Love Story: In The Cloud

by Ken Renshaw

  It took an hour to get to Candice's house in Altadena, built on the rolling hills on the border of where the land gives way to steep brush–covered mountains, above Pasadena. Some parts of the neighborhood looked as though it had been built in the 1930s, with porches where people sat and conversed with passing-by neighbors. Others built in the 1960s with low sloping roofs and stained wood siding, in a modern style, which had concealed entrances and no street side windows. It seemed the third generation monolithic faux Mediterranean stucco homes with intimidating entrances were replacing some of the older homes. The streets were lined with an assortment of palm trees from the thirties, when they were considered exotic plants, and an assortment of cypress and pine that were adapted to a semi-desert environment.

  Candice's house was of one of the 1930s California Bungalow Style ranch houses, with river rock work around pillars in front of large porches, where people used to sit on hot days before air conditioning. It was elegantly and apparently lovingly restored and maintained. Candice met me at the door.

  "Come in Dave, welcome to 'almost the mountains'."

  "I love your house!" I paused and looked around the living room.

  "I love all the reddish natural wood trim against the forest green walls. Great Mission furniture! Is that picture by one of the California Impressionists?"

  "I'm impressed. Yes that is a Joanne Cromwell painting from the same era the house was built. We also decorated with authentic period furnishings. This is a 1930s house in most respects, except for the plumbing, wiring, kitchen appliances, air conditioning, and Tom's electronic music studio."

  "I can tell," I replied.

  Tom came into the room.

  Candice made introductions

  Tom was a skinny, fortyish man with long, dark red hair pulled back into a ponytail, a bulbous red bushy beard and, small wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing sandals and a black T-shirt with a Yamaha logo. He had a delightful sparkle in his eyes.

  "Pleased to meet you, Tom, I have been admiring your house. It seems very authentic except for the tech upgrades."

  They gave me a tour of the house and then suggested we enjoy the afternoon on the back patio. We enjoyed some iced tea and talked about living with wilderness right up against the back yard and the variety of animals about.

  I thought of my mobile home in the desert and said, "I have a mobile home in the desert at a place called CrystalSky, about 3,500 feet elevation, on the other side of the mountains in your back yard. I have a view across a hundred miles of desert, to the Sierras in the North and toward Las Vegas in the East. The day after a rainstorm, the desert will be a carpet of little yellow wildflowers. In the evening, I can hear coyotes.

  "The mobile home is next to an airfield. I keep a sailplane there. I soar in the mountains and into the desert, sometimes for six hours in one day"

  I noticed Tom was looking at me with the same gaze Georgia Manteo used when she was sensing something psychic.

  Tom interrupted, "Sailplanes are those things with two wings. Aren't they called biplanes?"

  "No," I replied. "My sailplane has a single, long wing fifteen meters from tip-to-tip. They're sleek. Since there is no motor to house, the fuselage is only big enough for a man in a reclining position. Mine is made of gleaming white fiberglass and composite materials. They can glide a long way. If I were twenty–thousand feet above us here in Altadena, I could glide to Las Vegas.

  "Often, I find myself soaring with hawks or eagles. I enjoy that sense of freedom."

  "That sounds like quite a sport," Tom smiled.

  I was a little embarrassed. "Excuse my enthusiasm. I can go on for hours about soaring and my adventures."

  "It sounds like quite a passion," commented Candice. "Talk about vulnerability–flying to Las Vegas without a motor. How does this fit with your lawyering?"

  "It's the antidote!"

  They laughed.

  Candice said, "Lets go back to lawyering. Tell Tom about your case."

  "On the surface, it is a liability suit by the parents of a girl who got lost and died in a snowstorm. The suit is against a sheriff who ignored a credentialed psychic who told him exactly where a lost girl was. The girl's life could have been saved if the sheriff had acted on the information.

  "My client, Colson–also Candice's research sponsor–wants to make it a test case to show that the psychic was doing something explainable by science. He wants to open people's eyes to the idea that, with The Cloud, as I am calling it, or eight-dimensional paradigm in physics, ESP is scientifically legitimate.

  "I find that all manner of information about psychic phenomena is coming my way. I have witnessed and learned about channeling, I have found the lady in my life can pick up my mental pictures. I find that I am now able to tune into and feel vibrations of people. Of course, Candice's work on eight-space is a foundation for all my scientific thinking and acceptance of all these new ideas. Then, I said to Tom, "Candice says you do counseling involving space-time perceptions. People's space-time perceptions will fit right into the puzzle I am working on."

  Candice excused herself and said, "I'll leave you guys to talk about this."

  Tom looked pleased and started, "People have been doing counseling involving space-time perceptions for a long time. For example, I read about a famous faith healer in the 1980s, who would have a person identify some problem, such as being mad at mother, and then ask for them to visualize the last time they were mad at mother. Then, they would tell the person to visualize Jesus coming into their visualization, taking them by the hand, and then walking backward in time to the previous time they were mad at mother. They repeated the walk backward to the earlier time they were mad at mother, which might be some time when they were a toddler and got spanked. Then, they would deal with the emotion in that time frame and the feelings of being mad at mother would be gone. I have left out some of the details of the procedure."

