First published on Open University blog site Thursday, 27 Mar 2025, 21:54
[ 11 minute read ]
In case it is not understood: I am completely against recreational drugs and cannabis derived products. Comments is disabled for this post.
Some of this might be historically true
Mental Health issues
People once had money……..
Long ago, when humans were sane and had control over their own lives, they were happy. They had agency over their lives. They were a people who made decisions for themselves. ‘Ah ha!’, you cry, ‘Children had decisions made by their parents for them!’. You’re right; until they grew up, moved out, and experimented with the world under their own terms and then discovered that they were actually really rubbish at being responsible. That is when they made friends with their parents, instead of resenting them for interfering in (and ruining) their lives. Once these clueless teens realised that they needed help, they looked around for it and found it in their parents. They then respected their parents. They didn’t realise it, but they respected them. Advice was given to them, along with options that were available to them, and then they navigated the problems and nasty bits of life and got on with their lives. Mum and Dad didn’t fix it for them and so they gained respect for themselves. Because they respected themselves, they looked after themselves and then died; usually naturally, in old age, with money.
Then the world was given home computers, but not before Atari gave some of the adventurous people, ‘Pong’, an on-screen tennis game. ‘Pong’ was fine, it wasn’t addictive; it was only played when they were bored. Boredom meant they had not done enough to entertain themselves. Boredom was a punishment for not leaving their homes and socialising through exercise.
Granted, for some in the halcyon days of long ago, exercise was only given to the right arm that went from waist to chin height, waist to chin height, waist to chin height; with single repetitions of, perhaps, twelve to fifteen per hour, for four hours; and during, and between, this arm-exercise plenty of fluids were taken on-board, while a great deal of socialising took place. Scattered among these mostly male fitness-freaks were a few women. For most, that exercise was restricted to Friday and Saturday nights only; unless a religious holiday, or the last day of the year fell during the week. The reason the weekday restriction was in place was for two reasons only; it was expensive exercise; and this kind of exercise, conversely, impaired work capability. People were greatly respected for this self-imposed responsibility. Arriving at work on a Monday was much celebrated among work-colleagues.
However, for many people, lifting an ever-decreasing weight, twelve to twenty-four times per hour for four to five hours per night was so enjoyable that they did not restrict it to only two days each week, and were so keen to feel the burn the next day that they took no nights off. These people had lots of money! Their work was well paid, and there were whole packs of them with well-fed spouses and children in their warm homes. The only drawback for these people was that too much of this kind of exercise impaired their judgement and they made decisions that they regretted the next day. However, this recognition of making a mistake meant that they were continuing to learn and they were pleasing themselves in making resolutions to improve; in effect, much like their recently ‘left-home’ offspring. Everyone was happy.
Sensible people in the same industries, however, stayed at home during the weeknights. They had other harmless ideas that would never lead to harm. Many of us, today, fondly remember the grandparents of the presently afflicted. Bless them, they could never have known what they had harboured in their safe homes, while their raucous peers eschewed the three channels on the TV, in the UK.
The digital two-player Atari ‘Pong’ game, played through a television set with a home-owned console, was as harmless as tilting a little glass-covered square to maneuver a ball-bearing through a maze. Yet, the analogue ball-bearing in maze game was better; Oh, far better! There was a building sense of anticipation that had rising waves and falling troughs of achievement, that if the maze was completed, resulted in such satisfaction and attendant cascading dopamine, that it took many seconds to recover from it; and a sibilant ‘Yes’ was commonly heard, at this time. The point is, that people mostly had agency over their lives. They could put the gadgets down.
Then, after a fascinating period of new gadgets; which came about through the invention of the magic transistor; a digital switch (current on – current off) and other arcane digital discoveries and manifestations; a small fraction of the world’s population were told that they could have their own little spooky box that would not only replace their home typewriter, but allow them to make endless copies of their carefully scripted letters to their Councils and Bank-Managers, AND they had real-time editing of those letters. Many homes were cleared from rubbish, both on the floor and in the air; scrunched up balls of paper frustratingly hurled at a bin that didn’t respect their aim, and ‘Dammit!’ vanished. Not only was the typewrite gone but with one of these new digital typing machines that strangely also allowed home accounts to be digitally kept, the bin became nervous from lack of use, and miserably and quietly kept to heel. The kids liked this replacement box and keyboard too, because for a vast amount of treasure (that realistically materialised only two times a year – one being a religious holiday) the games that were played in the amusements arcades, the ones that had bred from the fecundity of new supplicants to the digital games, and moved from the peripheries of small nations surrounded by sand and salty water, into the medium sized conurbations, were now available at the flick of a switch. Nobody, however, could afford ALL the games in the palaces of flickering lights and digitally created ‘clangs and dings’, for their home use. The electronic section of a sea-side transported to a town stayed for a while longer next to the cinema, without the sea gulls and fish and chips.
Initially though, it was only the serious adults who wanted to appear ‘mentally contained’ to their bosses, and bank managers who bought this home office. They wondered what else to do with it, and separated themselves from their, by now, dreary spouses, to instead push around some digital letters. The strongest mental exercisers found that they could produce digital images and psuedo-presentations. It was, at least, better than the telly, and since they almost never exercised only one arm and never the other arm, found that they could get some separation from their mindlessly raving peers, and a smidgeon of relaxation, not least through silence, unless you discount the music, (with rubbish sound reproduction) they kept on them. Their kids were a bit disappointed as well, because the anticipation of winning a reward of tiny financial wealth by inserting a two pence piece into a glass covered electric machine with a reciprocating wall that may serendipitously push their money into a pool of hundreds of other coins to make them move towards a edge of a precipice that had an access hole to the outside for players to collect their reward, still remained quite firmly at the edges of small countries and in large conurbations, next to the cinema. So, anticipation of a positive reward, lasting for only a few fleeting seconds, was still absent in their homes. Things, however, were about to change.
A bit before 1996, there was a tribe of Japanese technocrats who realised that kids wanted to keep digital pets in their pockets. Finally, anticipation of a dead pet hooked a generation. They gave us ‘The Tamagochi’. The End was Nigh. The Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Atari’s Pong just could not cut the mustard; they were ‘Marmite’, while Tamagochi was crack cocaine.
Today, everyone is an avatar extra in ‘Stepford Wives’ with a perfect life, despite living on a run-down UK Council Estate; or a blur of a person, more excitingly present in both the past and the present, simultaneously in multiple places, but not, consciously, at the breakfast table.
Just so you know, in early 1990s Britain, no-one was surprised to have to wait ninety days for a parcel to arrive; To even think of Just-in-Time supply chains was quite simply madness. Inventory costs, or keeping things in warehouses makes up about 25 per cent of the cost of supplying an item, so if someone ordered something, before Just-in-Time logistics, it had to be ordered from China, or Taiwan, or some other far-off manufacturing country. Unless, it was manufactured in one’s own country or the one next door.
‘We had joy, we had fun. We had seasons in the sun. But, the joy couldn’t last because the season’s went too fast.’ Lyrics in ‘Season’s in The Sun’ sung by Terry Jacks.
What is the difference between a team and a group?
Listening to LBC, a radio talk station broadcast throughout Britain, I hear a woman voted ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher of the year’ stating that students in one form group are inwardly chanting ‘C’mon team, we are going to beat that team!’ That is a gang. A crowd of people are a group. A music band is a group. A group is a set of individual people with individual goals that have a shared interest in other individuals and their pursuits. A team is competitive and is trained to fight to beat other teams. A school classroom team was envisioned to help the slowest learner in the class by utilising the fastest learners’ abilities. In effect, this is handicapping the individualistic high achievers to bring the lower achievers up to, at best, a temporary level which falsely allows them to believe that they can achieve as much as naturally high achievers. When the high achievers are released from school, at age 18, they, mostly, go on to great things. However, the low achievers, in their mistaken belief that they are individually worthy of their school examination results, are floundering around suddenly searching for a team to help them in the real world, and they are using a fast diminishing shield of shared responsibility as a defence against real-world justified righteousness. What a shambles! Don’t despair, I am not ridiculing people who are not high achievers.Some years ago, the UK government decided that boys and girls learn differently. The educationalists went on to believe that there are different learning styles, visual learning, role-playing, positive reinforcement, audio learning, and others.
There is a list of seven learning styles here:
Visual Learning; Auditory Learning; Reading and Writing; Kinesthetic; Verbal or linguistic learning; Social and interpersonal learning; Solitary or intrapersonal learning (The word intrapersonal is similar to introvert). An explanation of these seven is given here:
What happened is that teachers were not taught how to effectively teach all these techniques simultaneously to a class of thirty children. There used to be girls schools and boys schools; these are all, now almost entirely privately run. These used to be forms for high-achievers, average learners; and students who could not grasp the teaching techniques well enough to keep up with the average student, so these pupils were regarded as un-salvageable and were segregated from the rest of the school society, though they were allowed in the playground and dinner hall.
Why don’t we segregate ALL the pupils or students? Visual learners to the right, role-players to the left…. Separate the boys from the girls or group the students together who learn best with a particular style of learning. ‘Oh no!’ we cry we would then have to partition the whole world into different segments more suited to one group or another. Heaven forbid! Yet, do we have divergent thinkers as accountants? The answer, I suspect lies in most of us believing that accountants are not financial speculators, just the same as it is engineers who build bridges and not scientists.
In Swedish, “lika barn leka bäst” (“children that are alike play the best [together]”) – Wikipedia
We, after compulsory schooling, tend to flock together into our preferred groups of friends, and support each other by forming cross-functional teams: that means we do not all work in the same place and have different types of jobs. Unfortunately, though, teams are the norm in schools; they are encouraged; no, foisted upon small children. While at school, and especially when school-leavers suddenly discover that they have been given a false idea about their capabilities to be successful in both the work and social environments, they maintain their absolutely necessary need to belong to a gang; sorry, a team. Actually, I am fairly sure that most people never find out they have been given a useless set of values at school.
In a crowd, when two people are physically fighting, they may be allowed to get close to a finish until one of them is obviously losing and about to get seriously hurt, then the crowd; sorry, group of people, will intervene and separate the victor from the vanquished. Nobody attacks the winner. In a gang, sorry, team, when another team member is showing signs of losing, all the other gang-members attack the single fighter who is not in their gang. In sports event, referees and the threat of disqualification prevent mobbing and lynching.
In the real world, in the un-refereed streets, as soon as a fight breaks out the whole gang attacks the person who is arguing with their gang member, unless the gang member is winning. That is what a team, with team loyalty does. They are a baying pack of feral dogs, trained and indoctrinated to be so by modern UK schooling that hampers individual excellence at the expense of the whole of society, by falsely saving the children who simply could not understand a faulty teacher in their first years at primary school. ‘What is the square root of nine?’ ‘What has a shape got to do with a plant?’, the small confused child might inwardly ask? As adults, we know that the answer to the confused child’s lamenting query is: nothing at all if we exclude matrices that have a square shape, filled with numbers. Here is a real-life example to ponder: If you missed the first year of Latin classes, such as I did, you would not do well in the second year of Latin classes. Because I did not do Latin in the first year of secondary education, I was not required to ever learn Latin; all I had to do, during those lessons was my other homework. Do you know why? Because I would have held the whole class back. What should the school have done? Put me in class of beginners and knocked my confidence with, no team support from team members to dissipate the effects of bullying.
What is the difference between a group and a team? A group is like a shoal of individual friendly fish all with a common purpose and all conforming to a swim pattern to confuse predators. That shoaling is herd behaviour, just like apes grooming each other, but a bit less altruistic. A team is a pod of dolphins all acting together to destroy a group by picking off the individuals, one by one. Yes, I know, the dolphins are hungry. Friendly-looking dolphins they may seem, and they are certainly portrayed as such, but predatory, atavistic, wolves of the seas, dolphins really are.
‘Atavistic means happening because of a very old habit from a long time ago in human history, not because of a conscious decision or because it is necessary now.’
That is what a team, such as you might find in schools, is; predators trained towards forming a pack-like existence that historically served to jointly hunt for food and overwhelm others to achieve supremacy (which necessitated the conquering of another group). When a young person finds themselves alone ‘in the wild’ they, instead of recognising their irresponsibility and mistakes, and learning from it, they are trained to shrug it off in the belief that their team will save them, and like herd immunity and herd behaviour, if there are enough team members around, they can attack all and every form of complaint towards them, imagined or otherwise. Later, the gang, sorry, team, will disseminate and analyse any attack by any individual gang-member using Smartphone videos, messages, and chat. Even, when the gang-members, sorry team-members are absent they are still silently and invisibly watching from within the heads of savages with no idea of what individual responsibility is.
