h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's a moot point.

Or as Joey Tribiani said:

'That's a moo point. You know - like a cow's opinion. It don't mean nothin'!'

Cows might disagree.

Trying to be brief. Three key ones

(a) Dreaming one night of a place that felt very homely and in my dream looked around and saw a signpost for Darlingworth.. Next morning remembered to look it up. Nowhere to be found. Many years later driving to a funeral of the friend at uni who married my flatmate. I drove up into my roots Cotswolds and suddenly felt that I was driving into a zone of heightened awareness. Then I saw the signpost for Darlingworth. Late for the funeral it was only late that night on the way back that I saw that someone had doctored the G in Daglingworth.

(b) Other end of my Upper Thames Valley- similarly a very significant day for various reasons. I was driving along and had just been trying to imagine the life of the oak tree that I saw ahead- what it must have overlooked in 300 or so years.. I had spent much of my childhood "communing with this kind of nature". Romulous and Remus had a she-wolf. I had Oxfordshire countryside. I had just left our daughter at Uni for her last term. Suddenly a PC type window opened in my brain and I read/heard 'You do not have to worry about your daughter and her exams any more than you have to worry about me producing my leaves. She too is firmly planted and passing exams is what she does".. It was so right that I felt a peace I had not known in years: and as I passed the oak tree and got on to the motorway that goes up Stokenchurch Hill towards Christmas Common, suddenly a rainbow spread itself out before my bumpers and led my view off into the Heavens. I drove along it (and the road) for over half a mile.

(c) One night in the Alps c2002 during August I had a dream about Anglo-Saxons migrating across Europe heading for the British Isles, and in particular a striking PreRaphaelite head of hair in Saxon platts on one girl. That day I wrote a song based on that insight. "The Making of an English Peace".. In September I found myself teaching "that girl with that head of hair".. When I sang the class the song she showed her exceptional ability in history in the piece of homework she elarorated from that song and the lesson that had explained it. Over the next three years she went on to be the most brilliant historian that I taught in 37 years.. She should have finished at History at Oxford a couple of summers ago.

Cass

What great stories. And so vividly told, thank you.

I don't *care* why that happens, do you? I'm just grateful when it does.

Dmitri

Well I have just been working today with some bits or Eric Heller's "The Disinherited Mind" which was a study of German literature from Goethe down to Kraus: focussing on Goethe's insistence that within older poetic and artistic ages which had used poetry symbolism art etc in order to bind people together . Such "bards" as Homer etc in the Greek tradition could see and express things in a much more transendental way. In my reading it equates with Ancient Mesopotamia where the Cosmos involved a lot of minor gods who messed things around on Earth, but above them was Anu who was all peace and calm in that dimension in which the trivial dynamics of daily life cease to matter. Only love, peace and harmony.

Incidentally my rainbow experience came at a point when it felt like there was a confluence of so many different time periods. It was April 1999, a few days before my 55 birthday, approaching the end of a century and a Millennium, the end of our daughters time at uni, the end of the first group of pupils in my last school who I had taught from 11-18.. I also felt I was at the end of the book I was writing..And then I started thinking about all of the other life-cycles etc around me.


Cass

I have to thank Cass for his affirming testimony of a
precognitive 'reading' of a road-sign. This sort of thing
happens to me all the time and until now I have only been
criticised whenever I mention it. The fact that his vision
incorporated an amended spelling is quite telling.

I must say his voice from the oak tree is also affirming
but a much longer conversation than I've ever 'heard'. And
so specific! Mine are usually nebulous and enigmatic phrases
like 'By the time he gets it, it'll be the wrong thing to do'
or 'You dont think, you just think you do'. Generally they
have a cautionary tone but one never knows to what or
when they are applicable.

It seems that many of us have had what the ancients might have
called religious experiences or revelations. Is it safe yet to draw
some sort of conclusion that we are all in agreement that there
really are things, forces, spirits or 'something' beyond the normal
perceptible whirled, something beyond the ken of Science?

Let us hope others will now feel free to contribute their stories.
I doubt we will ever establish a methodology for exploring these
events and I hope we will not be seen as trying to establish some
new religion, but perhaps we can shed some light and fresh air on
some para-normal and super-natural activities that have been driven
into hiding by modern sceptics and their atheistic rationales.

