Audio. I wonder if it's a coincidence that god is in audio.
Maaaaan... the shadow and energy activity behind and around me as I wrote and edited that last Part. Haha!
I write with studio headphones on my head, pounding music just exactly as loudly as my phone can play it into my ears. There's something about sensory deprivation that really makes those things that have taken interest in me active.
I don't really know the verbiage to talk about this. Like I wrote last time: I am usually pretty stoned when I'm drafting these. I'm usually pretty stoned. I've embraced that I am a shaman, and when have you ever seen or heard of a shaman being depicted as anything but blitzed? (I'm not that stoned; I'm trying to be funny – I'm sure I'm failed except to a very small portion of my potential audience; and that's okay. You will understand someday if you choose to – and if not, that's cool too. Stick around.)
My girlfriend is convinced that at least one former-human entity exists here in the house in real-time as a disembodied, self-aware intelligence – the builder and first resident of the house. She calls him by his first name. I'm thinking that writing it down gives it more power than I want to play with, so I'm going to call him Bill. Say hi, Bill.
Actually, please don't say hi, Bill – in case there's a Bill in here reading this....
A reference to The Vertical Plane for those of you familiar with the story.
Anyway – what was I talking about? Oh, right. Something keeps moving the back of my chair and it's wiggin me out. That's what I was talking about. Telling that story about my dad and his childhood has got them all very agitated.
My girlfriend also thinks she has a spirit cat she doesn't call Whitey that hangs around her. And there's a damn cat that keeps jumping around from shadow to shadow in my periphery.
Look— Tell yourself it's the drugs. Because it is. Without them, I wouldn't see this stuff – I've told you, I'm not visual. But I could still feel it. And the liminality of subtly moving shadows because of a ceiling fan or cars' headlights is exactly what gives these things the opportunity to do their thing.
You could describe it in a quantum way: Because there are fluctuations in the actuality of a thing, there are ways the probability of what could be real can be fudged in such a way that the brain can insert images that aren't actually there. Or see into a version of existence where those things actually are.
Maybe I've watched or read or played too many of the specific things that I have, to build up such an apparently idiosyncratic way of thinking about and visualizing these things. That's a stupid thing to say. Everyone thinks idiosyncratically. I wish that were true.
What I mean is that the things that are all around me are kind of like Shadows, the Heartless from Kingdom Hearts – or like reflections on the inside of my glasses – or movement that's not actual movement at the corner of my eyes. I think that's how Dean Koontz describes what Odd Thomas sees in those books. I haven't read all of them. Actually, just the first and Brother Odd – because I was seriously considering joining a monastery at the time. I think it's the fourth one? No one else seems to have read those books.
(Last night, about a week after initially drafting this, when I was all done with the day and thinking I should revisit this piece to have it fresh in my mind when I woke up today - I came out into the living room, and my girlfriend has just turned on a documentary she has no plans of paying any attention to about Shadow People. It was... uncomfortable hearing them describe the phenomenon in many of the same words I've used here.)
Actually, the only other Koontz book I've ever been even moderately interested in otherwise was The Taking – and it scared me deeply enough to my soul that I unironically imagine what I would do if I were the protagonesst apropos of nothing on a weekly if not semi-daily basis – and have for... twenty years? Since I picked out its book on tape completely at random from the library as a child.
Yeah. I'm spooked out by spirit activity, and that's where my head goes – directly to those two books to try to frame what's going on.
I was talking about Rules and about superstitions last time – and this is an elaborate if not especially well-produced example of precisely why you're not supposed to dabble in this stuff.
If you dabble as a disbeliever, as I started and sort of said last time, either nothing is going to happen or the worst thing imaginably possible is going to happen – worse things than that, even. But going in as a believer requires the kind of worldview I've been probably failing more than successfully describing for you in this piece. And talking about it makes you sound either crazy or fucking stupid. Either way, you don't really want to be either of those things. Not typically.