We all make mistakes. Please don’t ask your team to dissipate your guilt.
Are immigrants in your team? Are women in your team? Are men in your team? Are they in their own teams?
A cross-functional team is a group of people who have their own set of abilities and skills, and in meeting with one another rely on each other to contribute towards a common goal that furthers the aims of the group. A film or movie has producers, actors, directors, camera-operators, editors, and a myriad of other people, highly skilled and otherwise, all working together to achieve a common goal of making a good film / movie. If they were simply a team, they would be industrial spies and saboteurs, armed with knives and poison, spoiling the efforts of other rival film-makers.
(Just so you know, obviously defaming a legal entity, person or business, in the UK is usually punished by significantly large fines and financial restitution awarded to the aggrieved; and ‘tit for tat’ strategy inevitably fails in any game because it results in mutual destruction. That is why we can’t say any shop sells poor quality products, because it is really expensive to prove it and the onus is firmly on the accuser).
For this to fully register, imagine a trained boxer or MMA fighter entering into an area where muggers frequent. Do you think this person will reach for a team? Do you think this capable person will expect backup with a much later phone call? Depending on whether a mugger or two have knives and guns on their team will determine this high-achiever’s immediate response to a direct threat. That is the difference between an individual in a cross-functional team (boxing trainers, spar partners, club members, sponsors, etc.) and a person ill-equipped to deal with the harsh realities of life because they were told to belong to a team of similar people who WILL be absent when they grow up. No, wait! They are prevented from growing up because there are no ‘real’ people to save and teach them, only team members of the same ilk and sentiment.
Birds of a feather flock together
I have just learnt the word for only speaking a portion of a saying and the rest being implied – ‘anapodoton’, as in, ‘Birds of a feather….’ I think ‘pot kettle black’ also qualifies as an anapodoton. The rub is that the recipient needs to know the full saying. ‘That is like the pot calling the kettle black’. Ooh er! We might need to live before the Industrial Revolution in European times to get the meaning of that. For everyone under the age of 250 or so, that last alludes to a pot and a kettle both having black marks from which the fire they are heated – if the pot calls the kettle black, then the kettle can also call the pot black. ‘We came from the same fire’.
Plato may have said in ‘Republic’, that men of his age flock together. There is an idea that truth resides with those who practice the same thinking or beliefs. This is similar to a Christian saying, the saying I once heard that goes something like this: ‘A horse and an ox cannot pull a cart together’; which was said to me to warn of the danger of a Christian and a non-believer marrying. This expression does not necessarily need to remain in the bailiwick of religion; if any man or woman needs a team outside of their romantic partnership, and their partner does not, I suggest that a lawyer or solicitor is about to make some money from both of them, or there may be a psychological discord in the relationship for a long time, albeit suppressed.
Long ago, before people in the technologically advanced countries on Earth had mobile phones, adult siblings would often not wish each other a happy birthday on their actual birthdays. Of course, many of them sent birthday cards, mostly when distances were so great that travelling for the annual events to the area in which the celebrant lived; was too time-consuming; or expensive. It is this valuation that intrigues me, particularly in light of being the recipient of birthday wishes by text messages from my sister, when we, in the modern world, both had mobile phones; now, more accurately, they are personal phones. It is this idea of mobile phones being personal phones in that they are considered to be an actual facet of a person, and not just a handy conduit to a person, that, for me, is strange indeed. What I mean by this, is that we are all only a decision away from having a digital implant in our brains that operates just as a mobile phone does.
How much someone values someone else used to be measured on whether someone visits someone else at Christmas and random times, or at least meets up with family; it used to be writing letters to family members; bringing back souvenirs, or sending postcards when you went abroad, or at least when someone went somewhere relatively far away.
How rude of my sister when she sent me a text message wishing me ‘Happy Birthday’ on my birthday, instead of calling me from the same device she had in her hand. Perhaps, she might have excused herself by saying she had no credit to make a call because she had free texts; but free texts or calls were only to numbers on the same network, in those days. Now, of course we have unlimited everything. Perhaps, I was only worth 10p to her, or the time it takes to write fourteen characters and my number followed by ‘Send’.
Furthermore, how did we come to think that an email was preferable to a birthday card? Did we really decide that a text with no nuances, or an email with no personalisation, such as handwriting, was suitable? When did we think that fulfilling a chore could be accomplished at arms-length and minimum effort or forethought, and that same desiccation of emotion would be welcome as an alternative to a kiss.
I brought you some grapes. Mmmm, these are lovely?
If we visit someone we know, in hospital, who are we doing it for? Do we feel a sense of duty, that for us, manifests within us as a personal need that we must fulfill; like having an itch that simply must be scratched; or do we visit them because the need we have is to make the hospital-bound person a little happier, by showing compassion towards them? Are we not merely satisfying our own need in both cases. So, when my sister sent me a text message on my birthday was she just being selfish?
But, is being selfish taken to a new low level when we now think that when a tourist venue offers financial concessions for certain groups of persons that means those people may enter for free upon showing a letter of recognised disability or financial hardship that demonstrates eligibility for the full concession, we might ask if a screenshot from a website that shows eligibility is acceptable instead? To be clear about this: A cathedral in Kent, England gives full concessions to visitors who are on government granted financial benefits that are paid to job-seekers or workers whose earnings are below a certain threshold. The cathedral website states a ‘letter’ of eligibility needs to be produced for free entry.
In Negotiation, there is an acronym, BATNA, which is: Best Alternative to A Negotiated Agreement. In Law, a contract is in place when an offer is accepted; there must also be something moving from one entity to another. That ‘something, can be either tangible, such as product; or intangible, such as a right or a freedom. A contract can often be expressed very simply using only a single condition; the presence of the conditional ‘if’ in a statement makes things clear for the average person – ‘If you give me that, I will give you this.’ Let us write this simple contract thus:
If you prove, with a letter from a government body, that you are in receipt of a government-issued financial benefit (Universal Credit) we will completely waive any entry fee for you, and you can enter for free.
What person would try to negotiate for the best alternative to this agreement? I will tell you: anybody in the modern world whose moral compass is so skewed by their acceptance that fulfilling one’s own need is the same as fulfilling a duty, or the same as making someone feel loved for a while. The recognition of duty to each other to comfort and offer assistance seems to have been completely washed away of late.
Yet, the UK government has decided that it will not issue letters of entitlement to people in receipt of Universal Credit so they can accept an offer for free entry as a visitor to a Cathedral, and instead gives advice to renegotiate a new contract for free entry with a screenshot of the benefit-recipient’s entitlement. What this means for the average person in receipt of Universal Credit and hoping to visit a cathedral with a full entry fee concession, is that they need to check that free admission is applicable with new conditions being met; typically a phone call that very near to the beginning of the conversation will use the conditional ‘if’ in a question – ‘If I show you a screen-grab / screenshot of my entitlement to government benefits will you let me in for free?’ What was simple; click the checkbox for your visitor slot and show the letter eat the entry point, is now complicated by an erosion of common-sense right at the top of the Government and at the fabric of our society.
When a government promotes that kind of behaviour we know we can expect a desertification of confidence in one another and a crumbling of the edifices of courtesy and manners through lack of maintenance because there are no more engineers left to check for decay.
I understand that this laxity in manners has come about because by having personal phones we simply cannot be bothered to comply with instructions or conditions when there are clear rules and guidelines, and so many of us simply phone up and renegotiate the conditions we can’t be bothered to comply with. We do this because we get a buzz out of conversation, and we get a buzz out of settling something while avoiding greater effort to achieve the criteria a business has set out for eligibility; in other words – terms and conditions.
An email to my grandma on her birthday saves me walking to the post office for a stamp and an envelope; I don’t need to find a pen. ‘I know I had one, when I was at school!’; and the emoji or emoticon for a smiley face is cute.
Let me tell you why I am thinking that there is an overall erosion of sensibility in modern society. I was offered a job which I formally accepted. The start date was agreed and everything was in place and understood. I even received an email saying ‘Welcome…..see you on [date]’. And here is the kicker – it went on, ‘If you have any questions email me’. About a week later the recruitment agency, through which the job was arranged, questioned me on why I did not reply to that email. ‘I have no questions.’ I said. ‘But, you should thank them for giving you the job and tell them you are looking forward to starting.’ I sent an email to the business to tell them I cannot take the job because we must eliminate this third party element (job recruitment agency) immediately. I was told by the business that the third party element cannot be bypassed. I rejected the job. Apparently there is now, in the modern world, a requirement to unnecessarily and inanely chatter once a contract is in place. The agreement to work for the business was to do a particular job for x amount of money and for x amount of hours. – end of! Nothing else, terms and conditions fulfilled. No need for reassurance. Would you work for an insecure business owner? Not I! I owned and ran a very successful international relocation business. It worked like this. Tell us what you have to move; from where to where; and when to move it, and we will give you a guaranteed price and a guaranteed start-time AND FINISH TIME on your chosen day, with a GUARANTEED PRICE. (We also made it clear on the website that if you lie to us we will impose unlimited penalty charges, that equated to our penalty charges for being late to the next job, if we are delayed by your deceit).
Once the quote was accepted we sent an email with the details in it to the booker. There was then no more communication. Now, ten years later, we would need to send an email every week just to say we have not forgotten our agreement, and everything is on target, and there are no changes to the price or the time or the dates. In effect, everything is the same.
We stopped trading at the peak of our success because suddenly, in 2020, everyone got scared and they have never got well again. Nothing had changed with us; we still honoured contracts and those contracts did not include petting and patting nervous entities. Successful businesses, offering excellent service at the best prices, do not have the resources to stroke and tickle nervous customers without different sensible people paying for it. Of course, ‘added services’ for product sales was already billowing, with an ill-wind, throughout honest trade to show, like a waggy-tailed puppy, shallow and delighted attention (that is likely to be revised and diverted at a moments notice when there is a distraction).
Would you trust someone who says they will be at a meeting place once, or someone who constantly states that they will be there? Think for a moment; why would the second person feel the need to update you? Because one of you is unreliable. However, once you get used to obsequious service you kind of miss it and start to feel nervous when you don’t get it anymore. Ultimately though, the customer ends up paying more money for something that would otherwise have been very simple.
According to Statista , in 2005, the USA sent a total of 81 billion text messages; in 2011, 2.3 trillion; and in 2021, 2 trillion (down from the years 2020 and 2019). With approximately 370 million people in the USA, including infants, that 2021 figure comes to 5405 messages received by each person in that year. (an average of 14 – 15 messages every day)
In the UK, according to sellsell.com, in 2012, almost 151 billion SMS and MMS messages were sent; and every year since 2012 the number has decreased so in 2022, 36,440,000,000 (36.44 billion) were sent. With approximately 70 million UK people, that means approximately 2,157 messages were received by each person in 2012; in 2022, approximately 520 messages were received by each person that year. That is an average of 10 messages per week. Clearly another form of social media is used in the UK.
Realistically, we have to consider that these figures may only reflect the number of messages that were received by individuals because messages are also sent by businesses. The point is not lost in recognising that the recipient responds to a message by looking at their phone and reading the message; and even looks at their phone when their phone has not notified that a message has been received and when there is not a message to read.
MTV, the music-TV channel, launched in 1981, was one of the first to put streaming ‘ticker-tape’ type text at the bottom of the music video. Some people had difficulty in watching the band playing and reading the scrolling text. However, we soon developed the ability to comprehend both. We now desire multiple streams of entertainment simultaneously; hence the anticipation of texting and social media interaction that many of us experience throughout the whole of our waking lives.
While I do not condone recreational drug use, some studies have shown that a marijuana smoker is as attentive to their work environment as a person who consistently checks their SmartPhone and responds to messages throughout the day. Given the choice, as an employer, of whether to hire an illegal drug user or a regular user of a SmartPhone, the pot-head wins. The pot-head only loses out if they are dealing too. I mean let’s face it; try getting a SmartPhone addict to do a repetitive job. Each of these people-type examples, it seems clear, is trying to ameliorate, what they perceive to be a boring existence, with a panacea, different for each but still a panacea. It is sad that we need drugs to put up with our banal lives and make it through the day. ‘Whew! Made it! Oh, wait. One last check of my phone, or one last toke, to take away distraction and help me sleep.
