then again, there are cases when no strain at all seems to have been involved.

The conditions leading to the opening of such "channels" seems to be just as individual as everything else.

Still, there appear to be certain identifiable "markers" of Time's undoing.

The Disappearing (and Reappearing) Tibetan

2011-03-24T19:23:00.019+01:00

Few people have had quite as interesting a life as Alexandra David-Néel (1868 -- 1969), the French-born explorer.

There are books about her, and many more books by her - and quite influential books they turned out to be.

In one of her works, With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet, she mentions, among many other interesting tidbits, the case of a young man who disappeared from view in circumstances that seem opposed to the laws of physics as we know them.

As you will see, this case differs, or so it seems, from any other mentioned so far in this blog. It could not be called a dimensional anomaly, properly speaking - certainly not in the same sense as the other cases described so far.

Still, after careful consideration we decided to include it here because there is simply much too much that we - we as a civilisation - do not know about our being on this Earth and about the modalities of its appearance, to omit it on the grounds of iffy categorisations.

The story appears within a very interesting lengthy passage on the formation of thought forms among Tibetan mystics and "magicians".

Here it goes, in A. D. N.'s own words.

As I have said, some apparitions are created on purpose either by a lengthy process resembling that described in the former chapter on the visualization of Yidam or, in the case of proficient adepts, instantaneously or almost instantaneously.

In other cases, apparently the author of the phenomenon generates it unconsciously, and is not even in the least aware of the apparition being seen by others.

In connection with this kind of visualization or thought-form creation, I may relate a few phenomena which I have witnessed myself.

A young Tibetan who was in my service went to see his family. I had granted him three weeks' leave, after which he was to purchase a food supply, engage porters to carry the loads across the hills, and come back with the caravan.

Most likely the fellow had a good time with his people. Two months elapsed and still he did not return. I thought he had definitely left me.

Then I saw him one night in a dream. He arrived at my place clad in a somewhat unusual fashion, wearing a sun hat of foreign shape. He had never worn such a hat.

The next morning, one of my servants came to me in haste. "Wangdu has come back," he told me. "I have just seen him down the hill."

The coincidence was strange. I went out of my room to look at the traveller.

The place where I stood dominated a valley. I distinctly saw Wangdu. He was dressed exactly as I had seen him in my dream. He was alone and walking slowly up the path that wound up the hill slope. I remarked that he had no luggage with him and the servant who was next me answered: "Wangdu has walked ahead, the load-carriers must be following."

We both continued to observe the man. He reached a small chörten, walked behind it and did not reappear.

The base of this chörten was a cube built in stone, 279 less than three feet high, and from its needle-shaped top to the ground, the small monument was no more than seven feet high. There was no cavity in it. Moreover, the chörten was completely isolated: there were neither houses, nor trees, nor undulations, nor anything that could provide a hiding in the vicinity.

My servant and I believed that Wangdu was resting for a while under the shade of the chörten. But as time went by without his reappearing, I inspected the ground round the monument with my field-glasses, but discovered nobody. Very much puzzled I sent two of my servants to search for the boy. I followed their movements with the glasses but no trace was to be found of Wangdu nor of anybody else.

That same day a little before dusk the young man appeared in the valley with his caravan. He wore the very same dress and the foreign sun hat which I had seen in my dream, and in the morning vision.

Without giving him or the load-carriers time to speak with my servants and hear about the phenomenon, I immediately questioned them. From their answers I learned that all of them had spent the previous night in a place too far distant from my dwelling for anyone to reach the latter in the morning. It was also clearly stated that Wangdu had continually walked with the party.

During the following weeks I was able to verify the accuracy of the men's declarations by inquiring about the time of the caravan's departure, at the few last stages where the porters were changed. It was proved that they had all spoken the truth and had left the last stage together with Wangdu, as they said.

The modality, the appearance of the young Tibetan's disappearance, if you'll forgive the hapless pun, is practically identical to some of the "vanishing" stories mentioned here - notably the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst (which, however, seems to have been a particularly well executed abduction and/or murder) and the account about Paula Welden's vanishing (possibly also a murder), in 1950.

To refresh your memory: Bathurst famously "walked around the horses" into thin air - or so it was reported - while Paula Welden reportedly vanished when she walked around a rocky outcrop. She simply never reappeared.

But the similarity ends there. As you can see, A. D. N. interpreted this peculiar incident as having to do with the creation of thought forms.

Then again, there is a whole line of thought that claims that everything we see or do is a mental construction - a "thought form". The only difference would be that instead of doing it consciously and purposefully we do it mostly in a haphazard or at least consciously uncontrolled manner.

According to this line of thought - and many of the stories here seem to corroborate it - appearance is nothing: a flicker on a flimsy surface, a projection.

And yet, appearance is the very base of our daily reality, and the measuring stick by which we gauge the "reality" of reality.

And this is what warrants the inclusion of this peculiar story here, whatever the origin of the phenomenon described.

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS:

The Scream (and within in it another story, Heard Accident Before it Happened)
The Other One
My Body, Myself?

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Whatever happened to the Roman soldiers of York?

2011-03-21T03:52:00.013+01:00

Why haven't we posted a word about that famous story yet? a concerned reader asked.

You know, the one about the poor chap who went into a cellar to do some maintenance or repair work and must have drilled too far into the wall or something, because an entire company of Roman soldiers, not to mention the horse, came out of the wall - surely you've heard about it?

If you haven't, don't worry.

Either the Search function doesn't work properly, or the reader somehow missed the search results, but we certainly did write about it, albeit within a post discussing a different matter.

Here it is, complete with resurrected links.

What is (Not) a Ghost?

P.S. If you're looking for ancient Romans in Great Britain, you might want to have a peep at these, too: The Last of the Romans.

N.B. Please, excuse the messy and generally deteriorated appearance of this blog.

Yesterday Blogger must have suffered some particularly ill effects of the full moon, because it almost ate our blog entirely. We have spent two days trying to undo the damage, but it appears to be a lobotomy.

High time for Google to renew its brain - or at least some of its local grey cells...

A Matter of Gravity

2011-03-19T11:22:00.016+01:00

Here's a thought from a nice little compendium of "shocking" facts from the recently published book, The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow:

"No matter how thorough our observation of the present, the (unobserved) past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."

Ah yes - observation. The physics equivalent of the Holy Grail... and just as elusive.

What is observation - this force that makes infinite potentialities and probabilities collapse into one observed "reality"?

It is an acknowledgement of sorts, yes - but does it have anything to do with consciousness, in the (admittedly limited) sense that we understand it?

The father of the "many worlds theory", Hugh Everett, is said to have vehemently refused the idea.

Apparently, very many physicists still do.

But it should also be said that Everett's conception of consciousness itself was, inevitably, limited.

A friend of mine, also a physicist (the same one that shared a pizza and Australia's Next Top Model with me), recently said something that is now stuck in my mind like a silly tune, a jingle that won't go away:

OBSERVATION = GRAVITY

GRAVITY = OBSERVATION

The problem is, gravity itself is much more of a mystery than apple-stricken Isaac Newton and his followers (especially his followers) would have us believe.

Yet this same force seems to be dictating Time - arranging timespace - itself.

Something to ponder about on this almost-spring Saturday, when so many people seem to be expecting so many terrible wonders from our dear puny little Moon.

The Moon (who else?) from Georges Méliès' 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon.

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Is it the Faultlines' Fault?

(A) Dare

2011-03-04T23:04:00.029+01:00

If you are feeling antsy and would like to actually experiment with timespace on your own, this may be your lucky day. Your journey starts here.

ESSENTIAL LUGGAGE (10 items):

1. unwavering belief that it is actually possible to manipulate your position in time/space beyond what seems possible or normal

2. a humble mind unencumbered by what it reads

("Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"... Does this ring any bells?)

4. A well-developed body awareness and body memory
(more on this in some other post, perhaps, but it's exactly what it sounds like: how do you feel - in your body - the reality of any given moment, of whatever is happening... and how it is happening?)

5. fearlessness

6.-10: perseverance

OPTIONAL (but highly advisable);

- a joyful heart

- gratitude

Man can prove the existence of a dimensionally larger world simply by focusing his attention on an invisible state and imagining that he sees and feels it.

If he remains concentrated in this state, his present environment will pass away, and he will awaken in a dimensionally larger world where the object of his contemplation will be seen as a concrete objective reality.

Intuitively I feel that, were he to abstract his thoughts from this dimensionally larger world and retreat still farther within his mind, he would again bring about an externalization of time.

He would discover that every time he retreats into his inner mind and brings about an externalization of time, space becomes dimensionally larger.

And he would, therefore, conclude that both time and space are serial, and that the drama of life is but the climbing of a multitudinous dimensional time block.

Thus spoke Neville Goddard, one of those rare people who dare go out of their - our - mind: out of the confines of the rational mind.

(The link above leads to a book from where the excerpt was taken.
You can find more links to books - free of charge - if you follow the link below. Or if you just Google them out.)

For a very good link on him, see The Answer (and related entries) in our associated blog.

DISCLAIMER

If anything - anything at all - goes awry, please do not blame us.

We don't think you would, but we have no control over who reads this blog, and how they choose to interpret it. We cannot be held responsible for other people's lives and decisions.

Post originally written on 23/02/10

While You Were Sleeping...

2011-02-23T19:56:00.024+01:00

Here in my hometown
things are not as I knew them.

How I long to be
in the place where the axe shaft
moldered away into dust.

Ki no Tomonori,
poem 991, cca 900 A.C.
(translated by Helen Craig McCullough)

In a comment (scroll down the page) to one of our more popular recent posts, a kind reader brought to our attention a lovely short story, A Sonata ("The Sonata"), by Érico Veríssimo, a famous Brazilian writer.
It seems it hasn't been translated into English so far, but it is a sad love story that transcends time/space.

And English-speaking readers will be familiar with Washington Irving's short story Rip van Winkle, published in 1819.

Of course, modern fiction involving some sort of so-called "time travel" - which has become an impossibly trite and banal term by now - is abundant and proliferating at an alarming rate. (It wouldn't be alarming if all stories were as sensitive and well-written as The Sonata, but they aren't.)