But this thing we're doing – because if you've made it six Parts into this thing, you're committed too at this point; you're just as much to blame for this happening as I am – that's the goal, isn't it? That's the Call to Action I should be selling you, right? The Hook I should force through your cheek, hidden, unsuspected by you, in what appears to be a novel and potentially tasty treat – and which I should then use to drag you, potentially kicking and screaming, maybe even mortally wounded if you swallow the hook, into an environment which is actually hostile to you – whereupon I will brutally murder you... eventually.
Yeesh.
Fishing is a really barbaric activity – isn't it?
Why do writers talk about their readers in these terms?
But, see, I'm just skeptical because I'm inexperienced. I see danger where you don't know to look for it. Being sold a line – being expected to buy into something hook, line, and sinker – these are things which are so commonplace to you that you might go into shock without them.
Like a deeply chemically-dependent consumer suddenly cut off from their supply.
Maybe that's what this is about – shocking you awake.
What does it mean to be awake if we accept the worldview that we are an expression of a sleeping Universal God?
Why do I run so far off course so quickly?
I went into this from a sort of middle perspective. This being my participation in the forbidden aspects of the occult nature of reality. I started to talk about how my Goddess and I do not have a typical power imbalance. We do. She is still in control – in power over me. It's just in a different way. I'm the one with the leverage. See, she wants something from me. I didn't call out to her. I didn't invite her. I noticed her. Lurking around in my periphery.
If that makes sense.
If you can sort of imagine it like I saw her watching me from my afar in public enough times to go over and talk to her because she clearly wanted to talk to me but was most definitely not going to make the first move— If you can imagine a spiritual experience being sort of like that, then you can imagine what I went through with Her. I do not specifically remember.
In fact, I'm not sure even when I first noticed Her or when I first accepted that She was "real". I suppose it's one of those things where I wanted it to be real for so long, or enough coincidences in my life and the expressions of the universe in my education added up to the obvious. I'm not sure. I'll revisit this at some point, I'm sure of that.
Coincidences. My girlfriend could explain what it's like better than I could at this point. She points out how it happens to her now that she's around me. (Which means that she's paying attention in the same way that I am, not that I'm doing anything. But paying attention at all is the first step, and I'm proud of her, so I'm sharing for her.)
It's reading a message out of static. And that's why I asked my goddess for a second reading.
The idea wasn't so much to test her. You don't test a goddess. You can't comprehend what a goddess is or how a goddess perceives time or even themselves, but you should know if you're going to try talking to one that you don't test them. If they exist at all, they are at least what you can imagine they are. Which indicates that they're a psychic and idiosyncratic phenomena – word of the day alert – and that's part of the conversation we're going to have to have about deity at some point.
But that's for Rob – the one of the two of us who is a deity – to talk about. Not me.
The Scientific Method, as a rule, can't be applied to “paranormal” phenomena. You'll just have to take my word for it on this one or read things like The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P Hansen. Replication is a big problem with psy and other paranormal phenomena.
Ghost people will tell you the reason they can't get a ghost to do things on command all the time is because there isn't enough energy – if the entity is even there in that space in that time. And that's probably as right as anything else.
But it's also because psy and paranormal phenomena are manipulating probability. Like I feel like we've talked about enough to make us both sick of all the numbers. When the Goddess and I communicate, I genuinely believe that she makes the cards she wants to turn over appear in my hand. I can feel it. The Probability - like I feel when I release a die and it's going to land on the number I want - like a lock turning easily in a well-lubricated tumbler. Or something like that.
There are several methods I use to test this. Because I know that it's all motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. I also know that my brain has already evaluated the visual information I'm going to "feel" as a sort of trick of probability and decides for me before I know I've thought about it how I'm going to react.
This has been proved experimentally in a lab, in fact. https://brainworldmagazine.com/whos-the-decision-maker-your-brain-or-you/
From the Article: "A classic experiment from the 1970s and 1980s that is referenced frequently in these discussions is the work of Dr. Benjamin Libet, which show that the brain begins preparing for movement even before we consciously decide to move."