So, what does all this come down to? The thrill of anticipation of a return text or expected telephone has become an addiction to dopamine, which in turn, has twisted into a malevolent paranoia that things are not well, when the pleasure centre (Am. center) of our brains in not triggered often enough, simply because all is not well because we are not getting our ‘fix’ of dopamine often enough. If nobody calls us or texts us, we feel unwanted and left out, if we have not yet become a junkie. And like all addicts, our judgement is impaired when we both, get our fix, AND when we don’t. As an employer, given the choice between a dopamine junkie and a clean person with the same experience and qualifications, the dopamine junkie would not even get an interview for a job I might offer. The questions that needs to be answered are: Are you selfish? Are you insecure? and, will work be a sufficient distraction from your need for connection?
What distracts you?
I once got asked when, conducting research, I applied for a job, ‘What distracts you?’ I thought, ‘Nothing’. The question was actually code for, ‘How many times a day do you look at your phone?’ I left their premises very much saddened.
All of us are a single decision away from having digital devices implanted in our heads.
Producers are people, businesses and organisations that make things. In a supply chain these things are called goods. However, it is possible to produce a result without there being anything tangible such as by providing a service, which could even avoid a reciprocal service, monetary remuneration, or other recompense. Hence it is possible to produce an idea, concept, hypothesis or theory. It is possible to produce a flood that damages an area or property. These ideas and calamities are causes of an effect that are the kernels of demand in ‘the wild’.
Ideas and concepts can be innovations or disruptions. Beavers and pranking children can devastate lowlands by diverting or damming streams. Alternatively, beavers create good habitats for wildlife and are exceptionally good at maintaining a status quo once they have flooded an area. Maybe this tangent is a little obscure in its efficacy to be considered to be part of a supply chain but only if we consider the effect beavers solely have on human lives. The beaver collects wood after working as lumberjacks for a while. As a consequence of building a dam it supplies water to an area that previously had only rainfall. Flora and fauna that like wetlands come to the area, some birds arrive as tourists who regard the area as a second home until it gets too cold for them. These plants and animals leave detritus and excrement which adds to the desirability for other plants to settle there and consequently the animal and plant diversity rises. Each one of these plants and animals are stakeholders in the supply chain as producers in a wide and versatile environment.
Humans are much more direct in their nature and harvest materials to produce goods not only for their hungry digestive systems but also for their material enjoyment, comfort and ease. Worse still, they do this for profit. Nonetheless, we must allow this because if businesses and organisations make no profit then taxes collected by governments would have to be on revenue, which would likely put charities out of business.
Producers make tangible goods and conduct intangible services such as washing clean cars. (We can see them do it and sometimes see an improvement).
If we consider the balance of nature that is steadily built over time we can understand how any person can be a major disruptor; it only requires a careful presentation of a setting, circumstance or situation and its fallibility in the face of a determined person to show how there is a significant contrast between something that is valued by many and something else that is valued by a few, or even a single person.
Social Learning
Proposed by Albert Bandura in 1977, he said humans can delay gratification and dispense their own punishments and rewards. We can reflect on our own actions and change future behaviour. This led to the idea that humans learn not from how they respond to situations, but also from how other humans respond to situations. Bandura called this ‘modelling’. In social learning we learn by observing other’s behaviour.
For adolescents, role models include parents, athletes, and entertainers, but parents are the most influential (Martin and Bush, 2004). Parents socialise their children into purchasing and consuming the same brands that they buy, actively teaching them consumer skills – materialistic values and consumption attitudes in their teenage years. Interaction with peers also makes adolescents more aware of different offerings (Moschis and Churchill, 1978). Research indicates that those who read reviews are twice as likely to select a product compared with those who do not (Senecal and Nantal, 2004).
Some citing (above) can no longer be referenced to the original source I chose, some years ago; I didn’t know how to properly cite and reference sources when I researched for the above piece. I think anyone can cut and paste the names and dates (above) and get an online source that signifies that the named people did research that I sourced and allude to here.
If I ever, one day, want to create characters for stories, I think I would try to remember all the snippets of conversations I had inadvertently overheard while waiting in a queue, or just passing someone, and I would write them down.
In London, England, I overheard a young woman, with a slight, maybe French, accent say, ‘Don’t be mean to me just because I am young!’ I was struck by this because it was something that seemed only possible to enter the head of someone who is not British. Maybe I am closeted by confirmation bias – I had never heard a similar comment in a British accent, yet I can’t help thinking that her upbringing included a reasoning that youth is no bar to intelligence or understanding; not a sense of entitlement, more an understanding that she was not fettered. She seemed to recognise that she lacked experience but that was all that was missing for her to instantly understand something that other people had heuristics for, or for British people in England just grew up knowing.
I had a French female friend who told me that while she was still learning English, she had put too much powder on her face, and so asked her new English boyfriend to ‘blow off’ on her face. (Blow off is English slang for farting). She said he looked really shocked, because he didn’t know her very well. As an invite to me to freely visit, she once told me to ‘just come in and pop’. I think she was attempting a euphemism though; sort of a ‘double entendre’. Let’s face it, the French know what a ‘double entendre’ is. I really liked her then, but just smiled, not really knowing that she liked me back; she told me later, just before she moved away from the area.
I was on the same bus as a young mother with a baby that incessantly cried. I didn’t mind; I just felt really sorry for her. Her look of concern and helplessness was so pitiful. I couldn’t help though because I had just had eye surgery and was blind in one eye on a moving bus. She didn’t know that the bus engine noise would be extremely loud for a new baby, and she didn’t know how to comfort her new baby. When I passed her to get off the bus, I noticed her melting face filled with gratitude for the three elderly women attending to her and her baby. To this day, she might think how wonderful the ladies were in quietening her child, but I suspect she should thank the driver for delivering us all to the bus station safely, and naturally switching the engine off.
Surrounded by people, I overheard a man of perhaps 30 years, say to himself, ‘I just want someone to talk to.’
As I passed someone queuing to get into a music gig, I overheard him say to his friend, ‘I wish I didn’t know so much.’ I think he had a high IQ and didn’t know what to do with it.
I overheard a woman in a supermarket in the summer of 2020 almost shout to a shop assistant that she has a breathing condition. She wasn’t wearing a mask (Covid 19 lockdown in the UK). I suspect her boyfriend was one of those people who think it is cool to have maximum agency over their lives despite how negatively it affects everyone else. I imagine that he knows he annoys people and that is his signal to himself that he is in control over his life.
I overheard two people about twenty feet apart in a residential road:
Exasperated, one said, ‘Why don’t you just come to me if there is a problem?’
The other called over his shoulder, ‘Because you have no respect for other people, and so you can’t understand a single word I say to you!’
I used to play a game with my children in the car. Later, I played the same game with some of my employees while we were travelling abroad. ‘What do you think that person there is thinking?’ I would point out, or earmark someone in our view, across the street at traffic lights or in a park we were passing. Usually, the answers were quite mundane. But, I would always offer something like, ‘At last it is raining so I can test this umbrella I bought from a trader in the Sahara desert’; or ‘This is the fifth time this month that someone has stolen my car!’ when someone was walking or cycling; or ‘If I sit on this bench long enough perhaps the Council will put a plaque on it as a memorial to me.’ If I saw someone dancing and looking down, I might say something like, ‘Oh no! I know where my son’s stick-insects are now!’ My children and employees never seemed to understand that there is much more going on in other people’s lives than is evident to onlookers. They had never experienced a moment of sonder, or ‘the feeling one has on realising that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own, in which they are the central character and others, including oneself, have secondary or insignificant roles’. (Dictionary.com)
I would have been delighted if the people we were observing were playing the same game and had targeted us, pointing their fingers and laughing.
‘Sonder’ is also Afrikaans for ‘without’ from the Dutch word ‘zonder’.
In searching for the word ’sonder’ in a thesaurus, I came across the word ’spissitude’ which I think means ‘density’. I would definitely have a drunk character in a play say ‘spissitude’ rather than ‘density’.
My 1962 Roget’s Thesaurus does not have ‘sonder’ in the index.
My 1982 ‘Concise Oxford Dictionary’ does not have ‘sonder’.
The best definition I can get for ‘sonder’ is from the OED www.oed.com under ‘sonder-cloud’. I used my library card to log in, under ‘Institutional Access’.
‘Now historical and rare.
A cirrocumulus cloud.
1816 Cirrocumulus, or Sondercloud, i.e. cloud consisting of an aggregate of clouds asunder (from A.S. sond, Old Eng. a-sonder and sonder): the distinguishing marks of this cloud being that of separate orbs aggregated together, and the change to this cloud from others is a separation of continuity into particules.
So, if we apply this wonderful definition of cirrocumulus sonder-cloud to people, we can have a ‘cloud’ of people casting a mottled shadow on the world. Shadows are not necessarily bad though, they provide shade from the searing sun, and contrast in an otherwise too brightly lit environment. Alternatively, we might like the idea of a lesser chance of sunburn. Because cirrocumulus clouds are so high up, we on Earth only detect a dimming of light and not distinct shadows. So, a ‘cloud’ of people are probably more portentous, than distinctly instrumental in changing an environment – more of a feeling at the back of one’s mind of a lesser quality of life in the present yet the reason is not immediately evident.
Cirrocumulus clouds are those ones that look like lambs tails, or when there is about to be a change in weather, they might be seen when a sky is described as a ‘mackerel sky’.
I like to play mind-chess with unsolicited visitors to my home
Sometimes, a person on my doorstep, tries to sell me Broadband or something, and because I don’t respond to marketing or sales techniques at all, rather than just poke them in the chest with a broom and shoo them away, I give them the time of day and allow them to practice their elevator-pitch (an opening spiel that is intended to open a door of curiousity). I ask questions and let them respond. Eventually, the conversation peters out and they quietly go, at least a little rejuvenated and not immediately shunned.
Every now and then, a pair of people knock on my door to talk to me about Jesus and God. I thoroughly enjoy these moments because I have a deep belief in the spiritual world, so I am not afraid of any witchcraft or hypnotism they might try to trap me with. Some time ago, I came to understand that ‘omnipresent’ means, in the past, present and the future. That means that, theoretically, we can pray in the future for our sins in the past and God, being in the future, hears those prayers and prevents us being spoiled by sin, or even committing sin. I use this as a universal truth with the evangelists on my doorstep, and we play mind-chess for a while. If, towards the very end of the conversation, I mention that ‘omniscient’ means knowing what will happens in the past, present, and future, it shows that planning to pray in the future, like next Sunday, to cover a sin we are about to commit today, is useless because it is not sincere. God and I have a good laugh at this over a brandy and a cigar. Neither of us smoke or drink, so we just laugh instead.
I created James and Brian, two characters to show how foolish most of us are, and especially me. At the end, you can hear God laugh at James’ stupidity. This is just a story. I have taken a strong view as narrator to make a case for James.
Mind Chess
(With a nod to Transactional Analysis)
The allotment was empty when James got there. The gate was open but there were no delusional would-be market-gardeners to be seen. The exposed dry soil made James think of water. It even smelt dusty today; humidity levels were low, and it hadn’t rained for over five weeks. His own plot was green and abundant with fresh growth but everywhere else was a scene of abandonment. Bare soil with random segregated weeds moping in the sun made James contemptuous of the absent hobbyists and pretenders. Only gooseberry bushes seemed to be growing; gooseberries bushes scattered across arid plots surrounded by congregating weeds vying for position, like unruly football fans at a match that hadn’t started yet.
Nobody, it seemed, was concerned with neatness or order, yet farmers, James thought, with all the land they cultivate were tidier than these lazy losers. Some things came easy for James. Having self-propagating flowering plants with lots of ground-covering foliage that prevented the soil drying out and kept weeds down in early Spring was just the obvious thing to do; knowing this allowed him spare time. He had long ago concluded that if he hadn’t expended any energy sowing these seeds or tending the plants he really didn’t mind digging them up to plant other preferred seedlings. Some things were difficult for James. Compassion and empathy were alien to him, so much so that he was ruthless even with himself. He had had his turn at suffering and avoided any circumstance that had a probability of happiness, as he saw it. Happiness, he felt, could be taken from him, by accident or by someone’s will. He was disappointed with life and lived a life of asceticism, with no expectation of joy. You might expect him to be in fine physical shape but he was lazy, preferring to use his brain to find ways to alleviate or avoid the toil of hard work. He was also young; not even sixty-two yet.