All too many writers simply follow the scent of money - and money is currently heading towards anything that has to do with the possibility of transcending the ultimate barrier: Time. Or, more accurately, timespace.
It is the vogue of the times, and it says a lot about our world in A.D. 2011.

But as lovely - or ridiculous - as our modern stories may be, it is the old folk tales about seeming temporal displacments or anomalies that interest us here.

Most educated readers will have heard or read about such folk tales.
The specifics may vary, but the main scenario is practically the same:
a person - usually a man - falls asleep or strays off the beaten path, only to find out upon his return to his native village that all the people he knew have been long dead because decades - in some cases, centuries - have passed while he was napping.

Here is a version of a famous Chinese folk tale from the 9th century, at the latest, known as the Ranka, or The Rotten Axe Handle (and retold by the Japanese poet Ki no Tomonori in the poem above):

Wang Chih was a hardy young fellow who used to venture deep into the mountains to find suitable wood for his axe.

One day he went farther than usual and became lost. He wandered about for a while and eventually came upon two strange old men who were playing Go, their board resting on a rock between them.

Wang Chih was fascinated. He put down his axe and began to watch.
One of the players gave him something like a date to chew on, so that he felt neither hunger nor thirst.

As he continued to watch he fell into a trance for what seemed like an hour or two. When he awoke, however, the two old men were no longer there. He found that his axe handle had rotted to dust and he had grown a long beard. When he returned to his native village he discovered that his family had disappeared and that no one even remembered his name.

(Taken from here.)

And here's another version of it, with more - but not irrelevant - emphasis on the game of Go.

By TequilazOr

What makes this particular strand of fancy especially interesting is that cultures all over the world - cultures unrelated to each other - know of such stories.
Yours truly, who is no expert on comparative literature, knows of a Vietnamese, a Finnish, and a few German folk tales involving this type of experience, notably Peter Klaus, the Goatherd of Sittendorf (scroll down and risk being captivated by many other, unrelated, gems on the page).

What's interesting about the Peter Klaus legend is that, like in the Chinese story, the goatherd is also seduced by a game. (BTW, you'll find web accounts of this story that claim that the village of Sittendorf mentioned in the tale is fictional.

It is not fictional; it very much exists, even today!)

And that's not mentioning tales like the story of Honi "the Circle-Drawer" (HaMa'agel), mentioned in various ancient Judaic sources, including the Talmud, but too ambiguous to be discussed at length here.

Yet seldom is the question raised: how on earth did they - our mostly illiterate and presumably very earth-bound farming distant ancestors - come up with such a preposterous idea for a story, anyway? And not just one community, but communities all over the world?

You see, collective - folk - imagination doesn't work as an individual's fancy.
By its very nature it is much more coherent. An individual's "flight of fancy" must be accepted and validated by the collective imagination - by others in the community - to live on (and grow, as it usually happens) as a folk tale, whereas individual writers are accountable to no one (except, nowadays, to disgruntled Amazon reviewers, but I digress...).

Of course this doesn't mean that the subject of any given folk tale or legend must have been directly observed by other people; or that folk tales purport the factual truth (as opposed to some sort of archetypal truth).

But the subject matter does have to have a primal attraction, the origins of which are usually lost in time, for it to catch on; and it has to have some sort of validity for it to continue - even if it is validated by the common experience of mere un-knowing, or ignorance, if you prefer.

Many evolutionary sociologists and other related species would have you believe that our ancestors didn't understand anything whatsoever, and were afraid of absolutely everything.

Were they?
How did they survive for so long, then?
Fear and ignorance may provide a convenient flippant explanation for every "irrational" belief under the sun (provided the recipients do not put too much thought into it), but they do not constitute a particularly good defense strategy in the wild, certainly not long-term.

Observation does.

To make an already all too long a story somewhat shorter: every legend, every folk tale contains a grain of truth observable by a community, no matter how distorted it becomes over time.

In this case, the truth - simple but not small - may be the nobly humble acknowledgement that not everything real is readily comprehensible to the rational mind.

P.S. Due to temporal constraints (ha!) this post remains to be properly edited. Do come back. :)

Chrononauts, or What the Bleep Do THEY Know?

2011-02-12T04:12:00.024+01:00

It is with GREAT hesitation that I bring this up.

As you possibly know, or are about to discover, the personality featured in this post is associated with a conspiracy theory - and we hate conspiracy theories.

Not because we think that conspiracies in general do not exist, but because we find it unproductive to speculate and chase wild geese that may eventually turn out to be even less than that - simple mirages conjured up by misunderstandings or simple ignorance, with a touch of paranoia thrown in for good measure.

However, we believe that the story you're about to hear - courtesy of the wonder that is YouTube - is a valid, if unproven, "time slip" account: the account of a man who purportedly was transported to a time 100 years before his birth - and he says he' got a photo to prove it.

But there is another reason why we decided to include this story.

Within the first five minutes of this other video, the man - Andrew Basiago - tells about a connection to copper mining and Chile.

With that in mind, go and revisit this post of ours:

A Strange Bird Over Copiapo

Coincidence?

Maybe. Probably.

Most likely. Of course it is.

But it certainly is a chile-ing one, if you'll excuse the inevitable (if clumsy) pun.

And it was the "toss of the coin" we needed.

A "time slip" (of sorts) in cyberworld

2011-02-06T04:40:00.006+01:00

I know, I know... This space is gathering cobwebs.

And while that may be romantic in films, in blogworld it's a sign of impending doom.

But sometimes the world of the here-now actually is more interesting than whatever may be taking place in some parallel dimension... That's good news, right?

We've not sunken to the level of "best of" compilation posts - not yet (and rest assured, there's a lot more time slippage yarn waiting to be unravelled here!) - but a good compilation by others can be of legitimate interest to anyone reading this.

Here's such a compilation by a fellow blogger.

It consists of posts from a wonderful, now defunct website (that has been mentioned here before).

TIME SLIP ACCOUNTS

Some of the stories you will recognise from these pages, others will be new.

In any case, it is well worth the ride through the rough waters of cyberspacetime. :)

Ten ways to travel through Time

2010-12-04T15:30:00.012+01:00

Unfortunately, all of them involve machinery of some type.
Which is not only inconvenient, but it disregards the role of consciousness in timespace perception.

Of course, many mainstream scientists, starting with Hugh Everett, disregarded consciousness altogether. And where did that get us? We have LOTS of theories, but few tangible results that we know of.

On the other hand, it is perfectly understandable that science based on 18th century mechanistic positivism would not have the resources - the ideological infrastructure, so to speak - properly to research the "abstraction", the utter mess, that is human consciousness as an instrument of timespace processing.

But there is no denying that consciousness determines, filters in or out, and shapes practically everything that we perceive.
Why deny - or ignore - its role in timespace perception?
It's not a scientific approach at all.

Still, if you are interested in gadget-based "time travel", go here and knock yourself out. :)

THE SECRET TRUTH ABOUT TIME TRAVEL

The article also includes a list of ten countries which supposedly have active "time control research programs", with India leading the flock.

A strange bird over Copiapó

2010-11-15T23:30:00.039+01:00

If you're moderately aware of the stories making news around the world, you are probably familiar with the name Copiapó.
It is the place where the recent global telenovela about 33 miners trapped - and then spectacularly rescued -in the copper mine of San Jose took place.

It turns out, however, that Copiapó had made headlines once before, more than 140 years ago.

On March 18th, 1868, the local newspaper El Constituyente published the contents of a letter received by the editors two days earlier.

It spoke of an unidentified flying object - at first thought to be a huge bird - that caused significant terror and consternation among those who saw it.

Incredibly, the letter was signed by the director of the local copper mine (even more incredibly called "Fantasma" - 'phantom', 'apparition'), for it was there that the "bird" appeared.

The letter claimed that the thing was witnessed, shortly after 18:00 in the evening, by the miners who had just finished their shift.

If you read Spanish, you're in luck.
Here is a very nice article about it, complete with an artistic rendition of the "bird" and facsimile of the article. (A facsimile of the letter would have been even nicer, but I doubt it still exists.)

El caso de Copiapó

And here is a brief description of it, published in the July 1868 issue of The Zoologist:

"A STRANGE BIRD"

Copiapo, Chile, April 1868:

"Yesterday, at about five o'clock in the afternoon when the daily labours in this mine were over, and all the workmen were together awaiting their supper, we saw coming through the air, from the side of The Ternera a gigantic bird, which at first sight we took for one of the clouds then partially darkening the atmosphere, supposing it to have been separated from the rest by the wind.

Its course was from north—west to south—east; its flight was rapid and in a straight line. As it was passing a short distance above our heads we could mark the strange formation of its body.
Its immense wings were clothed with something resembling the thick and stout bristles of a boar, while on its body, elongated like that of a serpent, we could only see brilliant scales which clashed together with metallic sound as the strange animal turned its body in its flight."

Very interesting, especially if you're into UFOs (whatever they are in each case).

I am not.
I have seen many strange things in the sky myself, and I wouldn't be surprised at all even if a massive "spaceship" appeared.
It's just that I do not dwell on this particular modern mystery.

Why am I writing about it, then - and in a blog dedicated to dimensional anomalies, to boot?

Because of an idle thought - and it really is no more than that - that occurred to me as I was reading the report about that 1868 vision at Copiapó.

Could it be that the miners of 1868 saw this?

A Chilean Army helicopter carrying the rescued miners to the hospital.

"... its flight was rapid and in a straight line... On its body, elongated like that of a serpent, we could only see brilliant scales which clashed together with metallic sound as the strange animal turned its body in its flight."

P.S. You know the drill - no pun intended - so do come back in the near future to check for any edits.

The Other One

2010-11-12T19:10:00.064+01:00

Bilocation is a phenomenon that has always fascinated me.
How can a person be seen at two (or, heavens forbid, more!) locations at the same time?

Some explain it with "astral travel".
But this explanation does not make sense when the "original" is fully awake and conscious and engaged in perfectly mundane activities at the time.

Is it a matter of perception?
Clearly.
But clearly there is something for the others to perceive.
There have been numerous cases where there were plenty of witnesses attesting the vision of a person who was known - and also witnessed by others - to be at a different location at the time.

Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, the famous and controversial Capuchin monk, is just one such example.
And of course, there are many stories regarding the weird phenomenon of the Doppelgänger.