Whether these things are an external force or some projection of
internal and subconscious sensibilties they cannot be denied and
must be discussed without prejudicial judgments.


~jwf~

I thought I was experiencing an altered state of reality to find the garden covered in a rolling, bubbling mass of cooling lava!

When I got closer it turned out to be around 1000 starlings. Couldn't see a single patch of green.

That should be the slugs held at bay for a week or so.

Being cheerful about starlings (wow) and Goethe both, I'd like to reply to jwf.

I think the problem all those people have who are quick to deny someone else's liminal experience is that they are labouring under a misapprehension in their thinking.

It isn't that there's not a reason for things. It's that we don't know the reason.

The fallacy is in believing that your church, your news source, your favourite book-publishing pundit, or whatever you put your faith in, has all the answers. Where is it written on the face of eternity that human beings on Planet Earth in the year 2012 will have all the answers to life, the universe, and everything?

And if we have all the answers, why are we still talking?

Ah, but that's just it. "We" don't have all the answers, "I" have all the answers, and as such it's my duty to harangue you And wallop you over the head until you realise that.

Hi folks, Dmitri invited me here. I still don't really feel safe about talking about my experiences on such an 'open' sort of thread. Anyways, I have been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and used to suffer from it a lot; now I'm doing much better, I think I can pass for 'normal' most of the time, and I don't think I have overt delusions any more. Still, my experience of reality seems to be very different from most other people's. I have those mystical, religious sort of experiences all the time. I can't really say much more here. I have written two entries about schizophrenia in my journal ... I don't quite know how to link to them, though ...

Copy the url, starting with the letter 'F'.

But Dmitri, the URL is just that of my USpace ...

Re My oak tree-

I was interested to find Aldous Huxley recounting something similar on a train trip from Oxford to Paddington: probably in "Doors of Perception. Heaven and Hell"- which perhaps is relevant to the thread if people do not know it.. It is I think of interest because Aldous Huxley's family background was Biology.. His grandfather was the eminent Dr. Thomas Huxley (discoverer of the inte-maxilary vertebrae that divided Man from the Apes and caused the search for the "Missing Link") and his brother was Dr. Julian Huxley Biology don at Oxford.

Huxley became interested in brain chemistry and what it means to be "Human"- and an important part of his thesis was that modern man is becoming cut-off from his strong roots because we do not experience the full annual experience any more. Muslims believe in the fast of Ramadan as a time of "cleansing" through the discipline of going hungry-- Forty days and forty nights helps you to understand that "Man does not live by bread alone..."

And also the change from fresh produce to winter diet that was heavily weighted towards cereals also changed the chemistry of the brain. Huxley pointed out how these conditions have often been associated with moments of revelation and sessions with "bards" in winter nights telling tales that people could grasp as being true to what life could be.

In another song of mine about "The Heaven's Smile" that could often be seen above the dark reality down below I pick out many of those Oxford images from dons in recreation mode:

"Then childlike supple minds
Not fully formed could queeze a passage through
Down rabbit holes and river banks and wardrobe backs
To places that were not yet true.

Yet wonderland knew the cosmic truth
Each time and season has its hour
And the wicked witch and the dragon's tooth
Are just the dark side of endless power."

Is something not true in the eyes of eternity just because it is not yet true? Were we already there by implication when there was a gleam in our parent' eyes?

Cass

Ah. Would you like me to do it, Willem? I can find it.

I would be very grateful if you could do that Dmitri

'places that were not yet true' - I love it, Cass.

Part 1 of Willem's journal:

F633958292272"?thread=#p110593958

Thanks a lot Dmitri! I'll leave now.

I have to point out to Cass that Effers had mentioned
Huxley's experiences in an earlier posting. That is not
a critical observation merely informative and a conscious
consideration for Effers who sometimes feels ignored.

Like your posting, Effers' was informative to myself and
to anyone else who is fond of Huxley's work and life.

Did you know his house was just under the first O in the
Hollywood sign? His wife lived there, tending Triffid-like
plants until her recent death.

My favourite book is 'After Many A summer Dies the Swan'
which I'd really love to see done as a film-noire period
piece not unlike Madonna's Dick Tracy. The implications
of immortality that are dealt with at the end of the book
would have been impossible to film before CGI.


~jwf~