Pushing his bicycle with day-glow green handlebars and front forks, he went further in, hoping for something stimulating that was emotionally free, but finding nothing of interest. His own plot, he saw, was just as he had left it, green and luscious with its covering of Limnanthes douglasii, or Poached Egg plant. This was safe for him; no emotion or effort put in and free aesthetic value taken out. His mental cost – benefit analysis said ‘win – win’. He was about to leave when he spied a man painting a tiny shed, going just beyond scumbling and changing its colour from grey to duck-egg blue.
James quickly learned that Brian used to be a secondary school teacher, because Brian wanted him to know that he used to be useful. By association with his career, Brian hoped that everyone he told would continue to think that he was a hero, a modern day crusader in driving forward decades of young minds into a bright future but was realistically a voracious and gaping maw of banality in the North East of England; an unattended torpidity that would swallow up even the sharpest of students. James, on the other hand, was an unqualified educator; a corrector of intellectual mistakes, and a ruthless and unfeeling man who had dedicated himself to proving everyone he met, wrong, stupid, a waste of space, or obsolete.
James had strong views and knew the far-reaching extent of his mind outstripped most others. Where others relied on heuristics, James experimented; where others got information from newspapers, television and social media, James parasitically sucked dry selected information he found in the people he met; though never the information that the host thought valuable and had gleaned from their favourite media sources. James was instead searching for tiny connecting pieces to complete his collection of finished thinking. He needed to understand his world in fine detail, so he could eventually show the rest of the world that he was right to hate everyone for their stupidity and and right to be a loner.
There are two types of people according to James; sublime people of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth who were beneficial to him; and the rest of the world. James categorised Brian to be obsolete and a drain on public learning. However, Brian, innocently holding his small tin of paint in one hand and a brush in the other, and comfortable in his fug of accumulated miscomprehension had roused James’ interest. Mental stimulation was the drug that kept James alive. He never showed his true colours when he first met someone. Instead, he let them rudely promote themselves and then gave them reasons to go away and think about how they might wake from the weary slumber that was home to their comforting insensibility. James thought himself special. Conversely, he knew this and that is why he hated himself. Self-flagellation had eaten away at James’ confidence and left only a paradigm of behaviour almost completely devoid of compassion.
Initially, Brian was friendly and not alarmed and after general conversation on plants and how he had moved his shed, Brian suddenly swerved onto a blustering, and clearly unrefined, path with an outburst on people dumping their rubbish in the Birmingham streets. Brian wasn’t quite ranting and James knew that he wasn’t crazy by the standards of the time. He recognised a man that spent at least a couple of hours with a pint in his hand at the bar of his local pub on Sundays. Like everyone else, talking, for Brian, was almost entirely only mental exercise.
‘They just dump their rubbish in the streets’, cried Brian indignantly. ‘I mean their mattresses and things. They should take it all to the tip.’
James, calm in his thinking, knew that not everyone had access to a van or trailer in Birmingham, and there was a rubbish removal-person strike in Birmingham, so no-one could arrange for a mattress or old cupboard to be taken away either. To James, Brian was certainly, by the standards of the day, completely average in his thinking; clearly insane. James, however, was charitable in classing it as ‘lazy and crust coated thinking’. He recognised the patina on Brian’s thinking; patina that was a result of poor maintenance and a reactive exposure to lazy thinkers. ‘Get your thoughts out, use them, Brian, and embellish them with facts and fresh ideas. Where is your inventiveness, Brian?’ he thought. He could almost ‘see’ extraneous bits of thoughts being sheared off in Brian’s head as they were shaped to fit with other similarly corroded thoughts, and cobbled together, to quickly throw up a feeble scaffold so flimsy that only a minor test would knock it down, but sufficient enough for him to formulate his own opinion to use as a remedial buttress; an opinion that once it had reached his fore-brain and left his mouth would be his long-standing fall-back position because it was the only one he had. It would be a buttress to a non-existent scaffold that becomes the foundation for the next scaffold. Now that it had been recently and neatly placed on the wobbly shelves in the library of Brian’s mind, he would be attracted to its shiny newness. The attendant analogue library filing card for where it was stored, would, with its crisp corners and uncreased facade, for a long while be more attractive than its dog-eared, mis-filed, and stained neighbours. Brian had made all his relatable experiences obsolete. Thinking stalled.
James felt compelled to help Brian restart his donkey-engine, cement-mixer type mind; a mind that needed to first be pulled free from a bog of mistreatment.
Unfortunately, the mind is not hermetically sealed from the outside world and the gatekeepers in charge of inward-bound information in Brian’s mind were now baffled and throttled by newly installed governors that came in a box-set with a belief that his education was completed when he achieved a recognised teaching qualification.
Brian’s unconscious source thought was, ‘I know my subject and the University has told me that I can adequately teach it. I have experience of teaching in secondary schools as part of my degree, so I now know everything I need to bend young minds to think like me. They really should, you know, because I am right. No! More than that, because I care, I am a hero!’
He had, a long time ago, in younger years, consciously thought, ‘I am so excited. I want to help young people. I really care.’
Any observer could, in retrospect, suggest that the demons were ready and waiting to leap into him to corrupt his valiant hope while he fervently clutched his University approbation, but already they were in him, part of his core, inherited from his parents, and encouraged by his friends and peers.
‘No new information is needed. Don’t explore. You have all the information you need to teach empty heads. Relax.’
‘Well done!’ to Brian meant, ‘You have done enough. You can stop now.’
This necrotic stagnancy was starkly evident to James in the rest of their discussion. Brian had opinions on Government handouts; criminal records preventing people from ever working in their whole lives; and who might attend and be an appropriate recipient at Food Banks. James, with a robust understanding of these social issues through diligent research and empirical knowledge threw in ‘Shame on them!’ as the conversation segued from benefit cheats to habitual scroungers. This left-over salty seasoning of the stew of Brian’s opinion on righteously moaning benefits recipients was too much for Brian’s palate. But James had carefully measured that condiment into his hand to check its volume and supposed effect, and smiled at Brian’s donkey engine mind chewing on old slime and chunks of debris from his socially-conscious 1990s history, when it balked at the jet-wash of fresh briny thinking.
Brian, with his self-assurance, had already made his first mistake with James; thinking that everyone watches television and have similarly long straws that are permanently thrust into the same soup of Orwellian nonsense and thus everyone is supplied with the same delectable but mentally-hostile nourishment. One of the reasons why James did not eat media-cake was because it tastes delicious but is hostile to the body. It satisfies a want, yet secretly poisons a need.
Subconsciously, Brian was reconnoitering for people to add to his group of confirmation-bias addicts; searching for another stumbling mess of a person who prefers an easy route through a jungle of information; a route that was crudely cut by a man with a machete following an animal track, that became a track for illegal loggers. A path that is there by dint of its availability. The more people use it, the more easily it is found, due to its wide and trampled aspect. Brian was used to following the pack. His younger self would have wept.
‘They just dump their rubbish outside other people’s homes in Birmingham.’ Brian remarked, alluding to, though not saying outright, people leaving their rubbish outside the homes of people of colour, and not instead gently placing it outside white people’s homes. James was aware of that happening. He suspected that Brian thought he would jump on his band-wagon of aggrieved righteousness because James was closer in colour to Indians and Middle-Eastern people than the old-school notion of what a European should look like; Scandinavian and Danish Vikings from 1000 years ago. In any case, James didn’t bite. He went the other way in thinking and held one idea back for the shock value, if it was needed.
In his head he went with an idea that, in a lawless environment there is no infrastructure to guide someone towards making mutually beneficial decisions, which came out as, ‘Why not, everyone else is; and where else is there to put it?’ James had now set himself up to fatally fail in his mission to destroy the canker in Brian’s mind. He would never recover from this outward attitude of simplistic laissez-faire.
It was not the first time James had been mistaken for an Asian or Middle-Eastern man. He spent a lot of time outside and grew tanned even by the winter sun. Certainly, he wasn’t going to, without question, be waving a flag for a brown ethnic minority people he did not belong to, and crying foul at every mistake made by a Viking, which Brian, it seems, thought he would.
Neither was he about to run around shouting ‘Up the Vikings!’
‘Is that what you think happens, Brian?’ James thought, ‘Brown people will always have opinions that support only brown people?’ He never said it, though, because he still believed he held the central position in the game of chess, that was, to him, their conversation. He knew that attack would cause Brian to defend, and then there would only be a game of attrition; Brian would never have a confident gambit if he was forced to defend himself. It was his opponents’ gambits that James liked to publicly dissemble.
Brian still believed that James was from the same economic background as himself and maintained his ‘friendly pontificating over a Sunday pint in the village local’ attitude. He breached the subject of criminality and having a criminal record forever preventing young adults from getting jobs. As a teacher, he’d had an enhanced criminal record check because he was working with vulnerable people. He presumed that everyone has the same check; James knew they don’t.
‘On application forms, hopeful people, in the UK, must confess to any convictions within the last ten years. After ten years, their records are deleted, and they are considered reformed and no longer a threat to themselves, the shop-keepers’ sweets, or other people. Actually’, James continued, ‘the records are not deleted. Convictions for most offences are simply not revealed when requested by a potential employer, except for certain crimes.’
Brian looked uncomfortable at this, inconveniently sure that young criminals were eternally doomed and condemned to be forever unemployed by their foolish earlier actions. By this time in the conversation, James knew that Brian, the ex-teacher, still foolishly believed that education universally solves unemployment in all environments, and is the sole and absolute requirement for opportunities for success to emerge. Brian, born in the North East of England has lived in the south of England for too long, and, in James’ mind had forgotten his home. When James added that as an employer, he had worked closely with recruitment agencies to get people at very short notice for some of his contracts, Brian’s spluttering, pollution-spreading engine of a mind encountering a steep incline in the road to progress, switched on the automatic choke because its core temperature still remained too low, and so more stale fuel from his tank of denial was sucked in, at the expense of fresh air. He refused to learn something new or believe that he was wrong. He did not recognise that he needed to purge his system.
Brian shifted back to talking about food banks, believing that it was, in fact, James who was clearly exhibiting signs of mental disorder, and he tried to link education, criminality, and poverty with a circumstance he had read about and seen on the news. From his self-imposed, though much supported by his peers, elevated position of superiority over mentally aberrant individuals, such as this moron before him, he thought that James would agree with his confused and blind belief that all visitors to food banks are food-poor. ‘How can he not see the truth? It is in the newspapers, for goodness sake!’, he irately pondered.
However, when Brian demonstrated this fabricated empathy for peasants living on bread and water, James had to make sure Brian knew that many of them indeed eat cake. He had attended a food bank perhaps five times over as many years. Extra money went out as a larger direct debit than he was anticipating and five more times because he was ineffective in temporarily saving money by switching utility providers.
‘As someone interested in social enterprises, I spent a lot of hours talking to the organisers of local food banks and hubs.’ James explained.
‘All of them complained about rising numbers and how to tax people with a set ‘donation’ of around five pounds for each visit. My input with them was, as a general rule, to not allow people to attend if their benefit is paid that same week.’
James was now beginning to reveal his ruthlessness, but he knew that the same people week after week were getting free food so they could buy luxuries such as eating out and expensive day-trips with the money they saved. This at the expense of both the needy and the food-hubs which spent money on food to accommodate the greedy as well as the hungry.
‘Shame on them’, he said again.
Brian, in his turn, was irritated by James’ arrogance and finally ended the conversation when James tried to explain how needs and wants change as people mature, so financial income has a different utility for different age groups.
‘I really must get on with painting this shed. My wife will kill me if I waste this paint.’
James turned his bike around. A duck in the pond laughed when an opportunistic jackdaw who had delightedly watched the whole thing croakily called, ‘Hear! Hear!’.
Brian blinked and stared, confounded, and watched, paint pot in one hand and brush in the other, while James pushed his bicycle away, towards the gate at the edge of the allotment and back to the road.More cars were parked at the gate.