One of the most famous such cases is the story of Emélie (often spelled Emilie) Sagée, the French-born school teacher from Livonia (an ancient land, today divided between Latvia and Estonia), whose strange case was described by Robert Dale Owen in the first edition of his book Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860).

The events supposedly took place in 1845 - 1846, at a boarding school called Neuwelcke (or perhaps situated in a place of that name), around "a mile and a half from Wolmar" (Valmiera, in Latvian).

Here's a short version of the account, copied verbatim (and gratefully) from here:

Most of her students in 1846 and 1846 often witnessed Sagee’s doppelganger. The double would often mimic the young woman’s movements, be very active while Sagee remained motionless, and appear healthy during times that Sagee was known to be ill.

One time, all the students in the school saw Emilie Sagee working in the school’s gardens at the same time that they could see her sitting in a chair in the room with them! When two of the more courageous students attempted to interact with the image in the chair, they discovered an “odd resistance in the air surrounding it.”
Ms. Sagee never did see her own double.

She didn't, but she did feel increasingly faint - or so the story goes.
And it is an interesting story. Dale Owen heard it from Julie von Guldenstubbé, the second daughter of the then famous Baron von Guldenstubbé (more about him below), who was one of Sagée's pupils and purportedly had witnessed the phenomenon herself.

The ruins of a castle in Valmiera (Wolmar, in German)*
Borrowed from this lovely website.

If you're interested in this topic, you were probably familiar with this story. But you may not have read the original account of it.

Well, now you can.
Here it is, free of charge, thanks to the Internet Archive.

Why a Livonian school-teacher lost her situation

(yes, she was kicked out, on top of everything)

I find this book particularly valuable because it includes the author's tentative explanations and thoughts about such spacetime - or perception? - anomalies.

So, make sure you read the entire book, when you can, not just this story.
(And notice the quality of the language, of sheer literacy, compared to today's books on the subject - not to mention internet postings on various forums.)

However, after perusing the various editions of the book (there were eight of them, I believe, from 1860 to 1891), there is an interesting question lingering in my mind: why is this story to be found in the first edition only?

There is no answer implicit in this question.
I have no idea.

I have no doubts about Mr. Dale Owen's personal integrity - judging by his writing, he strikes me as an intellectually honest man - yet I cannot help but think, was perhaps his witness found to be less than reliable?

The Guldenstubbés were an interesting lot. The Baron himself was an eminent "spiritist", a passionate adherent of spirit-summoning and "direct writing", which was quite in vogue at the time. (You can read about his vision of a "ghost in the tower" here.)

Surely Dale Owen was not only aware of this - it is probably why he got in contact with him and his daughter in the first place - but clearly thought there was good reason to consider the Baron's daughter a reliable witness.
(A thought occurred to me while reading about the Guldenstubbés: is it possible that it was Miss Julie only who saw the teacher's "double" and the other girls thought they did, too?
This sort of contagion is by no means as extraordinary as it may sound.
However, it was just a thought. If you read the story carefully, it seems clear that there was more to it than mere "contagion".)

Or was something else amiss?

We may never know.
But it doesn't really matter, because the question here is: can such things be?
And there have been simply too many well documented cases to dismiss their existence.

For a tentative explanation I'll refer you to a section in the same Dale Owen's book, with a highly telling title, "The Counterpart Appears Where the Thoughts or the Affections Are?" (p. 857/858, immediately following the account of Emélie Sagée's double).

As for Padre Pio, according to the website above, "the closest he ever came to an explanation of bilocation was to say that it occurred 'by an extension of his personality'."

You'll find many other similar accounts in the book.
If you like literary fiction of the sort, read Dostoyevsky's The Double (you can do it right now and free of charge).
But if you prefer visual information, then skip the various video sites, overflowing with spurious material, and aim straight for art: rent Krzystof Kieslowski's unforgettable film The Double Life of Veronique - and enjoy.

* This structure has nothing whatsoever to do with the story itself, but it is such a wonderfully evocative photo (oh, those clouds!) that I just had to include it.
I tried to locate the erstwhile "Pensionat Neuwelcke", but all to no avail. All I found out was that "Neuwelcke" would be Melbarži, in Latvian. There are at least two of those, and neither is "a mile and a half from Wolmar".

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE: My body, myself?

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Diagonally parked in a parallel universe

2010-11-04T07:06:00.021+01:00

If there ever was a photo that deserved this (overused but still moderately funny) caption, it is this one:

(Originally published here, unoriginally reposted here.)

I have very little doubt -considerably less than 0.000000000000000 % (and I am being generous)- that it is a hoax.

But it's FUN.
Which is why I am letting the appropriate software and other pertinent analysis to others.
(If I had any doubts it was a hoax, I would gladly invest a lot of time to do it myself!)

Besides, we've been sort of otherwise engaged lately, in case you haven't noticed the conspicuous absence of posts.

We do think about out readers. A lot. (Even when they are not complaining.)
It's just that we subscribe to the idea that nothing often is better than just anything.

Not to mention the deleterious effect that writing about such stuff can have on experiencing the stuff.
It's more serious a problem than it sounds.

But more on that some other time.

Would Time by any other name still stink the same?

2010-08-12T07:24:00.009+02:00

A wordy intermezzo

One of the things I love the most about my life is that it occasionally produces short, electric word storms that get me going.
(They get other people going, too, although not necessarily in the same direction.)

Here's a snippet of one such impromptu exchange that happened as I was standing on a terrace with an acquaintance of mine who is a physicist, on August 10th, the notte di San Lorenzo, when Saint Lawrence sheds tears - AKA comets - and wishes come true.

I must have had a secret wish for a rambling conversation about time, because that certainly came true.

The beginning of the conversation is intentionally omitted.
You're welcome to insert one of your own making.

HE: You mean, our perception of time?

ME: Time is nothing but perception. You of all people should know that.
And maybe that's just it. We name it as if it were something outside, a force of nature or something, when in reality it's all on the inside. All of it.

HE: Not all of it.

ME: All of it. And I know everyone is supposed to sort of know that, but intellectual grasp is one thing and true knowledge, conviction, is another. If time were used as a name for a perception, almost sense-like, like smell, sight, touch, maybe that would make Time easier to grasp. And maybe even manipulate.

HE (silent, staring at me):

You just gave me an idea.

You just gave me an idea.

(It's not an editing error; I gave him an idea twice. Or maybe he thought I did not understand the first time.)

I wish I could say he dramatically stormed out and ended up producing something that will be on all news channels. Or at least in Nature magazine.
But he didn't. He stayed for pizza and apple beer, and even watched part of Australia's Next Top Model (a rerun) on TV with me.

Still, he said I gave him an idea.
Let's just hope it's about physics.

Just a reminder

2010-08-10T19:41:00.008+02:00

On this day, 109 years ago,
two lucky women embarked on a journey like no other.

Versailles, by Dont Techno.

Moving house

2010-08-09T16:24:00.024+02:00

The following report comes from a reader called simply Barbara.
She does not wish to be identified any further. (Which is perfectly OK.)
It is posted here verbatim, with only a link inserted, to refer you back to a post she mentioned.

In their own words...

This happened maybe four years ago, in summer time. I don't recall any other details, as it was a long time ago. But after reading the post about the house in England that keeps appearing and disappearing I remembered this event that baffled me at the time.

About two miles from my former home (I lived in a city) there is a tall woody hill with an inn at the top that many people like to visit on weekends and after work to chill out. There is only one road leading up there from the direction of the city (where I lived), although there is another road on the other side of the hill.
I used to go there from time to time because it's close and offers a very nice panoramic view of the city.

On this particular day I drove there with a couple of family members and a friend.
As we were nearing the beginning of the slope, just before the road starts going uphill, I noticed a tiny oldfashioned cottage on the left side of the road. It was very tiny, with whitewashed (but dirty) walls and a straw roof.
This sort of building was very common here centuries ago, but nowadays it's very difficult to find a cottage like that.

Th cottage was standing alone on top of a small grassy hill, just above the modern housing development sprawling on both sides of the road. It looked old and abandoned.

I was very surprised because I didn't remember seeing it before, and enchanted to see a cottage like that and I thought to myself it would be a perfect "retreat" for me to do my writing and stuff. I also remember thinking it was a ridiculous idea considering it was so close to my home, but I really liked it. I rememebr thinking I would have to ask a relative of mine who is a lawyer how to go about it.

Later that day, on our way back home, I didn't remember to look because I was engrossed in a conversation we were having.
But I did remember to look the next time we went there, maybe two months later.

The cottage wasn't there!

I remember thinking it was sooo typical! Every time I like something, a product or a service, whatever, they discontinue it or it becomes unavailable to me. It happens all the time, with makeup, with perfume, with TV shows I like.
But I was especially sad that the cottage had been torn down because it was so unique.

Maybe three or four months later we went to the hill again to have a "twilight drink" (like a "night cap", only it wasn't night yet :)). On our way there I didn't even bother to look for the place where the cottage had stood. Besides, we were talking, so I only remembered it just as we were passing the spot where I had seen it, so I didn't really look.

But as we were driving home I was sitting in the back looking through the car window on my right side... and there was the cottage again!

I asked the person who was driving if he could stop, but it was really impossible (too much traffic).
When I got home I called that relative who was a lawyer and asked her if she could take a picture of that cottage the next time she goes to the hill (because she used to go there often, whereas I have a disability that prevents me from walking for any length of time and I do not own a car).
She could not recall any such cottage (and she lived nearby), so I gave her a precise description of the site.

The next time we talked she said she saw no such cottage. She described to me the surrounding houses, and the description fit the place I had seen, only there was no cottage.

I don't know what to make of this. There is only one road leading up the slope, the road we took. You simply cannot take any other road because there is no other road.
Also, the distance is very short, comparatively, so it's not like there are a lot of such roadside grassy slopes. In fact there is only one, with modern houses below - and that solitary cottage was standing high on the slope, above the houses. It was extremely distinctive - the only house with a straw roof I've seen here! - so there's no way I confused it with some other house.
Also, it was not a prefabricated structure that could be taken down and reassembled again (not to mention that it looked old and abandoned).

I don't live in that city anymore and I don't visit the hill. The few people that I mentioned it to and were familiar with the place didn't seem to recall any such cottage.