One of the methods I use to test myself is not shuffling the deck – the approach I took with these first two drawings. I did, however, cut it when I started – and I was compelled, as I believe you are meant not to, to look at one of the exposed cards. It was the Emperor. That becomes important later. I didn't read to find out what that meant for quite some time.
Reality as it is is … not. It's not as it appears, but it also just isn't. It's mostly empty space. You know this. I'm not being profound. What is profound to me is that what Reality is is because it's more probable that it would be the way we observe it to be than that it should be any other way. What does that mean? I don't know.
But what I think it means is that everything is a happy coincidence – and by observing that coincidence, you can change it.
The way that paranormal activity works isn't by doing things that are so out of the realm of probability that they are asymptotic – that is effectively impossible. The way they work is by contriving a situation wherein the Experiencer is at or near 50% probability of anything happening.
As an example: there is a photograph on the desk in the room with me. I don't have a light source in the room, but the hallway behind me is lit. So the room is cut sort of in half: everything beneath the screen of my laptop, including half of the desk and half of the room, is half-lit; everything above that is half-lit by the radiant light of my screen, but in a sort of inversion of the other pattern. It's difficult to describe; you'd have to see it, and I'm not visually inclined to even know how to get a good photo. You'll just have to work with me here.
Half of that photo frame is lit, half of it is not. In the lit, top, half, I can see the shadow-reflection of the ceiling fan spinning behind me. Sometimes. Sometimes I can't see the motion. And sometimes I can see a person standing behind me, leaning over just enough to see my screen and read it comfortably while also being careful not to touch me.
And sometimes I can feel the shifting weight in the floor of feet approaching to stand behind me. Sometimes that feeling is one of the cats moving around; sometimes it's a subtle shift of my weight that moves the wheels around beneath me – and there's a 50% chance it could also be Bill or Whitey using the liminality in which I find myself most comfortable to be productive conducive to existing at all.
Which means they could very easily be figments of my imagination. But that maybe-maybe not is the phenomenon. In that way there is no argument that It exists. We are arguing whether it's real. It's something that we have conceptualized in our minds at all – and in that way it is more Real than anything we can say about it. Because after conceptualization, the best we can do with an idea is blindly grope it for sense data.
Kind of like how the best a father can do after conception is try to shape what the child will become and at worst observe it after it has reached maturity as what it is, absent him. Or maybe be unaware of it entirely forever. But that's something I prefer not to consider, maybe.
So, anyway, it's about time I wrapped this sucker up.
Tarot narrows the probability of what a message can be closer to 50%. Reversals expand that probability by double, as we've discussed. I think there are 72 cards in the deck? So every card, until you start pulling cards out of the deck, has 1/72 chance of being drawn. I placed the cards of my second drawing atop those of the first.
And I'm going to start the next Part with that Drawing. Don't you worry. But first--
Since I drafted this, I decided I wanted to try another experiment. I rearranged my workspace so that I'm not in the center of a half-lit room anymore. I also got rid of that damn photo frame. And can't see outside through the screen door from the corner of my eye anymore. And lo and behold, I haven't had anyone creep up on me who wasn't a living, breathing girlfriend or cat since.
Is that a headspace issue? Is it a me thing? Was I "haunted" by not taking more personal ownership of the space? Did my moving things in a way that befit me and my productivity reclaim ownership of the room from her imaginary Bill and Whitey? I think that you'd get both answers depending on whom you asked. A third answer could be that it's all bullshit and I'm just trying to journal that my life is a little spooky to hook you in Paranormal Activity style. Like some kind of experiment in fiction or something.
This is an experiment in fiction. But, gods, I hope my life doesn't spiral that far out of control. I prefer to not have paranormal or psy activity going on around me.
Anyway. Next time, the Second Reading.
Comments
Post a Comment