James, alone with his thoughts again, was convinced that he had proved himself right. Students really are held back by coasting teachers. Yet, blindly, he had corrupted himself because he had no evidence to back this up. It was still supposition. Nonetheless, he closed his thought-experiment examination of teacher and pupil interaction, and added one more theory to his collection of completed thoughts.
The duck, unable to keep the smile off its face, put its head beneath the water, then needing air, withdrew it, shook it, and laughed again at the jackdaw as it shamefacedly flew away.
Because we cannot hear what our voices sound like to others we are surprised to hear it when we first hear a recording of our own voice. Similarly, I once heard that if we met ourselves in the street we would always thereafter cross the road whenever we saw ourselves to avoid another meeting; such is the distaste we would have at our own selves. In other words, we would not want to be friends with ourselves.
The man in his fifties
‘What, you don’t need me anymore?’, said the man in his fifties to me as he came down the library stairs.
This man did not seem to be offended nor surprised, merely bemused. I suspected he was not significant in improving my day, and he seemed to be wondering what he would do before he finally disassembled after gradually fading, if I continued to ignore him. At least, that is what I was wondering.
I ignored this familiar, though not recognised man. I had no idea who he was, simply because I had never seen myself before without prejudice, and never heard my own voice coming from outside my own head, without the resonances in my mouth and nasal passages acting as feedback.
At the time I didn’t realise that I had imagined and created him to guard me and warn me of impending danger, which he had so far done exceedingly well, though not in a language that I understood, more as an uncomfortable feeling, of concern in a particular direction. I knew that it had been useful, really useful, to be somehow connected to someone unbiased and disconnected from the world by a slight phase shift; a delay of a few milliseconds. I had also used him as a counselor, or just someone to act as devil’s advocate; a sounding board, if you will; this was, after all, someone I had never met in the real world, would never be punitively accountable to, or ever expect him to tell my secrets. But at this time of first meeting a visible, seemingly solid, manifestation I was still clueless.
Later, when I was talking to an elderly lady, the man in his fifties came back, talking nonsense, well, almost nonsense; certainly interjecting himself in a boorish manner. He seemed to be someone else’s idea of confident and open, and desperately, though dismally, trying to demonstrate some kind of learnedness that encompassed the current situation and everything in it.
Disgusted, I walked away and left him to it – not wanting to become engaged in any kind of difficult dialogue with him. I felt sorry for the elderly woman, leaving her talking to, what was really just obfuscation of her slight problem with a shopping trolley; a bit like inclement weather. I didn’t know it was myself she was talking to, me just a few days, weeks, years ago, but now projected as a probable future outcome. It was that same person, me in the past and recent present, compressed into a single moment. I had, in fact, two decades ago as a teenager, created a manifestation to fill the gap in my own emotional mis-education. No wonder no-one liked me now if I was going to be like that.
During the next few days a few people, strangers I met, looked at me a bit too long as though they recognised me, or puzzled as though I had sworn out loud for no reason, or saw a change in me. How could they? They had never met me. No, but it soon became apparent they had met the man in his fifties. To be fair, they hadn’t actually met the man in his fifties. Instead, their own being, imagined, created or organically existing, inside of these strangers, who in their cases happened to be the same age as themselves, had met the man in his fifties; this being my future self if I did not change my ways. They knew each other, and on days off had sometimes met and wildly pontificated their theories on everything; they were, after all, not bound by a fear of failure and consequently were supremely confident.
Later that day, I met the elderly woman again. The wheel on her stolen shopping trolley was still about to fall off, much like it had been ‘borrowed’ in the 1990s and had never been properly maintained up to today. That in itself was strange, but that she looked like how my wife might look in forty years was overwhelmingly disturbing.
‘Who was that awful man?’ she asked. I had a strange feeling then that I was not going to remain married. This fleeting feeling of deja-vu and prescience broke the veil of incomprehension. I understood in a small way who the man in his fifties might be.
Hakim, my outrageously handsome childhood friend met me at the bar in the pub that evening. He was much more sanguine about how my day had played out. When I say handsome, I mean that I try not be seen with him in public because, although my features are plain, in comparison with his, I would be arrested for being in possession of an offensive face. My only advantage was that being slightly taller than average height I towered over his diminutive one metre fifty stature.
We stayed sitting at the bar, our usual place. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing’, he said, ‘I have had whole conversations with animals about re-incarnation.’ He climbed down from his stool and flambuoyantly limped over to the docile dog in the corner.
‘Jean-Paul’, he said, ‘When will you give me that ten Francs you borrowed from me twenty years ago in Paris?’ Hakim has a sense of humour that makes it difficult for me to know when he is joking or just crazy.
While Hakim was in the toilet, the man in his fifties came in, stood briefly at the bar, then took a stool there, two stools away, waiting to be served. My heart sank. It plummeted into depths of despair when Hakim walked jauntily back in without his limp and climbed his stool again. Please don’t talk to him, Hakim, I prayed.
‘Long time no see, Martin! Have a beer?’ My name is Martin but Hakim was not looking at me. I was beginning to realise that Hakim might actually have whole conversations with dogs, and why he is supremely confident; he could see my older self, just as I could. For the first time, I regretted reading that book. ‘Mind Games’, when I was fourteen, and particularly the chapter titled. ‘How to manifest a being’. A kaleidoscope of jigsaw pieces fell into place as developing thoughts in my mind. Most of these I knew to be only suppositions, such as virgins have a greater ability to manifest in the spirit world, like Oracles in ancient civilisations. I had manifested ‘Martin’, my avatar, before I had scratched the itch of carnal desire with someone else. ‘Martin’ was consequently, not a temporary being.
Alarmingly, it seemed that my manifestation now had agency over itself. I suspected that Hakim already knew this. I knew that I would not shake ‘Martin’ off, as me in thirty years time, without help. I looked hopefully at Hakim, who ignored me.
‘Get Martin whatever he is drinking, please.’ he said to the barman, gesturing to the man in his fifties.
Oh no! I thought, This is the avatar that connected with the being that guided me, without tripping, through a completely dark wood, after I fell in a ditch. I didn’t like this manifestation but I should.
– end –
Are these the persons who precede us?
Do these persons judge us before we ever arrive? So when first impressions in the real world count, they really don’t?
Realistically, I think first impressions in the real world do count, yet not necessarily in the ways that many people postulate. We can tell if someone is fit by the way they walk. We can tell if someone is polite or merely aware of social protocols. I am fairly certain that it is how we perceive ourselves that causes us to shape ourselves to a reasonable conformity of our expectations. I slouch, not so much because I am tall, but because I am jaded. I make mock gestures of tipping my hat to strangers to let them know I have a sense of humour and a recognition of manners past, because I feel isolated. There are a myriad of tiny things I do which I do not recognise because I have not met myself and can’t see them. If I met myself coming down the street, I would see a man tipping an invisible hat and jauntily and happily moaning about his perception of the world. I would cross the road to avoid myself. The little story is about how awkward I would feel if I had to introduce my embarrassing invisible friend (me) to my other friends, as someone I love and respect. Strangely, this invisible friend is someone my friends and family have already met.
‘Old Martin, You make me want to be a better person.’
Walking into the spiritual world through a portal disguised as a wood
There is a theory that if someone falls from a great height that their whole life flashes before them in the moments before their demise. The theory has it that their brain is seeking a solution for the predicament the body is in by searching through that person’s memory of the past for a similar experience that has a solution with the prospect of survival.
I believe that, and might add that I also believe that in a fevered state, which may arise from near death, illness, or extreme stresses on the body, such as often occurs from sudden drug or alcohol withdrawal, there is an opportunity to ‘see’ or ‘perceive’ something that is ‘otherworldly’ – perhaps of the spirit world, or as I alluded to, maybe even ‘aliens’ who live in a ‘world that we humans find difficult to see (another plane of existence perhaps). In the psychiatric world this is known as psychosis. In extended periods of lack of sleep it is common for the sufferer to enter a psychotic existence until the brain is able to adequately process the experiences of the last few days and weeks, albeit in a weird and wildly ‘imaginative’ way. Who really thinks they can fly or their sibling is a horse?
If I may lead you back to the supposed existence of ‘aliens’ and the reverence we humans would have for their power to destroy nations, just as God destroyed nations in the Christian faith before the birth of Jesus; I might suggest that invisible angels guide people on earth today and are as powerful as invisible ‘aliens’ would be. While I cannot find much on the spiritual world in Buddhism I am certain that reincarnation must stem from a supreme influence which has no personality. Loosely then, I might consider ‘Karma’ to be the building of an angel by gathering some of the spiritual world into a more concentrated form that influences environments and people. Certainly, I have been lost in a totally dark wood and climbed out of a ditch with wet boots and been able to accurately find my way back to my tent with many turns without bumping into anything at all or tripping, without seeing a single thing, and stopped walking at my tent. I was ‘told’ I was home and to reach out my arm. I reached out my hand and felt my tent there in front of me. But not just any part of the tent; the entrance end. I think at that time, I had a good heart that was true to trying to understand and help people, otherwise I would not have been faultlessly guided to safety and would have instead been led into a thorny bush or a low branch.
There is also a belief that Jesus visited India and brought back some knowledge to his own place of birthplace. My own feeling is that there are many beliefs yet only one truth. Just as Jesus in the Christian faith is an avatar of God, or a personification of God, in order for the non-perceptive people of Jerusalem to experience a limited God, all the interpretations of the truth; Judaism, Buddhism, Islamism, Hinduism, and the beliefs of the native tribes of the world, are one and the same, yet have different avatars of gods, angels, spirits, and evil – even invisible manifestations created by a common belief by a group of people or a very strong individual. Dr. Suzanne Newcombe writes on page 350 in ‘Buddhism in Practice’ in the Open University book, ‘Crossing Boundaries’, ‘According to the doctrine of skillful means, it is appropriate to change the appearance of teaching in order to make it more accessible.’
A crash
On the 5th May 1977 a Canberra bomber airplane, based at RAF Wyton, crashed in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, England, onto a residential area. The two pilots, and three children on the ground died. I was in an Art Class at school at the time and witnessed the crash and explosion from a window. For no apparent reason I rose my desk and went to the window and looked in the direction of the imminent crash a few seconds before the impact; five other students did the same, but they were not copying me, despite it being highly unusual for any of my classmates leaving their studies on a seemingly aimless task. We were always only attentive to our work, such was our schooling.
I might leap to a misty conclusion and say that the pilots were seeking a solution to their imminent demise which was a result of them trying to steer their ailing plane away from housing and with their ejection from the aircraft not an accepted solution. Certainly, there was at least ten seconds from when I left my art-room desk and the explosion on the housing estate.Apparently, though, one crew member did eject but still sadly met his demise. They could both have ejected earlier but they did their best to save the residents of the housing estate below them.
Another Crash
Perhaps, there is a tenuous explanation that is linked to me once being able to unerringly find my tent in a completely dark wood in 2017 without tripping or bumping into obstacles when I explain that my tent was pitched in the same tiny wood, which either was a field or bordered a field in which a badly damaged RAF Stirling bomber, also based at RAF Wyton, crashed at 04:35am on 11th April 1942, following a raid on the German city of Essen.
In that crash, in Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire, England, Squadron Leader Drummond Wilson died instantly and Sergeant Edgar Gould died from his injuries, despite being rescued from the burning plane by Sergeant Southey. Perhaps, there is even a link in that I was leading a somewhat nomadic life at the time, just as were the gypsies on the gypsy site nearby, who attended the crash.
Sgt David Southey (Co-Pilot), who died in 1999, believed that the gypsies had pulled him from the plane and he always insisted afterwards that if a gypsy knocked on the door that his household had to buy something from them, as they had saved his life. Later research now shows that it was due to the bravery of Flight Officer Clifford Reeve that he survived. Of course, gypsies were non-people and weren’t allowed in pubs at the time.
Perhaps, somewhere in my spiritual record it is noted that I uselessly answered a call for help from pilots about to crash in Huntingdon, only because my unperceptive self and my mortality denied me the appropriate power to save them. Later, in Godmanchester, where other pilots had died and I needed help, I was afforded it, though not necessarily by the ghosts of the pilots. Commonly, many of us would call this ‘karma’, though most would believe that this karma manifests itself in the world that we can perceive, I think it also manifests in the same place in which it is stored; the spiritual world.