I have no idea what that was.
But I do know what I saw.... Twice!

Cottage, by Proama.

Thank you very much, Barbara.
Personally I find such inconspicuously placed events fascinating and even poetic, in an odd sort of way.

And by the way (no pun intended ;)), I gather you hadn't read the story about a certain hill at the time of your writing... or you would count yourself lucky that the hill itself was there. :)

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE:
The Long Way Home
Have You Seen This House?

About the image:

Such a beautiful story deserves a beautiful picture. This one, we thought, was beautiful, even though the structure is just a wooden shack, not a brick and mortar (and straw) cottage, like the one that Barbara saw.

We did not ask for permission to insert it here, but it certainly wasn't because of lack of respect towards the author.

You can see the picture here, and the author's gallery if you click the link beneath the picture.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Mind fields: are "ghosts" glimpses of parallel worlds?

2010-08-04T23:05:00.008+02:00

A reader called Val B. wrote in to ask do we think 'ghosts' are glimpses of other dimensions, say of parallel worlds or alternate realities, as it were.

Apparently it was this post that triggered your question, Val.
I am glad. Because in that post we broach - ever so lightly and superficially - the question of the nature of "ghosts" (expounded also in this post).

Personally I find "ghost" to be a catch-all term that catches precisely nothing.
In all too many people it seems to be an automatic response (never a good thing, not in my book) to all sorts of unexpected or "illogical" apparitions.
Even worse, underlying there seems to be a deeply rooted but mindless preconception that "ghosts" are: a) dead people, who b) ended, usually tragically, in c) the place where the apparition occurs.

Really?
How do we know that?

We don't.

I understand the need by many people to feel there is an existence beyond death. Who wouldn't?

But such apparitions rarely prove - or disprove, for that matter - anything of the sort.
Besides... I firmly believe that the truth, and only the truth, does set us free.
And stereotypical thinking - jumping to conclusions - is by definition removed from the truth. It disregards the truth, whatever it may be. Even worse, it disregards the need to quest for truth.

It would be interesting and very useful to compile a classification of different types of apparitions.
In fact, am sure it's been done, but I have yet to find a good compilation of the sort.
However, they can be roughly divided in two main categories: apparitions where perception seems to be unilateral; and apparitions where perception seems to be mutual.

There are a number of instances that would certainly seem to indicate that certain apparitions are glimpses of perfectly ordinary, banal moments in a long-since-deceased person's life.

What's puzzling about such cases, if you think about it, is that the vision isn't reciprocal. In other words, the "apparition" doesn't seem to notice the person who can see her or him.

Then, there are cases - they seem to be much rarer - where the vision is, or seems to be, reciprocal. (Here is one such case.)

Regarding the first type (which could be further subdivided into various categories), I am increasingly leaning towards the tentative conclusion that there probably is an all-pervading "medium" - something akin to what the ancients called aether - that absorbs and automatically records everything that takes place, reflecting it back when the circumstances are right.
(Or perhaps everything is there all the time, but we can only occasionally catch a glimpse of it.)

Everything, every single molecule of our physical (and possibly para-physical) world, seems to be composed of this mysterious film-like subtle substance, or somehow partaking in it.

That could explain visions such as the Roman legion marching endlessly through a cellar in York. That was clearly a vision - not a recreation of that event. In other words, it was like a tape playing on TV - not a reoccurrence of an ancient occurrence.
How do we know?
Because the lower part of the legs and the feet of the soldiers were not visible.
They were following a road, the level of which was in those days much lower than today.

In other cases, it seems as if the individual memory of a person, long gone, is the source of visions. It is as if it created a field of experience - or, more accurately, as if it projected its own field of experience remembered for others to, literally, step in.

Still other apparitions, especially recurring and unchanging visions (i.e. the various "white ladies", "grey ladies", etc.), may be the result of cumulative collective imaging (which is not exactly the same as imagining). In other words, they may be externalised mental "growths", fed by the collective mind of their environment, including the mind fields of those who have long since died.

But it's the "mutual" apparitions that puzzle me.
In such cases one could speculatively surmise that a two-way glimpse of parallel timelines is taking place.
If all time is happening all the time - only our minds are adapted to a "tunnel vision" that helps us remain relatively stable in an endless, timeless ocean of apparent chaos - then it's not outside the realm of possibility that occasionally the "veil" should part for a few instants, perhaps ruffled by the breeze of some unusual electromagnetic activity influencing our brain and our mind, affording a mutual view of what is, only perceived by two individual (i.e. limited) minds as two different points in spacetime.
And that might be true even for the realm of what could have been.
(Ask Michio Kaku - or almost any of the authors featured in the side bar - to explain it to you. :))

Final conclusion?
None can be made at this point, by anyone - except, maybe, to conclude that we know nothing about the nature of the world and of our very lives, and should proceed accordingly.

And isn't that a gloriously liberating acknowledgement? :)

P.S. I can tell this post is going to be SO edited in the future.
So please, do come back at a later time.

Is it the fault lines' fault?

2010-07-12T23:34:00.024+02:00

Every serious discussion about more or less verified "paranormal" events ends - and sometimes starts - with the big question: what causes these events? What triggers them?

One of the episodes of the series "Ghosthunters" (the 1996 British programme, not the uber-silly USA series started in 2004), mentioned in a previous post, for example, presents an interesting (if necessarily tentative) explanation of apparitions in the Severn Valley, in England. (It is the episode called, appropriately, "Spectres of the Severn".) Namely, that the apparitions purportedly witnessed by many people in said valley are to be blamed on the terrain itself, more precisely on the effect of the fault lines that run across the valley and the geomagnetic activity that they produce.

Personally, I am quite inclined to believe it. What else but magnetic or electric currents of some description could trigger such unusual visions? After all, everything around us, including our brains (which, I believe, house only a small portion of our Mind - a gate to it, if you will), is electricity - patterns of energy, receptive to all kinds of impulses from the greater "net" into which they are woven and from which they emerge.

Furthermore, I've always been intrigued by the apparent fact (which probably is no such thing, just a firmly anchored subjective impression) that there are countries or lands where reports about "paranormal" events - and that includes folk legends - seem to be more bountiful than elsewhere, notably Great Britain and Japan. (A typical - and typically shortsighted - reponse to such musings is: "Well, they are probably more prone to belief in such things than people elsewhere". Well, if that is so - why is it so?)

I used to suspect that it may have something to do with the vast expanses of water surrounding both of these countries. Water, after all, is among the best conductors of electricity there are.

And it may be so. But the theory that it might be the shifts of tectonic plates activity that affect the neural system is no less fitting. Japan, for example, is criss-crossed by fault lines, being a hotspot for earthquakes.

Whatever the precise cause, I have little doubt that the specific geomagnetic pattern of each place potentially has a measurable effect on the neural system of living beings, perhaps triggering unusual insights into the realities of timespace.

What I find somewhat silly, however, is the often simplistically reductionist view of such interaction.

By now almost everyone - certainly everyone reading this, I dare say - will be familiar with the various experiments involving artificial stimulation of the brain by magnetic and electrical impulses, conducted in the past two decades or so. By stimulating certain areas of the brain (the temporal lobes) researchers were able to trigger what seemed like "mystical" or "paranormal" experiences in the test subjects.

Here is a good compendium of such work by Michael Persinger, a well-known researcher in this field.

Spirituality and the Brain

What I find oddly shortsighted is the failure by many researchers and interpreters of such experiments to realise that identifying the spot in the brain where reaction takes place, and even replicating such an experience by artificial stimulation, does not automatically identify the source of said experiences in the "wild".

(Furthermore, these experiments are not as reproducible as many reports would have you believe. See, for example, the cutely if somewhat annoyingly titled article Electrical Brainstorms Busted as Source of Ghosts.)

In fact, this type of research fails to answer even the simplest questions. Because it's one thing to poke the brain with a wire (if they can be simplistic, so can I), and another to be walking about and suddenly be confronted with, say, the sounds of singing coming out of nowhere (or take practically any experience described in this blog).

Yes, a geomagnetic or electrical impulse of some description is messing with my brain.
But how? Why then and there? Where is it coming from?
Why do some people - people from all walks of life, sometimes a priori skeptical about such phenomena, and often quite oblivious to the possibility of such a thing happening - witness certain events and others don't?

And most importantly: why do "established" (i.e. repeated over time) anomalies always appear in more or less the same shape or form to all those who witness them, even though they knew nothing about them beforehand (or about each other)?

It is the same question as the one raised by so called "hallucinations".
Yes, they may appear under the influence of some substance... but does that necessarily mean that it is the substance that produces them?
(And we're not talking about delirium tremens, so there's no need to banalise the discussion by dragging it in.)

Or does it perhaps mean that the substance has made the person simply more susceptible to see what actually is there, but unseen in ordinary circumstances?

(This is the question raised by an articulate young clinical psychologist in the episode Spectres of the Severn, above. By the way, this man became a clinical psychologist because of a "paranormal" experience he had had years earlier, along with a few friends of his. It is described in the first episode of the series, Ripples in Time.)

Anyway, if you want to explore such anomalies and their possible sources "scientifically", here's a gadget you don't want to miss:

MADS

And here is a good comprehensive introduction to "paranormal" phenomena:

And finally, to end this on a lighter (?) note - being summer and all - here's an "unscientific" but fun and unpretentious - and ultimately potentially useful - article on fault lines, or "ley lines", and their connection to "paranormal" phenomena, written by someone who had been researching them for more than two decades.

Ley-Lines and their Connection to the UFO

For the record and in the name of intellectual honesty:

In the past few years I have developed a singular distaste for anything involving the terms "UFO" or "alien" and "abduction" in a single sentence.

Which is all the more pity, from my viewpoint, because I vividly remember the soft glow of a gentle, smiling awe that I felt as a child (and even later) whenever I witnessed something extra-ordinary in the skies. And I have seen, more than once, things that definitely appeared to be: a) artificial objects; b) flying, or airborne, to be more precise; and c) unidentified (not just by me).

Were they of extra-terrestrial origin, even if they turned out to be some sort of never-seen-before aircraft?
I honestly don't know.

But I certainly can understand the fascination that UFO hold for so many people.