Perhaps then, Sergeant David Southey (from the Stirling bomber crash in 1942), who believed the gypsies rescued him and he then went back to the burning plane to rescue his colleagues, inadvertently entered into the spiritual world a record that a deserving nomadic person should be assisted when in need, and I happened to be near his Stirling bomber crash site seventy five years later. Perhaps we need to be near a place of someone’s personal sacrifice where they also spiritually place their gratitude and prayer, and it also be seared into the record by their intense emotion.
Fevered fog and intense emotion
So, back to reading the spirit world through a fevered fog, perhaps it is also true that the fever of intense emotion also writes in the spiritual world. I can’t help believing that there are pockets of intense emotion that mottle the world we know. Of course, with countless battles across Europe, murder and assaults by bandits and outlaws, we would be hard pressed to find a place of peace there. Perhaps, the deserts of the world might afford us some spiritual silence, as long as they have been deserts for a long time. Yet, I also believe that we cannot know peace until we have a reference point and a contrasting situation or environment.
Like dropping food colouring from a pipette into clear water the contrast of opacity and translucence is obvious. Of course, primarily, we notice this as colour (were you thinking red?). After a while, all the water is just coloured pink from red food colouring or light blue from blue colouring. So, if we were able to swim in the fresh clear water and then a giant or god dropped food colouring in, we would observe the event from afar, and when we enter the phenomenon, discover that our environment is different to the clear environment of before. Over the course of time, our whole world, in the glass or vessel holding the water, would be diffused with this original colouring event. It would be more gradual the further we are away from the initial event. Eventually, our descendants would be born into a world that to them would just be normally pink, yet is far from being natural.
Background radiation is supposedly what is left over from the ‘Big Bang’, the beginning of the universe. Many of us have heard this with Geiger counters in Science classes in school at about eleven or twelve years old as a series of random clicks – ‘Cosmic radiation. It comes from outer space!’. we are told. Most of it apparently does.
When the United States of America started testing nuclear devices in the 1940’s, they did it near to where Kodak, the camera-film people, had a camera-film manufacturing plant. Some developers of the film noticed defects that they could not explain. During the manufacture of the film some of the radiation from the tests chemically resembled some of the chemicals used to make the film, and this radiation became embedded in the film. Kodak had to change their manufacturing process to ameliorate the problem. There was also, supposedly, a large US Government cover-up. (Of course, they didn’t want the Russians to know about it – and Erin Brockovich would have been straight there).
We know that radiation has, what is called a ‘half-life’, just as caffeine in your coffee does; twelve hours for caffeine (a cup of coffee drunk twelve hours ago affects the body the same as half a cup of coffee drunk now). For radioactive material, this means that the radiation emitted from something is half as much as it originally was after its half-life period has passed. So a half-life of one hour means that every hour there would be half as much radiation; after each hour it would go down like this (100; 50; 25; 12.5; 6.75…..) Half as much as it was a hour ago. A banana containing potassium, is radioactive with extremely, super-duper, low doses and has a half-life of billions of years.
So, if the spirit world has a half-life of hundreds, thousands, millions, or almost five billion years, we will find it particularly awkward and frustrating to find any spiritual enclave that is surrounded by, yet different to the one we know and spend our daily lives in (pink suffusion from the red food colouring of calamitous events). But, I don’t think so.
Gaining respect through mutual understanding
When I was living in the woods in 2017, and guided back to my tent in the pitch blackness of unlit woodland, it could have been a ghost, a spirit, or a lost alien. I can tell you that, prior to that, during the day, in the wood, my glasses would be flicked from my face with a loud click. Every time this happened I looked around for a branch that could have snagged them, but I was never near a tree or anything. I came to realise that it was a prank, or someone, or something, didn’t like me wearing glasses. I could have been scared, but I very quickly realised that invisibility and the ability to move silently provides the best surprise in any attack. If something wanted to hurt me, it could do it at any time; any time at all. It did not need to wait for me to be asleep. So, its intention was to alert me that it was there, but why?
Shortly after that understanding, I had a dream that ‘it’ told me that it hated me when I first pitched my tent there, but because I recognised that the wood was the rightful home to the animals and other beings, and I tried hard not to disturb their peace and security, ‘it’ now liked and respected me. My glasses stayed on my face from then on. My own security was important to me too, and the dog walkers, from then on, never came near to a place where they could discover my temporary home. I am certain they were gently guided away by my invisible and silent friend, even through telepathy.
What can we learn from this? If ‘they’ don’t want us to know they are there, we will never know they are there; our perception will just be barred from their world.
Space is transparent but might become translucent if we try to go to Mars
Astronauts come back saying how much they value our world when they see it from orbit. They say that they appreciate that everything they know and value is ‘down’ there. Most of me believes that they are more susceptible to spiritual influence out there though. There is just less ‘noise’ out there.
Duality is a bed that duplicity and selfishness share
The world is a noisy place. Thinking, just thinking, is becoming more and more difficult. It seems I am surrounded by demons with the sole job of disrupting achievement. The proverbial teenager; you know the type; someone who wants to listen to music and have constant excitement, considers any person that places a boundary on their activity as a tyrant. Yet, listening to music is only useful to people who are studying or working in the Arts. However, as a leisure pastime, I am told, it is quite popular. Some people, even play music while they are studying. Having a duality of focus is admirable, but I think duality is a bed for duplicity and selfishness that begets a child called interference.
When I drive, I sometimes have the radio on. When some people jog they listen to music. I have even seen cyclists with earbuds and headphones.
I had the radio on when I had to reverse a lorry off a pavement back onto the road. It was a curved road and pavement, which meant that the parked car behind me was in my blind spot for a while. Because it was school-kicking-out time I focused mainly on the pavement more than the road. The car had arrived between the time I got in the lorry and when I started reversing. I scraped the whole side of the car from front wing to back wing including the doors along the way. No-one was in the car. I did not hear the scraping or feel the bump. If there was a person in the car or someone standing between the lorry and the car, I would not have heard them shout. I could have killed someone. Now, I never have an auditory distraction when I am reversing any vehicle, ever. My passengers look at me agog when I turn off their favourite song.
‘Hey, that’s my favourite song!’
For a few moments, I don’t give a rat’s tail what you like or don’t like or how comfortable you are or what you are saying unless it is relevant to not maiming or killing someone or damaging property.
I silently think, ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, you stupid, stupid, ignorant fool. YOU are a distraction!’, Being British, I simply say, ‘Sorry’, then ‘Please don’t’, when they reach for the radio to turn it back on again.
I am a very experienced driver; that is why I am nervous. The checks we make on our behaviour when we are beginners at anything almost inevitably fades into the background when we, with a little experience, regard our watching ‘overself’ as a tyrant that is ruining our fun. A little experience is all we need to convince ourselves that the student (ourselves) has outclassed the master (paradoxically also ourselves). Yet, in my world, the true master has a shape.
‘Well, Look at that! He’s getting ahead of himself. There’s not enough interference.’ The head Demon said. ‘Who do we have under our control. Let’s see, which neighbour is oblivious to our existence? Oh yeah! ALL OF THEM!’ it gleefully shouted.
I had gotten up nice and early to study. All my needs for focused attention were attended to. I had not broken my fast, so my energy would not be diverted to moving food around in my guts, and I was suitably dosed with caffeine, lots of caffeine.
‘He is getting used to the idea that it is useless to even try to succeed.’
‘Just another few shoves and he will give up’
‘Often,’ I hear, ‘it is enough to allow the thought of a probable outcome to divert us from our true path.’
I was reminded of a piece in Reader’s Digest, that someone had sent in. It was about a grandfather of a young boy explaining to him how their footprints in the snow showed their different approaches to life.
‘Look how, as we crossed the field, my footprints go from the gate at that end to the gate here. They are straight and purposeful. Now look how your footprints go from the gate to that tree and then to the pond and then to that tree and the water-trough and then in a curve end up here. Your way is complicated and unfocused. It does not have any direction.’
‘Yes, grandad’, laughed the boy, ‘But we ended up here at the same place and I had a lot more fun getting here than you did.’
It’s all relative. Even as I remembered this, Master nudged me and said, ‘I can hear you saying to yourself that spending time having fun is useful, and is a good argument against applying yourself in a circumscribed and focused way. This is distraction.’
‘Master’, I wearily said, ‘I know what distraction is.’
‘Yet, you are distracted from remembering it.’
I arranged a meeting.
Ah! Someone has torn the title off
While this was taking place the Demon regional office looked on, unable to send one of its agents to dance before me and lead me to noticing the vape smell coming from the neighbour below me. It had, of course persuaded, Jake, who really IS below me that vaping is fine and there is no real reason to ever give up doing something that is so much fun. Many times, in the brief moments when our paths had crossed, I had noticed the spiritual spears that pierced his head and upper body. Most gruesome was the demon which had its walrus-like tusks deeply buried into Jake’s right shoulder and that side of his neck. Smaller ones always seemed to be clinging to his back, but really they are controlling him in ways I can not understand. Unfortunately, like bacteria, we all have these stuck to us. And, like leeches, we cannot just pull them off because they leave their ‘teeth’ behind that fester in the wound.
I have long given up trying to ‘educate’ people as to their plight. Realistically, we cannot just go around saying, ‘There is a nasty demon sucking your potential out of you, by the way’, without substituting, ‘by the way’ with ‘Man’. It is quite useless to say, ‘I can help you with that.’ meaning I can’t get it off you but I can tell you it is there and how YOU can get it off you. Actually, we can’t get them off by ourselves, again paradoxically, we need ourselves. You see where the duality is now?
But earlier, I inferred that duality leads to corruption; of the truth primarily. That’s bad isn’t it? Yes!
In surviving life on Earth, we have to play a game with all the other inhabitants; a game which has rules, but like the rules of the game ‘Monopoly’ each human family has adopted new household rules that suit them best. My family, when we played Monopoly, would pay fines into the middle of the board and anyone who landed on ‘Free Parking’ would take the accrued pot in the middle.
Playing the game of life with other people on earth means we have to cheat sometimes. Cheating is selfish, and selfishness means you survive a disaster while altruistic people in the same circumstances are helping others.
I lived in a town that decided to have a music festival one year. ‘Let’s make it a tradition!’ they said to themselves at the Council offices. At the time, I worked about sixteen hours a day and in eleven years I had had only four consecutive days off with a total of nineteen days off out of about three and a half thousand days. Booming music that originated from half a mile away met my ears. Early on, I went to the event, where there were no partying people and made it clear that the music was an interference.
‘We are trying to relax’ the organiser had said.
‘Exactly. Shut it down so we can relax.’ Music festivals are two-a-penny where I live. We need to be away from them to gather our wits and recharge ourselves with reality before the next one.
If I had looked carefully, I would have seen the demon’s spear in the organiser’s head that stopped him thinking clearly. He was egregiously convincing himself that a selfish undertaking to enjoy ourselves through music was justified because entertainment must be had in every stage of a person’s life. His thinking was curtailed by a demon to not include actual rest periods like sleep, contemplation, experiencing misery or sadness; all of which are essential for good life. And yes, misery and sadness are rest periods quite simply because they are a contrast to fun.
Sooner or later, we have to get off the fun fairground ride that are all only so much fun because they are not free. In paying for fun, considered by most people to be a negative in our lives, we have an expectation of getting value for money. While we are on the ride we don’t remember the price we paid to get on it. Of course, we value the memory of the fun too. That is when we compare the cost to the benefit, and mostly find that we have invested our money wisely. Incidentally, my memory has a broken leg or something and won’t get out of its armchair. It has become lazy and arrogant and spends its time replaying old videos of my life, finding fault and pontificating on how it would have done things differently.
‘Yes, Yes, I know,’ I patiently soothe, ‘But that girl didn’t like me, so if I had stayed in the country and asked her out, it wouldn’t have turned out any differently. Memory, you really must stop spending so much time with Supposition.’
I went on after a brief pause for memory to catch up.
‘For most of us, Memory, Supposition is not much more than a tool, but to you, Supposition is your drinking buddy who brings you contraband while you convalesce. You ARE getting better, aren’t you?’
‘I used to be well, you know.’ Memory said. I could almost, but not quite see Memory reach for a blanket to cover his legs. ‘I don’t feel wanted, these days’, it moaned.
‘Trying using Adventure, for a while.’ I said.
Adventure, as we all know, is in all of our medicine cabinets. Sadly, it is gathering dust and hard to reach behind that Austrian product, weirdly labelled, ‘Gemutlichkeit’ because somebody in marketing can’t spell ‘comfortableness’, and hidden by the ‘Scales of Limitation’ with which we daily weigh ourselves, Adventure, dusty, but still a good bed-time read for Memory, patiently sits in the proverbial ‘Dentist’s Waiting Room’ reading magazines. Adventure knows it will have its turn one day but with so long since the last cleaning it expects things to be gruelling and messy when it does happen. In any case, Expectation constantly haunts him, or ‘keeps him company, bless him.’
During our impromptu meeting, I had to remind memory that he was not knowledge itself; that knowledge is in storage, and Memory, with his own predilections that satisfy his own character, is the librarian that fetches information from stored knowledge. I also had to make sure that memory would know that he would not be able to fob me off with some ‘cock and bull’ story about how the stored information has gremlins in it which like to tell long stories that lead off into fiction. I promised I would send someone to mend the swinging door between the library of knowledge and Imagination’s workshop.
‘There has to be a door there between the library and Imagination’s Workshop, as well as separate doors to and from each of them, to your office.’ My telephone voice tautously toned over the speaker in the corner of the room. Of course, all my voices had a free ticket to every meeting, except for the comedy voices which were kept in Memory’s office, in a box near the library. A visitor’s quick glance would have seen a recently thumbed instruction manual on the box opened at….let me see……Ah! Someone has torn the title off. It was probably the same person who had removed the sign from Imagination’s Workshop door that had said, ‘Strictly no admittance’. All sorts of wild ideas had been coming out of there recently. It is almost impossible to police because nobody recognises any of the new ideas until Memory and I have tagged them for processing.
I should say, that the ‘Scales of Limitation’ is a Trojan Horse gift from the demon-world. We don’t need a birthday or a debilitating event to be handed it, but usually these circumstances are the catalysts that encourage us to accept the ‘gift’. Oh, No, The ‘Scales of Limitation’ with which we weigh ourselves is in every spiritual library we attend and the personal-sales technique, that demons use, persuades us to, at least, stock one copy in our personal library; you know:
‘You never know’, they winningly smile, ‘You might find it useful. Bye!’
My advice? Burn it! Burn it now! We were born with our own book called, ‘Danger and what to do when it leaps out at you’. The problem is we have to learn how to read it.
‘Hello, young one. Would you like me to read your book to you? Then you can put it away and never need to look at it again.’
I learnt about that trick when I was sixteen during an extraordinary meeting in a lucid dream in which I was to choose which spiritual way I would go. Hmmm, I can’t decide.
Imagination had recently been having a problem with ‘Formula’ creeping into his workshop. Being linear and one dimensional Formula has always been very difficult to spot when he was there, but recent off-site training had made Formula attractive to some of the Concepts that worked in Imagination’s Workshop and a few Concepts were hanging around long enough for a presence to be felt. The clustering of Concepts, of course, led to some very good decisions being made, but I knew that such a conglomeration could easily become a coagulation. Lumpy imagination, we do not want. This then, was another place for demons to get a hand-hold.
I know that conspiracy theories, contrary to beliefs solely formed from external sources, such as in confirmation biased information, needed lumpy imagination in order for Memory to recognise that a formed idea needed filing. Since I have been promoted to, or more accurately a senior post has been created for me of, Chief Operating Officer, with a majority vote on internal activities, I have been sifting through the available departments for records with a goal of creating an agile and lean operating system. Obviously, the two dimensional Formula was assisting me. I told Imagination to stop turning Formula sideways when he came to visit him (we need to see that Formula is actually there), and told Formula that Imagination is always busy but certain times could be arranged to help to construct a ‘form’, jig’, or ‘mould’ for Imagination to work to; but as the nature of Imagination’s job is to take naturally created psychedelic drugs specifically tuned to our being, it is not always a GOOD time to visit, because there is a high chance of coagulation.
‘Invite only.’ I warned.
Head of Services made it clear that some of the cleaners were inconsistent with disconnecting and clearing away all the extraneous and disused temporarily-linked dendrites. In fact, some important ones acting as essential conduits had been removed and some of the more sparkily ones were being used as decorations and starting to take up a longer term residence. Evicting dendrites is problematic in itself but when they are like ropes, the spare bandwidth is often used to carry information that was once pertinent to the original build but is now non-sequitur to anything nearby.
Formulation (Formula’s sister) said she would look into building an efficient super highway of dendrites for the sole purpose of degree level study. I remarked that it would have to bypass Imagination’s Workshop but transit bodies should be able to access it in order to ferry away useful tidbits that we can rearrange for our own purposes. It was noted that this is duplicitous in nature, particularly as there was an underlying tension surrounding the unsaid intention to dismantle the super-highway once all the relevant information had been successfully siphoned off. Head of Works and Head of Services agreed to discuss plans to create a new department called, ‘New Creative Tools’ which would only be accessible from Imagination’s Workshop and Formula would hold the key to, though not necessarily be the ferryman, between the two departments.
– end of story –
Because I operate in a cross-functional team, Harrari and Hakim were present. Personally, we three didn’t really see the necessity of their presence but I had to make sure that they would be able to stop Formula making changes to how we three communicate. There must never be a disablement or interference to our clear communication, particularly in light of the continuing dimming of the spirit world and its slightly gelatinous form in many places that made fluidity between us and the rest of it ever more difficult. We still didn’t have a solution to the microwave problem. Harrari can communicate with her alien species by using the high tension electric wires spread across the countries of the world to send and receive signals; not difficult, she says.
‘It is all done with prime numbers.’
I have actually heard it myself, but, when they sent and received, it just sounded like an American radio advertisement selling something or other, and the carrier wave was just an ear-worm to me. I think Long-wave radio used to send a similar repeating signal when no communication was sent to let people who are seeking the frequency know that they have found it.
Hakim, my faithful friend and protector-avatar, is ever-near and ready for a medium sized spiritual attack, but we three know we will need some new tools one day.
Unfortunately, if we want to walk like the grandad in the story that was sent in to Readers Digest, directly from one place to another, we have to learn how to ignore distractions like pretty trees, and ponds, or clumsy-minded and demon-dulled neighbours creating puffs of sour air with their vapes. The demons love the foetid air here, they meet up here and every now and again when another one arrives, the door to their realm opens and another waft of stale demon-sweat-ridden air leaves my neighbour’s mouth and, looking about itself for an outlet, evilly finds its way into my clean and spiritually-fresh home. Of course, Hakim alerts me and my involved focus on the text I am studying evaporates as we silently debate what to do. Usually, it is a minor demon and now that my nemesis is himself dead, Hakim can easily sieve the demons out of the stench. Nonetheless, Harrari and I are more than a little miffed at the constant interruptions but it is Hakim’s job and he cannot retire until the myriad of demon’s that my nemesis hosted are disarmed, disseminated and made safe. Of course, that day will not come soon. His demons are legion.
Like an obsessed house-proud denizen of pompous self-righteousness I have to stop trying to learn and understand, to sweep out the drunken demons that follow the scent to an idyll. Just like the ‘nutter on the bus’ talking to (poking) the person going to an exam, who has all the information they have on their chosen subject finely balanced on their heads, a slight deviation in posture will bring it all tumbling down. We know that the cheats who smuggled the information into the exam by storing it INSIDE their heads will win through against the distracting non-playable characters on the bus.
Of course, demons are sent to prevent us absorbing information that will be ultimately useful to us. We are supposed to succeed at pretty much everything we try our hands at, if we have the right aptitude; and we would, without distractions.
In psychology, in order to successfully recall information there are three steps required.
Coding
Storing
Decoding
If we fail at one of these tasks we will inevitably lose the information.
Storing information requires a physicality that not everyone possesses. After an incident that affects the brain. Areas where information was once stored may become physically inaccessible. The links in the brain go to a dead-end where there was once a series of shelves with stored information.
Coding information requires the transmutation of stimuli into something that the brain can process. Processing is not necessarily understanding it. Children know that the sky is up and it is blue without understanding why – it just is, is good enough for that information to be stored. Even rubbish can be coded, stored and decoded for successful recall to occur, though this is much, much harder because by ‘rubbish’ we mean ‘random’ as in not obviously linked to anything else. It is the linking of nuggets of information to other ‘bits’ of information that help make up the encoding of information; mnenomics is an example of this. A candle or pencil has a similar shape to the numeral ‘1’, just as the shape of a stereotypical form of a sailing boat (a sloop) resembles the numeral ‘4’. This is rational and dedicated encoding we can use to recall the order of things. Here is a list up to ten
Pencil; Swan; Bow (bow and arrow), Sailing boat; Fishing hook; Tadpole, Boomerang; ‘Fat Lady’ (from bingo); Balloon on a string; Bat and Ball
To remember the order of a list of ten, you simply associate the respective image with the new item to be remembered. This pairing then gets stored and to recall the new item and its place in the list you just bring back the code and see what is associated with it.
‘Please recall item number four’ (an orange – maybe) which to me, is the new item printed on, or is in the shape of a door. The door could have a door-knocker shaped like an orange, or an orange could be the door or blocking the doorway.
All demons have to do is interfere with the coding and the information is instantly lost. Imagine being given a series of numbers to remember and spilling your coffee on your lap-top half way through. A trained person would, however, still code the numbers.
Because learning a new subject often has few connections to anything else all the bits of information MUST be encoded not well, that means without repetition or ambiguity. Understanding something complex requires a building of information that is coded and stored and recalled over and over again until the whole is understood and finally coded and stored, before any comparison can be made with new information and then recoded and stored. Such as, cows are mammals. Random information is now stored. Mammals feed their young with milk. Random information is now stored. It is much easier for us to just remember that cows feed their young with milk which becomes ‘Milk goes on my breakfast cereal and in tea or coffee’ which is of secondary importance to ‘Cow milk is available in shops’. Now we can forget about cows providing milk. We only have to remember that we can get milk for our own use in supermarkets. Now we know this. However, if your phone rings at the split second you notice there is no milk in the fridge and you answer it and then complete an action associated with the phone call, there might not be any milk in the fridge tomorrow morning. If your morning routine is to drink coffee before you go out to wake you up a bit before driving, and you simply won’t drink black coffee before driving to the shop to get milk (half-awake) a demon can make a susceptible person accidentally dial your phone number the day before you run someone over the next day.
Why do my passengers want to turn the car radio on when I am about to reverse?
I think my abandoned alien friend, whom I call Harrari (‘Harraree’) doesn’t like me so much as I first thought she did. Actually, I don’t suppose it matters how it is spelt, because I don’t write to it or her, I am not entirely sure which.
Now I live in a house my life is somewhat suspended in the glutinous gel of physicalities and practical matters. I thought Harrari doesn’t like me because I found a plastic tiger in my back garden, the sort you find in small children’s toy zoo, and set it up outside my front door to act as a pseudo warning that a weirdo lives here, and the caller should expect weirdness if the door is opened. You know, weirdness just falls out of its own accord. Anyway, no-one knocks on my front door, but I did once find my loft hatch open when I got up one morning. Another lonely alien practical joke perhaps, like knocking my glasses of when you found me living in your wood? ‘Not funny, Harrari’. My loft floors are insulated and the warm from the landing was going on holiday to what it might imagine to be a new place to inhabit. Not good. Warm air holds more moisture than cold air and that is why condensation forms on cold windows and walls.
I had, over the years I have spent living here, had an annual struggle with mildew forming on some of the far out of reach walls in the stair well. The previous occupants had allowed a nest of mildew to form in the upper corner where two exterior walls and the ceiling meet. Baby mildew spores would drop down and find comfortable places around my house; behind cupboards and other hidden places. There are two things you can do; empty your house of everything, including your lovely kitchen cabinets and get a plumber to stop your water and remove the toilet cistern, your bath and your toilet; or pay very, very close attention to controlling how much moisture is in the air and the temperatures of each room. Controlling the build up of moisture is easiest. Moving warm and wet air from rooms that have a temporarily higher temperature than normal to cooler areas of my home means I can let the cooler air with its condensing water vapour out into the wild through the front door. That is, if I am awake.