So, it is not that I dismiss - certainly not entirely - the possibility of (presumably extraterrestrial?) "aliens" descending upon us and abducting unsuspecting citizens, for whatever purpose.
It's just that, faced with the avalanche of dubious reports and intepretations of such experiences, I feel I cannot be bothered with them anymore. I've grown tired of them.

Nevertheless, I decided to include the link above because it gives a good, easy-to-understand account of the phenomenon we're talking about here.
I may add others in the future.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

No mere flesh and blood

2010-06-27T20:50:00.018+02:00

Today marks the 61st anniversary of the death of Frank Smythe.
(And the interesting thing is I decided to write this entry yesterday, before finding out - just now - that it was the anniversary of his death. Serendipity!)

Smythe was a great mountaineer, one of those rare individuals who thrive on the most extreme challenges.
He was also one of the relatively few mountaineers who openly admitted to have witnessed things that transcend our usual human experience of this world.

Here is one of Smythe's experiences, as described in J. H. Brennan's oft-quoted book Time Travel: A New Perspective (p. 53).

Frank L. Smythe describes how he entered a grassy hollow near Glen Glomach in the Scottish hills and experienced a time slip. He saw a small group of weary men, women, and children stagger into an ambush laid by men wielding spears, axes and clubs. In the resultant massacre, every last member of the group was slaughtered. Smythe was so horrified he ran from the scene.

The interesting thing about this account - it happened in 1940 - is that Smythe was a mountaineer, not an historian [unlike Arnold Toynbee whose experiences are discussed immediately previously in Brennan's book]. He had no particular interest in or knowledge of the spot where the time slip occurred. He did do some research into the area, but only afterwards, as a result of his experience. On the debit side, Smythe was never able to confirm his experience. He discovered two massacres had happened at the spot, but the clothing and weaponry did not match his vision.

The history of mankind being what it is - exceedingly prolific in blood and gore -, it is not at all surprising that not every single massacre would be properly recorded.

But even if it were... what would the confirmation of an event matching Smythe's description tell us? Is there something at that spot, near Glen Glomach - some fault, some "ley line", some source of electromagnetic activity - that would occasionally obliterate the single vision of linear time that is characteristic of our human experience?

Be that as it may, this was not the only odd sight that Smythe witnessed.
Here is a very interesting account of what is, I suspect, all too easily dismissed as the result of oxygen deprivation or whatever.

On June 1 1933, Frank Smythe was as high as anyone had ever climbed. But it would be another 20 years before anyone would stand on the summit [of the Chomolungma AKA Mt. Everest]. Exhausted after two nights in the so-called "death zone" and emaciated by weeks at high altitude, he began his descent to Camp Six at 27,400ft, where fellow climber Eric Shipton, too ill to climb, lay in a tiny tent waiting for him.
As he made his way down, he began to hallucinate - he was climbing without oxygen - and he had an overpowering feeling that someone was with him. It was so strong, that when he stopped, he divided his mint cake and turned to offer half to his "companion".
Later, he noticed two dark, bulbous objects hovering above him. One had "what looked like squat, underdeveloped wings, whilst the other had a beak-like protuberance like the spout of a teakettle. They distinctly pulsated... as though they possessed some horrible quality of life."
Smythe collected himself enough to do a mental check, naming each of the peaks around him. Then he looked back. The things hadn't moved. A mist drifted in front of them, and, when it cleared, they had vanished.

(From the article "The last 1,000 ft are not for mere flesh and blood", by Simon Smythe, published in The Telegraph, April 8th, 2003.)

Oxygen deprivation?
It is a facile explanation, and in reality says nothing - certainly not about the event itself.

Frank L. Smythe died on June 27th, 1949, in New Delhi.
He was two weeks shy of his 49th birthday.

Wherever he is, I hope he is enjoying himself.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Wotton Hatch Revisited

2010-06-25T20:07:00.004+02:00

A comment and a promise from Josh, a kindly visitor to this blog, reminded us of an old favourite that has been covered here in late 2008. All the material for that entry was gleaned from books, most especially from Brennan's Time Travel: A New Perspective, so we only included data that were available in those sources.

But early today, thanks to insomnia and the full moon that kept me happily awake, I found myself watching TV in the early hours of the morning, when an old programme I had totally forgotten about came on: Ghost Hunters.
As I sat watching it, I suddenly remembered that an episode of that series covered the Wotton Hatch incident, among others. I could not remember the title (the first and so far last time I had watched it was in 1996 or 1997), but it didn't take me long to find it.

It is the episode called Ripples in Time. (And it covers not only the Wotton Hatch incident, but starts with another one of our favourites: C. G. Jung's "time slip".)

The "Mr and Mrs Allan" from our post were really a well-known bookshop owner, Eric Barton, and his wife, Irina. And there is much, much more additional - and more importantly, first hand! - information about the whole incident.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can watch it ~~here~~.

EDIT: The link seems to have gone dead.
For the time being, you can see the video here (part I).

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

The Long Way Home

2010-05-26T23:45:00.034+02:00

One of the most fascinating types of timespace anomaly is a sudden loss of orientation due to a seeming change in the environment the subject is quite familiar with. In other words: you're looking for a familiar house (or a road, or some other landmark) - and it suddenly isn't there. Or it is completely changed. The next time you look, it is there again, back to its old self.

It is also one of the easiest targets for self-styled skeptics, who are all too happy to simply wave off such events as evidence of some brain malfunction (usually, and utterly unscientifically, left unidentified), even when there is no evidence that would point to the likelihood of such an event in any given subject. Just because something could happen, it doesn't follow that it did happen.

Such things - as all events, really - should be studied individually, if we ever hope to understand their origins and dynamics.

Here is a real story of such an event. It happened in Tagawa (Fukuoka), Japan, around 1950 - 1955, to the mother of a very dear friend of ours, called Seika.

It is perhaps important to note that the person to whom it happened - the mother - is known to be an extremely rational and no-nonsense person, not given to flights of fancy... and that's putting it mildly.

At the time of this event she was a young schoolgirl, perhaps 10-15 years old (probably while she was still in elementary school, according to Seika).

Here is her story.

Mother visited one of her girl friends, just like many school girls do. Probably before dinner time (or before it got dark), she decided to go home.

She was all too familiar with the area but suddenly she couldn't find a road. It's not that she forgot how to get home - there was no road where there should have been one. I suppose she found herself standing on a country field with no road.

She decided to think she'd been fooled by the 'fox' or 'racoon dog'. She went back to her friend's house and told them what happened. They let her stay there overnight.

The next morning, she found the road and went home. I remember sensing her 'pride' when I heard her talk about it. (That she wasn't fooled - that she was smart enough to go back and wait till the road appeared again.)

Awarded, 2009.

Japanese folklore, rich in "ghosts" and other so-called paranormal phenomena, has a preferred culprit in such cases: kitsune, "the Fox".

But I don't think too much should be read into the attribution of this type of anomaly to "the Fox". I suspect said "fox" is just an umbrella mythic figure that serves as a pop explanation for anything that trascends the ordinary experience of life.
It should be mentioned, however, that its attributed action often seems to be illusion-inducing.
And this could be significant.

Anyway, stories like this one can be found practically all over the world (but it's not often that one can find a reliable almost-first-hand source).
Here is a very interesting story from 1941, which, however, sadly lacks the geographic coordinates one would like to see.

Two points seem to stand out as possibly related: the "squeaking" pillar or whatever it was, and the military airfield that is mentioned in passing. Because of the anonymised nature of the account we can't know where it happened. But could it be that at the time of this event, in 1941, there were some sort of experiments being conducted by the military in the vicinity? After all, this was precisely the time when World War II precipitated the development of the radar and other such devices.

Just something to ponder about.
It is certainly much more rational and "logical" than just dimissing it - dismissing everything and anything that transcends the usual experience of our sorely limited senses - as fancy.

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS: Moving House

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

The End of Time?

2010-05-26T22:34:00.044+02:00

Ye of little patience: another story - another "exclusive", no less :) - is planned for later this week (up until and including Sunday).

Meanwhile, we've been pondering about the nature of time ad nauseam. Naturally, it never leads anywhere; or if it does, there is no way to confirm the validity of such insights. But if you're anything like us here, you know musings about the nature of time are as irresistible as they are (or can be) maddening.

So, why not muse upon it in the company of a book that proposes there is no "time" at all?

It's not a particularly recent one - in fact, it's ten years old - but then good work doesn't have an expiration date. I am referring to Julian Barbour's book The End of Time.

And since you can borrow it from any good library - as I would recommend - this post can't even be construed as advertising. Be warned, however, that once you've read it - and if you're truly interested in the curiosities of what we call "time" - you might be tempted to keep a copy forever.
I know I was. And I did. (Relax: not the library copy!)

Here's Barbour's angle, in a nutshell:

The main aim is to introduce a definite way of thinking about instants of time without having to suppose that they belong to something that flows relentlessly forward. I regard instants of time as real things, identifying them with possible instantaneous arrangements of all the things in the universe. They are configurations of the universe. In themselves, these configurations are perfectly static and timeless. But how and why can something static and timeless be experienced as intensely dynamic and temporal?"

So, it's all instants. Everything is NOW, in Barbour's opinion. Those individual "frames" in the seeming continuum of a lifetime, any lifetime, are the single core, the essence, of what our true four-dimensional experience is.; the rest is memory and/or imagination (and a very creative one, but I digress.)

Yes, I bet you already suspected that much.
But you might want to read about it from a physicist's perspective.
To whet your appetite or get a sense whether you'd like it at all, you can read this illuminating review here.

Or you can watch this Dutch video (23 minutes), about which Barbour says it has done "a remarkably good job of explaining the ideas of The End of Time in a non-technical way".

>

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Here are a few "dummy" questions that the interviewer should have asked, in our opinion, but either didn't or they were edited out.

* If there is no place for continuity of any sort, were all things created instantly in all their states and potentialities (and even their non-state opposites)? In other words, is a person created as a newborn, an adult, an old person, all at once?

That's what I get it from this interview, and that's what I've been suspecting for a long while now.
And if this is so, what is it that propels our perception to experience the seeming "arrow" of development always in the same direction, from young to old, from "cause" to "effect"?

But the most essential question, in my opinion, is the following:

* Throughout the programme, Barbour uses - inevitably, of course - time-bound (and time-shaped) language: he "came" to the conclusion, he "will" take a snapshot - and so forth.

Isn't "time" ultimately simply a name for our experience of continuity (illusory or not) between all these discrete instants?

I certainly think so; and if this is so, then the true nature of "time" is really a moot point, however interesting. In other words, if we are never going to experience it in any other way, why should we even care what the true nature of "time" is?

But is it so?
Are we really doomed to experience "time" as we normally do - in a linear fashion? (And the many entries in this very blog seem to attest that we do not experience it linearly at all, ahem, times.)

This sub-question seems to me particularly interesting because it would indicate, regardless of the answer (positive or negative), the sort of mechanism that dictates such perception - and which perhaps could be transcended.

Theoretical physics can be great fun and certainly a great exercise for the abstract mind. But unless it is also useful in a meaningful, existential way, it is mostly an exercise in futility.

Still, it is a great work that makes you think about such things.

Up in smoke

2010-04-02T00:11:00.025+02:00

On March 28th (or thereabouts) something must have gone haywire somewhere - wherever the "normality" of our days is fashioned and tailored.

I remember that day because something odd happened to me that afternoon.
As a matter of fact, it was just a reprise of a situation - a seemingly blatant anomaly, to put it mildly - already described in one of the earlier posts.
(And you can amuse yourself to death trying to guess which one it was, because I am not going to tell. :))

Furthermore, I overheard a couple of people in a shop nearby talking about "weirdness".
No Marian apparitions, no gnomes hopping around, not even a UFO sighting, nothing like that - just things not being quite "right" and people being unusually "forgetful". (That was the explanation I overheard.)

And then, a few hours ago, I received an interesting message from a person, regarding that same date.
(I did not enquire after that specific date, and only told her about my own experience after she had volunteered the following story.)
I asked her if I could publish this here, and she agreed, provided I do not mention her by name.
So, here is the translation of the message - well, most of it.

(By the way, the following event, whatever it was, took place on the shores of Lake Lugano, not far from the Italian-Swiss border, in case anyone is keeping track.)

***

That evening I was working late, as usually. I was reviewing a project that was due the next afternoon.
Around 22:00 I grabbed a cigarette from the pack that was lying on the little coffee table next to my desk (where I always keep my cigarettes). The pack was half full (or half empty, ha! :)) because I had bought it that same day. I didn't count the cigarettes, but the pack was definitely well stocked enough to last me through the night and well into the afternoon.

Maybe half an hour later I took two antihistamine pills (100 mg in total), as I do every day, and went on with my work.

Shortly before midnight, maybe a quarter to 24:00, I reached for another cigarette.
The pack was not on the table.
It did strike me as odd, somewhat, because I naturally thought it had fallen off the table or something, but didn't remember hearing the thump that I should have heard when it hit the floor. (It doesn't matter how engrossed I am my work, I do always remain alert.)

So I looked around and then under the coffee table to retrieve the pack. But the cigarettes were not there.
I was somewhat alarmed because it meant that evidently I had placed it somewhere else, and it's so uncharacteristic of me, and I was worried my work would reflect this unusual absence of mind. But my work had been going smoothly and I could not notice any decline in quality in the text.

I got up and searched for the pack. At this point I was circling around that table like a buzzard!
OK, so the pack wasn't anywhere near the table. I could not imagine where could it be, so I just looked around my studio (which is quite small and minimalistically furnished). I could not find it.

At this point I was really upset, but not so much because of the nicotine deprivation or whatever. I just could not understand where could it be.
So I tried the old fashioned method: retrace your steps.
And then... and then the really weird thing happened. I discovered that I could not, for the life of me, remember what I had been doing for the past twenty minutes or so.

This was so odd I just could not go on with my work. I tried hard to remember but all I could recall were vague, disjointed fragments of me working and watching the TV at some point (which is strange because I was much too busy working).

But the strangest thing of all, and I am not sure I can really describe it well, was the fact that up until the moment when I reached for that second cigarette and did not find the pack I didn't feel anything being out of the ordinary. I was simply working, nothing special, no concentration problems, nothing.

Anyway, I ended up tearing the house apart to find the pack. I looked EVERYWHERE, even in the bathroom (where I never smoke) - even in the fridge!
There are maybe four or five pieces of furniture in that studio, and I searched it as thoroughly as humanly possible. I even searched the rubbish bin, and also the pockets of garments that I hadn't worn in months.
But I never found the pack.
I am writing this four days later because I still haven't found it.

And I still can't shake the feeling that there is a gap in my memory of that evening, like an impenetrable thick haze (or fragments of a broken mirror, oddly enough - that's what it reminds me of), and that I cannot access whatever happened during it, no matter how hard I try.

Now, I know that antihistamines can cause short term memory problems. But you see, I have been taking these pills forever and never had anything like this happen to me.
And I know I did not - I could not - unknowingly smoke all the cigarettes!
They would have turned up in my ashtray, wouldn't they? (And I only have one.)
And I would have found the empty box, anyway.

I also know I did not go out because the alarm was still on (I have to switch it off before going out), and nobody had come to my door inquiring, as they would have if the alarm had gone off (even if I somehow had become temporarily deaf or just oblivious to it).

By the way, the work turned out quite well. Certainly nothing abnormal there, or the people paying for it would have said something.

You know, I think this weirdness is contagious.
I think I'll stop frequenting this blog! ;-)

***

I know this particular buzzard well enough to attest that she is not a liar, or a mentally deranged person, or a drug abuser, or an alcoholic - or indeed an ignorant wretch with a tenuous grasp of the basic laws of physics as we know them. And her pranks (which she does love to pull) are of a different kind altogether. Her word is as good as gold.

As a matter of fact, I had something vaguely similar happen to me at least once.
(And certainly more than once, if you count my personal "black hole".)

I cannot know what happened here, and wouldn't dream of trying to explain it, even though I am confident it's all just a matter of perfectly natural para-physics, rather than a personal psychological/awareness issue. In other words, the laws of physics "as we know them" might be problematic because we don't really know all that much about the wider context in which they seem to function - and, occasionally, malfunction.

P.S. This story is not an April Fool's joke.
I know because I checked. :-)

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Intermezzo: Haunting Performances

2010-03-06T00:40:00.026+01:00

What the average man calls Death,
I believe to be merely the beginning of Life itself.
We simply live beyond the shell.
We emerge from out of it's [sic!] narrow confines like a chrysalis.
Why call it Death?
Or, if we call it Death,
why surround it with dark fears and sick imaginings?
I'm not afraid of the Unknown.

From an entry in Rudolph Valentino's diary
(or so I am told, I haven't read it)

As has been explained in another entry or two, we don't "do" ghost stories here. Well... in principle.

Tonight, in honour of the upcoming Oscar night - an event that means absolutely nothing to me or to anyone in our team (with the possible exception of Lynx, who'll be watching the event for its fashion value) - I decided to make an exception and offer you a link to a brand new compilation of (sometimes first-hand) accounts about the "ghosts" that purportedly roam the hallowed halls of Hollywood and its water holes. Not because we don't have any "time slippage" stories to tell (one, especially, has our collective fingertips itching!), but because those that we do have deserve more time and attention than any of us have at this moment.

Besides, it's a very good excuse to point you to the very interesting and entertaining website that hosts it.

So, grab your favourite snack and click away!

If you liked the stories above, then there is a good chance you'll like the book (by the same author, Laurie Jacobson), too:

Hollywood Haunted: A Ghostly Tour of Filmland

If not, you can try another book on the same subject (by Tom Ogden):

Haunted Hollywood:
Tinseltown Terrors, Filmdom Phantoms, and Movieland Mayhem

And if you like reading about theatre "ghosts", don't miss this story, featuring none other than Ingmar Bergman: CURTAIN, PLEASE!

I wish the Olympic games - another event that rates 0,00 on my scale of interest (and it's because I like sports) - had such an entertaining collection of otherworldly stories.
Then again, after this year's tragically eventful edition, they might see the need to create one...

Dream Time - is it a timespace of its own?

2010-02-20T15:30:00.029+01:00

Some people love to hear about other people's night dreams and to talk about their own.

I don't; never did. The only dreams that interest me are people's so-called "daydreams".

It's not that I don't find dreams interesting. It's just that there seem to be different types of dreams, and it's very difficult to understand their meaning unless one is deeply involved in the dreamer's life.
Some dreams seem to "recycle" past events, others seem to (and sometimes do) predict future events, and others just seem to be... a timespace of their own - a territory unknown, yet oddly familiar while one is in it.

But today I find myself wondering: is that dreamscape, the apparent "spacetime" of dreams, perhaps an actual (para-physical) field, accessible from outside the dreamer's mind?

Two nights ago I had a series of dreams. They were - as my dreams usually are- convoluted and alien to the everyday world in their imagery, to the point of being impossible to retell (although they made perfect sense in their own "spacetime").

When I woke up, the only thing I remembered was the "tail" of the dreams: a beautiful music that had something - I couldn't remember what - to do with stacks of gold coins or money.

I didn't dwell on it, but I did try to recall the music; and for a few minutes after waking up I was able to repeat the tune. (It was something I had never heard before.)
And then, of course, I stopped thinking about the dream altogether, all the more so because there was no specific mood associated with it (I do remember feeling very happy hearing the music, but there was no impression of a powerful "message" lingering, as sometimes happens).

In the afternoon I met with an aunt of mine and her daughter, my cousin. As we were talking about some unimportant things, my aunt mentioned a cashier. At that point my cousin jumped in and said: "Right! That reminds me! I had the weirdest dream last night: about a cash register playing a song..."

Walfrido Garcia: Dockside Dreams, taken from here.

At this point I found myself staring at her and remembering my dream at the same time: yes, that was it - it was an open cash register that the music was coming out of. That's what all those stacks of "gold coins" that I vaguely remembered were.

I told my cousin that I had the exact same dream. I told her so with a straight face, and even though she said she believed me, I am not sure she did.

I asked her - and tried to remember myself - whether there was anything on television or in the newspapers in the previous days that could have made us both dream of that. She couldn't remember, and neither do I.
(At this point probably I should mention that I have an exceptionally good memory and, even more to the point, that I am usually extremely aware of my own thoughts and reactions to my surroundings. In other words, it's not easy to pump anything into my head without my knowledge.)