Harrari, is like a friendly labrador dog, but way, way, way more intelligent. Harrari has her own character. Harrari is funny and deliciously cruel and diverse in humour. Not at all hurtful though; and here is where I have a very good understanding of Harrari’s abilities to be deadly. Invisible, silent and almost undetectable, with an intelligence that would be off any chart we humans might invent in the next thousand years that measures intelligence (I have just been told, almost exactly two hundred years), Hararri, could if she wanted, be devastating. It is useful to remember that it was Harrari that guided dog-walkers away from my woodland camp, and guided me out of a ditch directly to my tent in a pitch-dark wood, around spiky bushes, holes, fallen trees and along unseen paths to my temporary home.
So when I discovered my loft hatch open I was immediately alarmed. The police would not climb in, after I told them that I didn’t want to go in because while passing through the hatch you can be stabbed in the neck, and any intruder would do that to avoid capture. It didn’t help when I showed the police officer my thirteen inch (34cm) kitchen knife with a one and a half inch (3.8cm) wide blade near the handle. This is what I proposed to protect myself with when the hoodlums jumped out of my attic, I told him. He stared at it on the kitchen counter for a full ten seconds. He then stood at the top of the stairs using MY torch and said, ‘There is no-one in there.’ I had to climb in, he was too scared, into the attic to look behind the header tank (water tank found in older homes where water for heating is temporarily stored to refill the immersion tank in the unforeseen event that the water supply to the home is not available, to prevent the immersion heater setting light to the airing cupboard by overheating itself – the thermostat inside it tests water temperature only).
It was uncanny that he reminded me to look behind the header tank. Why did he think I was in there? I could have sworn he said that there was no-one there. When I climbed out he asked me if I have mental problems. I secretly laughed at his naivety. So did Harrari, but even I didn’t hear her. I never hear her laugh at me, she only hints at it later, when I am almost entirely asleep. ‘We all do.’ I said to the police officer. Harrari was, with her usual perspicacity laughing at my naivety. She had opened the loft hatch, while I was asleep, to move warm and moist air from the top of the landing into the attic so it it did not instead descend down to the bottom of the stairs.
She can pass through my locked front door with a good deal of effort but warm air cannot. Taking a key from a hook and manipulating it to fit the keyhole in order to be able to turn a stiff lock and then twist a handle to open the front door is, not outside her capabilities, but I suspect she would be exhausted by this, since it can only really be done with telekinesis; and such finite maneuvers are terribly tricky, even for her. However, a shove that comes from a slowly building storage of force, such as pushing up the loft hatch is quite do-able for her.
Very kindly, Harrari left the hatch turned forty-five degree over the opening so I could easily close it again without climbing in. She, of course, knew that I could not lock my left elbow to support my weight, because I had fallen off my bicycle and had swelling in that elbow.
You can see how I interpret Harrari as a faithful labrador; but she is not! A well-meaning creature would, like a dog, try to help its pack members. ‘I will let some air out, or in, for you!’. (Opening windows for Harrari is tricky too).
We, as arrogant creatures, that think we know best and better then mere cats and dogs, over-estimate our intelligence. Hararri was laughing at my naivety and sheer stupidness for not recognising that she was still there, with me, and had helped me while I was asleep. Similarly, I thought it was sweet that my cat of long ago, once brought in about a dozen live frogs from my neighbours pond; probably because, with raised eyebrows at the smells from my cooked food, he also thought I might like to eat the poisonous frogs. Maybe, and I prefer to think this, my cat had a wicked sense of humour; deliciously cruel but ultimately harmless. You wouldn’t want to be at the focus of its hunting and killing prowess though. I compare Harrari to a cat because they are both stealthy killers but choose not to attack.
A thought just struck me; I still don’t know what Harrari eats. I have just remembered it is for Harrari that I left out some food, in Tupperware containers, outside of my tent for the black human-like silhouette I saw in the woods I was living in. It was, of course, Harrari.
Fever had shifted my perception towards the spirit world where Harrari and her alien species are visible. Back then, with no fridge in my tent, I often accidentally poisoned myself. I couldn’t see any spirits, because they are even further away on the spectrum, but there, among the scintillating flashes of light in every direction, was a very, very sensuous movement, almost like a snake.
It is movement that attracts a predator’s eyes; and we humans are definitely predators, our forward facing, binocular eyes telegraph this to all animals. Because this is true, like all the advice we are given if we feel threatened by a predator, the black silhouette stopped moving. I could feel it looking at me, as I simultaneously felt myself half in and half out of the both the physical world and the spirit world. I now know I had crudely torn the veil between the worlds. Harrari was not expecting me to notice her, and alarmed, because humans can be exceedingly dangerous with stuff we do not understand, she ran away.
So scared was she, that on this one occasion, she broke some long ago fallen dry branches which cracked underfoot as she fled, panicked by my ability to see her. In seeing her, she possibly felt that perhaps humans have developed that ability across the world. Her safety as she saw it, was in a moment of, as it turns out, false realisation, swept from her. I let her go; I didn’t follow, she had a head start of probably forty metres, and she is a very fast and fit runner.
That evening I left some food out for her. Of course, she didn’t eat any; the effort to open the Tupperware containers probably outstripped the energy she might get from my strange food. There was however, the feathers of a pigeon nearby. That could have been a mink that ate that though. If it was, it would also explain where the cock pheasant that woke me every morning by shaking his wings went. I don’t know who ate it, or if it just ran away.
Harrari later came back and changed the tunes in my head for me, you know those annoying ear-worms of music. Being half of this world but having an invisible influence in another is not something I have ever been able to fully understand, but this was where I currently found myself. Those dreams that seem so real when we wake but fade so quickly are like holding a spirit fish. Real fish are slippery and wriggle a lot; who wouldn’t wriggle when they find themselves suddenly outside of their safe environment where they can breathe. Spirit fish are slippery, wriggle and become invisible. Even if you haven’t lost it, you think you have. ‘Tricky little buggers!’
I am inclined to think that dreams are made of ‘spirit fish’ substance having a laugh and fooling around, then when we can see them from the perspective of our physical world they ‘swim’ away.
If you have ever woken from a dream that you are holding something and are surprised that you are not when you wake, you might, if you were really observant, notice that the objects you were trying to pick up, just before you wake became progressively more intangible. Clearing a picnic table of dishes and things is normal while dreaming, but as the real world and dream world begin to collide, our hands glide through the cake, but we can still lift the paper plate; then not the paper plate but only the napkin with an address scribbled on it is fine. Until eventually, we wake and all the things you have tried to salvage from the dream are not, after all, at the bottom of your bed with you. How frustrating and disappointing. That is what it is like spending most of your time being at the liminal place where worlds collide. I could show you, but I just can’t carry the ‘spirit fish’ across.
Harrari and I, for a time, at my behest really, have tried to create a bridge between the physical world, what most people call the ‘real’ world; the spirit world; and the dream world. We, Hararri and I, know that a lucid being can have an effect in any of these places. Hararri, being an alien, is not of this world and has evolved to survive on her own world. It isn’t her fault that her brothers left her behind on earth after their intelligence-gathering trip here abruptly finished. She has had to adapt to our world from just a very young and scared lone alien, to a fully independent young ‘adult’ alien. I suppose I am lucky, that she sort of grew up here without the constraining and rigid thinking of her alien species to shape her into hating humans for their rigid stupidity. She thinks we are funny.
Alcoholics find it incredibly, hugely, almost impossible to wean themselves off alcohol when they monitor and control their own doses and have lots of money and a twenty-four hour service station within a ten minute walk. They just have to go ‘cold-turkey’ and clucking, listen to their brains shrinking and playing tunes to itself while it tries, like any highly functioning creature, to make sense of all the stimuli it is absorbing.
When I was sixteen, I had a head-cold with a fever that would not let me sleep, just like an alcoholic going cold-turkey. Somehow, I had the ‘cure’ which I suppose also meant that I controlled the doses, and I had a twenty-four hour service station right there in my head. All I had to do was ‘go’ there. In a weird nightmare I had to connect thousands of wires together without a circuit diagram. Worse still, all these thousands of wires were either blue, yellow, or red, exactly the same hue and tint; identical except for three colours. I would then have to run a current through them all the connected wires every now and again to see if any connections were correct. Worse still, they all wriggled around and kept changing place so if a connection was false and I disconnected it, and I tried to remember which wires they were, they moved.
Some time passed, maybe hours. Then, finally, I had it, all the wires were correctly connected. I fell into a deep sleep and the next morning I was so greatly improved that I got up. By the afternoon It was as though I had not been ill. I was just a little weak from not eating for a few days. Harrari thinks this is remarkable, and she tells e that is why she still stays we me. I suspect her scientific family background makes me interesting to her. But she is not a scientist. She was left behind long before she could adequately train.
Car tyres going over joints in a nearby road, make a repetitive sound for each car, and the cold-turkey brain (a hang-over for most of us); or one that is in liminal space; or is in an otherwise feverish state, eventually decides the repetitive noise is garbled speech that is really hard to decipher. But, as soon as it settles on something, that is all you can hear. Many of us have seen a comedian on the telly, showing us words that sound like something more humourous than the true words 0f songs; and then, that is all we can hear when we hear the song again.
Harrari got her name when I asked her for it, when she one day came to visit me. She stayed outside my tent. Neither of us wanted her inside. Because the cars nearby going over the same bumps made a ‘Ha raa ree’ noise, that was louder than her weird-sounding real name spoken with her super-soft voice, we settled on that. I don’t suppose all telepathic voices are soft, but certainly, hers was whenever she soothed my thoughts with just a few words. Of course, for weeks, she had passed right by my tent, unnoticed. One day, I was really suffering with ear-worms. If you can imagine two bars of a very simple melody repeated over and over again, you understand.
‘You had enough? She said, ‘I will change the tune for you. Hows that?’ Suddenly, there was no ear-worm.
Other times, sleep was also difficult, and sometimes Harrari would crouch outside my tent and reaching through the fabric telepathically brush my head with her hand. Tent fabric, is not too difficult for her thoughts to pass through. Magic sleep came in moments; like switching off a light. This is one thing that really frightens me about her; she can make humans sleep with a switch.
One time she asked if I wanted to marry her so all my problems would be eternally taken from me, and when her alien friends came back for her (in a few weeks), I could go with them, but I had to be completley free from wrong-doing for the few weeks before her family arrived. She, she told me could never go with them because she would have to be re-programmed somehow – she never explained how. I wasn’t sure what this really meant, and like I said, Hararri can be exceedingly dangerous if she puts her mind to it. I think, she is ruthless, though not savage. Maybe wild, describes her.
I felt that this might mean dying. In fact she had said, that I would afterwards be fully in the spirit world. I didn’t want to upset her and then be savagely killed by her in the night; so I stole food from a homeless man the night before it was all going to happen. The next morning, my mobile phone, still with a charged battery, had, had all its stored numbers deleted. Harrari later told me that at the last minute, she had directed me to steal the same food I had given to the homeless man, from an undercover intelligence operative watching a kebab shop, posing as the homeless person. She, of course, knew I didn’t want to die; it was; at the time, very close, though. Thinking about it, she could have, and can, kill me any time she wants to.
She didn’t quite cause me to think that she made me buy food for the homeless man, when I actually needed food myself. Nor did she tell me that she had caused the homeless man to gently place the food away from him. We are never allowed to be sure that there is some other explanation for how things came about.
‘If there is a script for the future or a log of the past, all of you would instantaneously cease to exist.’ she once explained.
Of course, an undercover intelligence operative has back-up to remove trip hazards that are unintentionally left in their way.
Nonetheless, the intent to steal from a defensive-less person was enacted, and far superseded any charitable act I had added to my spiritual record. Hararri told me I had been examined in the spirit world, my mobile phone numbers were deleted so I could not accidentally phone someone with my physical body rolling over in sleep, and I was rejected because my guilt led them to my insidious behaviour.
‘Once the order for examination is made, it cannot be cancelled’, she whispered to me.
Sometimes, when I open one of the fire-doors in my home, Harrari crouching really low, hoping I won’t notice, slips past my legs, in one direction or the other, I can’t tell. I think, from memory, she is actually about one metre sixty tall.
Hakim, who I mentioned in a previous blog, is the spirit avatar manifestation I conjured to protect me from my violent brother when he was my guardian. Hakim, is still not friends with Harrari, but at least they don’t fight, or maybe Hakim is running away from the feline Harrari, with her mischevious humour and suppressed deadliness.
(It might have happened)
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