I asked my cousin about the details, but there were few she could remember: that she was happy and she laughed when she saw those cash drawers open rhythmically, with all those stacks of coins, and the music came out of them.

So was I. Her description sounds exactly like what I remember from my dream.
(At least now you know what makes our hearts sing...)

In order to test... I don't really know what (that it could have been a false memory?), I even tried a trick. I asked her: "Didn't you have a similar dream a while ago? Remember?"

She didn't remember.
(Of course not.)
Nor do I remember having a similar dream at any point in my life.

Whatever it was, nobody will convince me it was a "coincidence". I mean, what are the odds of that happening?

But whatever it was, it was not the first time it happened in my family.
My mother told me, a long time ago, that when she was a girl she shared a dream with her mother.

My grandmama being the down-to-earth-person that she was (and I must say, most of my family are like that) didn't dwell on it or even try to analyse it. Luckily, my mother remembered it. And I'll always regret Carl Gustav Jung never got to learn about their dream, as I am sure he would have been fascinated by it and would probably offer some interesting explanation.

What could be the explanation for such a phenomenon?
Based on other, non-dream experiences and lifelong thoughts about these matters I am inclined to think that families and friendships - perhaps any sort of interpersonal relationship - are more than more or less temporary physical conglomerates. The "pool" of their shared input - thoughts, emotions, experiences - may transcend the mere visible physical realm; and it may even outlive all of the individual members that contribute to it and tap from it.
If that is so, then it could be considered a sort of "timespace" in its own right.

And that is the reason why I wrote about this here, even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with time "slips".
If something so deeply individual-seeming as a dream image is accessible, or generated by, or both, by more than one person at the same time, it inevitably opens the question about the nature of space - and thereby the question of the nature of Time.

EDIT: Here is a very useful Dream Dictionary, for those who are interested in the meaning of dreams.

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Your wish is THE command

2010-01-28T05:02:00.011+01:00

The following account comes from M.R., a faithful - not to mention patient - follower of this oh-so-sporadic blog.

It is a fascinating little story - and to me doubly so, because I have experienced the very same thing.
So have you, perhaps.

***

A few years ago - maybe three or four - I used to visit a good friend of mine who worked in a six-storey building. He was a good worker, often staying overtime, late into the night. Which is when I visited him, because otherwise he wouldn't have had the time to receive me.

The building had a modern elevator which always ran smoothly and quickly; it was well maintained. There was nobody manning it; the building didn't even have a night porter, as it was shared by many smallish private businesses.

On more than one occasion something funny happened.
As I was walking through the lobby towards the elevator I could see on the indicator (above the elevator door) that the elevator was on the sixth floor, apparently staying still. Then, as I lifted my hand to press the button, I heard the elevator make that characteristic "vroooom" noise it makes when it goes into motion, and it descended directly to the lobby. There was nobody inside. And I hadn't touched the button!

At first I thought maybe somebody had stepped into the elevator and then changed their mind. But I didn't hear anyone move. (It's difficult to imagine, but even though six floors sounds like a lot, it really wasn't such a tall building, an the staircase was very acoustic, every step could be heard all over the building, especially late in the evening when the building was practically deserted.)

I told this to my friend, half expecting to hear he had sent the elevator my way (because he knew I was coming), but he said no, and that the same thing had happened to him too. He said that he even asked the repairman about it, and the man said it's "impossible" and that the elevator is in very good condition.

The same thing happened to me again maybe four months later. It happened exactly the same way: as I lifted my hand to press the button (but I didn't), I heard the elevator stir, go "clank" and then "vroooom" and start descending. And sure enough there was nobody inside. And nobody could be heard moving around.

I don't know if this has anything at all to do with "time slips", but I reckon it was something out of the ordinary. It was as if the machinery had received the "command" of my intention or wish to ride in the elevator before I physically pressed the appropriate button.

(I don't remember anything particular about the weather, sorry!)

***

You said it very well yourself:

It was as if the machinery had received the "command" of my intention or wish to ride in the elevator before I physically pressed the appropriate button.

There is nothing for me to add, because I believe that is exactly what happened.

How?

By means of some electrical impulse, perhaps.
Let's not forget: everything is basically electricity, patterns of energy interacting with each other. It is a well established fact (yes, much to the chagrin of Amazing Randi and his correligionaires, it is a fact) that telepathy does exist, both among people and between people and animals. Who is to say that a more or less sensitive electricity-driven device could not pick up a pattern emitted by the brain - or mind field (it's a term I happen to prefer ;) - of a human (or even of an animal, for that matter)? Only, in this case it is called telekinesis.

But WHAT exactly was in the "pattern" emitted that stirred the elevator and made it go "clank" and vroom"? ;)

Was it the mere thought?
It seems unlikely, because it would raise the question, why doesn't it work like that every time? After all, even seemingly "automatic" actions are preceded by thought.

Or was it a specific charge of the intention at that moment?

I mentioned this had happened to me too (also more than once).
It's a good thing it did because, while I also don't remember the weather or higroscopic conditions and what-not at the time, luckily I do remember something else, and very well:

I was very relaxed - not at all "mindful" - at the time, and I was happy to be going where I was going (to visit my mother). I was in a state of happy but relaxed anticipation, in my mind already walking through the door, as it were.

And the elevator, it seems, picked up the energy of my intention to get there ASAP - and anticipated my physical command.

In this case my "wish" (= intention) really WAS a command.

And maybe it always is.

Time portal - take two (or is it twelve?)

2010-01-20T22:06:00.010+01:00

This is just an update - or rather, a link to an update - regarding the "time portal" from this earlier post. It is also the closest I could find to a "summary", in English, of the developments outlined in that post.

Were the Untersberg mythical "twelve doors" actually twelve CAVES?

But there is more: a set of digital images depicting what clearly is an oddly "mis-placed" orb.

The author of the images thinks it's plasmic energy.
So do I. (But then, what do I know?)

What do you think it is?

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

Is it ALL a game?

2010-01-11T19:12:00.012+01:00

Sorry, no story - or even a musing - today.
But after I saw the beauty posted on our sister blog yesterday evening, I couldn't resist posting something similar, only more appropriate to the topics discussed here.

It's a web game - one of the best I've seen in a long time.
It engages some of the abilities you need in your daily life to function optimally - and which are absolutely indispensable to would-be researchers of "parallel worlds" researchers.

Why?
See for yourself.

Start here...

And when you're finished, continue below.

(If you can't see it, go here.)

P.S. Sorry for the awkward formatting.
But it's definitely worth the temporary disfigurement of the sidebar.

Time portal found?

2010-01-05T22:33:00.022+01:00

I know some of our regular readers have been following a certain thread on ATS discussing the mysteries and possible dimensional anomalies surrounding the area of a legendary mountain, the Untersberg, on the border between Austria and Germany.
(And this, unlike the thread mentioned in the previous post, most certainly does deserve a link.)

The thread is interesting mostly because it is probably the main and most reliable compendium of information and focus of discussion in English.

However, there are a few forums (or fora, whatever, no time for dead languages now) in other languages, notably in German. This one, hosted by a man - a shaman - who calls himself White Eagle, is probably the most relevant one.
And it was here that the announcement has been made two days ago that possibly (the font size is no glitch) a "time portal" has been found in the vicinity of Hallthurm.
("Stumbled upon" - by two people from Salzburg, on December 30th - would be perhaps a more fitting expression.)

Picture of the area where the "time portal" - or whatever it is - could be located (taken from here).

It is highly speculative, of course - how could it be anything else?
And nobody is saying it is anything else.
But in the opinion of White Eagle (the author of the original post on the forum) who, being a native, has been researching the area for decades now, that location could be the site of a "time portal".

Anyway, this thread, for a change, really might be worth following.
There have been all too many anomalies reported about the area through the ages to simply shrug and chalk them up to... what, exactly?

Unfortunately for all those who cannot read German, the thread on the German forum is, of course, in German. And we don't have the time to translate it right now.

But I am sure there will be English "summaries" coming up soon. *
Meanwhile, you can learn a lot about the road that led to this possible and highly speculative "discovery" by reading through the thread on ATS (beware, though: it's gigantic!), especially the original posts and, with particular attention, the recent (September-December 2009) posts by a member called BlueOrb (who among other things came up with highly interesting parallels between the nearby buildings constructed for Hitler and the buildings of the Cathars, and seems to be researching the topography of the churches around Untersberg.)

Now, if you look at your watch... didn't the time you spent reading this pass unusually quickly? :-)

P.S. As you well know, we edit our posts again and again and again... That's how we are.
So, be sure to come back sometime in the future, to check out our afterthoughts.

* Please, see the comment by BlueOrb below.

P.P.S. (added on 6. I. 10):

Just a quick note to all those of you who, in your eagerness to find out more - either to escape from the tax people or to "debunk" it - might be composing email upon email, to extort more information from us... Please, have another look at the post.

Did you see the word "possibly"?

Do you know why it is so big?

Because we couldn't find any BIGGER fonts.
OK? :-)

Hold on to your hats.
We're sure this decade is going to be a fast-speed chase along a very bumpy road in any case... :)

The dangers of conf(abu)lation

2010-01-05T19:07:00.013+01:00

I am serving you yet another P.S.
But if you are interested in the "dead again - alive again" phenomenon (whatever it is), it may be worth the few seconds of your time that it's going to take.

There is another thread discussing "dead celebrities who are now alive" over on ATS. (See the link in the post above, in the section regarding Karen Carpenter. I am not giving it here simply because I think the entire thread, save for two or three messages, is - to be blunt - unworthy of your attention, or mine. I mean, seriously: now there are people "explaining" this apparent anomaly as being the consequence of - take a deep breath now... ... - cloning.)

Amidst all the "chaff" there is a single interesting - albeit not the least surprising - indication of what is going on in many, perhaps most, cases:

A person thought s/he had heard that Joanne Woodward, a fantastic actress and wife of the late Paul Newman, had died many years ago - drowned, to be precise.

Another person pointed out that it was Natalie Wood - wife of Robert Wagner - who drowned, back in 1981, during a yachting trip that included Christopher Walken.

Have you noticed anything particular about the names of the people involved in these two accounts?

That's right: they all start with W, or include this visually very prominent letter.

So, what we have here is a classic case of conflation (which, of course, is NOT the same as confabulation, a far more annoying, and potentially dangerous, phenomenon that only harms the endeavours - and the reputation - of those who are striving to explore genuine mysteries).

Oh, BTW: you may be glad to read that - amazingly! - the person who thought it was Woodward who had drowned (only to be "alive again" in recent times) conceded that was what happened.

I know I am.

The truth of the world is mysterious enough as it is.
We don't need more "chaff" to confound it.
Intellectual honesty is the way to go... wherever it is that we are going.

Out of mind?

2010-01-02T22:43:00.058+01:00

Oh, to be in England - the magic country of wandering houses and wayward hills and flights across time...

Just as I thought I had read most of the most interesting "time slip" stories taking place in the United Kingdom, I was reminded of another one - of two, actually. (And yet a third one, for good measure.)

It's a story about a vision said to have been witnessed by Dr E. G. Moon, a supposedly "very down-to-earth" Scottish physician, on a certain day in 1935 when he visited one of his patients, the famous Lord Carson, at his home at Cleve Court (Isle of Thanet).

Now, this particular house is said to be haunted.

But what is said to have happened to Dr Moon doesn't appear to be a "haunting" proper. (And what is a "haunting" - or a "ghost", for that matter - anyway? For a few of my thoughts on the subject, see here.)

I found this story here and since it is uncommonly well written, I think it would be best to let the author* of the original text speak.

(N. B. Sadly, the original articles are gone; the links now point to the archived copies on the Wayback Machine.)

In 1935 Dr EG Moon, a very down-to-earth Scots Physician with a practice in Broadstairs, was at Minster in Thanet visiting his patient, Lord Carson, who lived at Cleve Court, a haunted house referred to elsewhere in the section. After talking to Carson, the doctor left his patient and made his way downstairs into the hallway. His mind was very clearly occupied at the time with the instructions he had given the nurse about the prescription he had left for Carson. At the front door Dr Moon hesitated, wondering whether to go back upstairs to have another word with the nurse.

It was at this point that the doctor noted that his car was no longer where he had left it in the driveway. In fact, it had been parked alongside a thick yew hedge and that, too, was missing. Even the drive down which he had driven from the main road was now nothing but a muddy track, and a man was coming towards him.

The newcomer on the scene, only thirty yards from Dr Moon, was rather oddly dressed wearing an old-fashioned coat with several capes around his shoulders. And he wore a top hat of the kind seen in the previous century. As he walked he smacked a switch against his riding boots. Over his shoulder he carried a long-barrelled gun. He stared hard at Moon. And the doctor registered the fact that the man coming towards him might have looked more at home in the 19th century.

View Larger Map

Cleve Court, Isle of Thanet (UK)

Remarkably, Dr Moon seems not at the time to have been either alarmed or even mildly surprised by the changed scenery, by the quite oddly dressed man approaching his or the fact that his car was missing. What preoccupied him was the thought of Lord Carson's prescription. He simply turned away, without any concern, to go back into the house. But he did quite casually take one more look at the scene he was leaving. And now, as if by magic, the car was back where it had been and the yew hedge too. The drive was no longer a muddy track. And the man had also disappeared, back one assumes to the previous century. And it was only now that Dr Moon realised that something odd, something decidedly odd, had occurred.

All of this took seconds and so there is every reason to understand why Dr Moon did not immediately go out into the driveway to see where his missing car was. For the same reason it is understandable why he did not speak to the man dressed like a farm bailiff of the past. Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state. When he came to - for that seems to be the best way of describing his return to his own time - he described to Lady Carson what he thought had occurred. He was anxious, however, that no word of if should come out in his lifetime for fear that his patients would begin to question his judgement. It was only after his death that the story was revealed.**

Now, this is a fascinating story as it is.
But it's this little bit what makes it even more interesting, to my eyes: "Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state".

He seems to have been in some sort of trance, an almost hypnotic state, similar (at least I understand it that way) to the state of mind one often encounters in dreams: the weirdest things seem not only somehow "normal", but often we simply know (during the dream only), why they make sense, why they should be so. This, I believe, is the Theta "state of mind" (actually, a brain wave rhythm).

And, luckily for us, we seem to have another story - from the very same region (and found on the same website) - pointing to the very same phenomenon, whatever it is that induces this strange state of receptiveness.

It is the account of a woman called Charlotte Warburton, who is said to have had a "time slip" on June 18, 1968, on Calverley Road, in the English town of Tunbridge Wells (Kent).
Mrs. Warburton entered a supermarket and instead found a cafe that hadn't been there before... nor was it there the next time she looked.
You can read more about it here.

I shall only point out the similarly unquestioning state of mind that she seems to have experienced - because I believe it is the key to such phenomena.

Was it an external factor, something from outside, what caused these experiences?

A third account - not strictly a "time slip" -, about a girl called Naomi Fuller (read it on the same page as the two accounts above) would seem to suggest that there is something about the area itself that, under certain (as yet undetermined) circumstances, switches a susceptible mind into a Theta-like state, which then makes it possible to perceive usually non-observable realities.

But if that were the case, wouldn't there be many more reports of such experiences? After all, timidity or fear of ridicule can only explain so much.

On the other hand, of course, there are places, all over the world, where such experiences (be it "hauntings", "ghosts" or whatever one might call them) are reported quite often. Of course, it is virtually impossible to establish how many reports are genuine, and from those that are, how many were "fed" by self-suggestion, by expectation.

Anyway, such places deserve - and often get - a thorough in situ individual investigation.

(Many seem to show unusually high electromagnetic activity. More on that some other time.)

I think there is little doubt that it is the individual's susceptibility that makes such things happen.

But if you think I am politely alluding to so-called "hallucinations", you couldn't be more wrong. Apparently, there can be shared visions of things normally unseen (this blog is full of such accounts; I would especially recommend reading the entries about Jung, the Andersons and, of course, about the legendary Misses Moberly and Jourdain) - and not all of them can be satisfactorily explained away as either lies or "folie a deux".

So, judging by such accounts, it would be relatively safe to assume that, at certain locations and under certain (undetermined) influences, an external local force (or interplay of forces) is capable of inducing or triggering perception of otherwise unobservable realities external to the observer - and judging by the accounts of odd or uncharacteristic receptivity accompanying these visions, it would be safe to surmise that the mind is perhaps on a Theta-like "wavelength" at the time of the experience.

P.S. I love you

2009-12-30T12:38:00.014+01:00

This is simply a post-scriptum to my latest entry. I am writing this because I thought some of you might be interested in some feedback.

In the past 30 hours I have been contacted by two people - actually, one and a half (more on that later ;) - who absolutely wanted to tell me they have tried the "technique" described in the entry to retrieve their lost objects.
Apparently, it worked like a charm.

A lady, called Laura, went out wearing her gold bracelet. She says she had never gone out without it ever since it was given to her by her late husband, as an anniversary gift.
But a few days ago she suddenly found the bracelet was missing...
You can read more about it in the comment below the original post.

The "half" person I was referring to is a relative of mine who notified me that she had mentioned this technique in an internet astrology forum.
Apparently, a member of said forum had been missing a precious GPS for days and had all but lost hope that she would ever get it back.

In all fairness, my relative also mentioned to her that she might want to try asking Saint Anthony of Padua to get it back. (Laugh all you will: it works for many people! :))

We'll never know who did it - Saint Anthony or Lady Love (although I suspect they may be closely related, anyway ;) - but the GPS reappeared within hours. It seems an elderly couple had found it and returned it while the owner was away, so her neighbour took it for safekeeping until she came home.
And get this: it took the finders a few days to find the address because they didn't know how to figure out where she lived. :)

I am very thankful to both for letting me know.
And I am very thankful to Cynthia Sue Larson, for it was her article that provided most of the inspiration for the last post.

*Oh, you're wondering why I refer to my relative as "half" a person? I don't: it's just that it wasn't her personal experience, and in my book second-hand accounts count as half-accounts.
If you must know... my relative is what our grandmama would call a person AND a half. :-)

All you need is love

2009-12-24T21:10:00.027+01:00

No: as you probably suspected, this has nothing to do with the Beatles.
And it is only a coincidence (or is it? I wonder sometimes) that I am writing this on Christmas, the love-fest par excellence - or at least a widely recognised symbolic date signifying love: towards our usual loved-ones and towards the Other.

What happened was that we were here discussing one of our earlier posts - the one about the missing socks - and I was reminded of a "technique" that Cynthia Sue Larson often mentions on her website.

(4) Feel Your Love for What is Lost
While all the previous steps are very important, feeling your love for what you have lost is undoubtedly the most important. While you continue staying grounded and breathing in love, remember all your favorite memories about what you've just lost. Allow yourself the luxury of feeling as much of that love as possible. Feel your heart growing warmer and warmer with those feelings of love. This love you are feeling is the bond between you and what has been lost, and by feeling your love as strongly as you can, you are calling what you love to return to you.

And that's not all. I remember reading somewhere - probably on her website again - about a woman (for some odd reason I seem to remember the totally irrelevant fact that she was from Israel) who started applying the "feel love" technique every time she found herself in a traffic jam, for example. Instead of cursing the other drivers and people on the street, she started developing a feeling of warm love and gratitude towards the "offenders" in any given situation. Apparently traffic "miracles" happened every time she did that.

I am especially interested in this because I happen to know it really does work.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, is immune to the cataclysmic power of love.

But some people - all people, actually, just not all the time - enjoy (or so they think) being indignant. The usual reasoning used by them to defend their wrath - "but if everyone just gives in, how will they ever learn?!" - is inane.

This is one situation where the old question, "would you be rather right or happy?" (of which I am, in principle, no great fan), really does apply and makes sense.

Think about it: the feeling of "love" means actively drawing from and (re)generating Eros,which is the unifying force,the all-encompassing power that holds atoms together - that holds the Universe together, with all its dimensions.
And so, "love" may very well be the only - certainly the most powerful - force to transcend dimensions.

Love your way out of trouble.
(And I don't mean making eyes or flashing smiles for a calculated effect: I mean feeling love in your heart.)
Or at least give it a fair try.

It works.

EDIT
Speaking of love, do not miss this lovely - and true - short story: Monsieur Proust's Opal.