  "There have been hundreds of kinds of this general class of therapy, that I call 'sequential recall,' used by various people over the years. Some interventions, particularly those that were highly structured, could be very effective. Some people make significant changes in their emotional life in short times with this kind of therapy. For some, it can be the result of a weekend or weeklong workshop, for others it can be a matter of months of one-to-one counseling. Usually, tremendous change can happen by getting rid of a few really big issues."

  "Keep going!' I said, “I’m very interested in how this all relates to space-time."

  Tom thought for a minute and then said. "I think I know of a good metaphor. Lets take a little walk in the back yard."

  We got up, and Tom led the way to a clump of avocado trees in the back of his yard. He led the way through leaves and branches to a wooden fence.

  "Here, meet Mr. Spider, as Candice calls him. He is hiding up in that corner of the web, under that leaf."

  Tom pointed to a large, very elaborate spider web woven between branches of a tree and the fence.

  "His web is beautiful when it is covered with morning dew. After we first discovered him, or her, we don't know, we would swat flies and them bring them out here and throw them in the web. Mr. S would scrabble out from his hiding place and jump on the fly. Mr. S monitored the threads coming from his corner and when one vibrated he seemed to know exactly what part of the web to scramble to. He has information connections to the entire web. His attention is consumed in being aware of all parts of his web."

  "My metaphor is that we live in a web of space-time, a web of life. We have threads from where we are now to many places in our life. We normally call those places memories or subconscious memories, childhood memories for example. Our information threads are tied to emotional incidents that were of significance to us. Those threads are interconnected to other similar emotional incidents, similar to the cross–ties Mr. S has in his web. For many people, all their attention is tied up in a web with these information ties. When you talk to them, you have the feeling they are no
t really there. Sometimes, people are living their lives consumed with one idea that their web is tied to, like a spider with a one strand web."

  "I think I get the idea," I replied, “the web is the set of connections someone has through the eight dimensions I have been calling The Cloud. Would you give me some more examples?"

  "Suppose your mother shouted at you that you were not good enough while spanking you when you were six years old. The idea might not be in your conscious mind, but still be connected to hundreds of later times when someone told you, implied, or made you believe you were not good enough. Your whole life might be organized around making up for being not good enough.

  "In space-time therapy, we would have you clear out the information web tied to the present and all the times when being not good enough came up. Sometimes it is very simple, and sometimes hard, to take the web of associations apart. Sometimes, simply recognizing the script, being not good enough, is the hardest part."

  "I get that" I replied. "More examples?"

  "Here is a real example of how an incident can dominate a person's life, which I surmised from reading the newspapers about a billionaire who recently died. This man, John, and his younger brother, Paul, and their father were all working together in a family business, which, as I recall, was a retail furniture store. His father announced he would retire and said he would pass the business on to Paul. When confronted by John, the father says, 'I am giving the business to Paul because I don't think you will be responsible enough to make money and keep the business going. You will never amount to anything.'

  "John left the business and struck out on his own, seriously dedicated to proving his father wrong. Although his father died a few years after John left, John worked ruthlessly, never achieving any real relationship with his many wives and assorted children, until he became one of the richest people in the world. He died a bitter, lonely man, but he did make his father wrong.

  "Let's go back into my office and talk some more. I don't want to disturb Mr. Spider."

  We walked back into the living room where Candice was reading or working on her iPad. Tom told Candice that we had visited Mr. Spider and were now going to his office.

  Candice asked, "Is Mr. Spider OK?"

  Tom nodded yes as we walk down the hall.

  Tom's office was decorated in the Craftsman Style, with dark blue walls, and dark wood wainscoting and trim. His desk, facing the wall, had three large, now dark, computer screens, a keyboard, a MIDI piano keyboard, and a couple of devices, possibly miniature drums, set to the side. As I looked around, I saw that there were some black speakers concealed in the decor.

  "This is where I do my composing and my counseling,"

  "It looks very tidy," I replied. "I would expect all kinds of mixing boards and instruments, piles of music scores, microphones, music stands."

  "They are all in the computer these days. I find that I work best when there is not paraphernalia around for me to attach my web of attention. Have a seat.

  "Let's see, we covered the general idea of the web. There is another aspect of that idea that many people have trouble with. From your description of your recent studies, it feels safe to expose you to these ideas. Sometimes, with some people, as you work back to the original emotional incident in their childhood, they find there is a connection to an earlier time. For instance, a person going back to a root incident of being spanked might find there is a connection to an earlier place in space-time, where they find a person being flogged while tied up in some colonial setting.

  "Here we run up against four-dimensional space-time limitation of many people's thinking. Some people who are not trained in logic and science have no trouble with the idea of what most call 'past lives.' A very large number of people in other cultures believe in that sort of thing. Scientists would be more apt to explain such perceptions as 'hallucinations.' A logical friend explained to me that past lives or transmigration of souls, as believed in some cultures, is impossible because the world population has grown. There would not be enough lives in some year such as 1000 BCE for everyone in 2000 CE to have a past life. There are also questions of the physics of how information or souls get moved from one life to another. Candice's eight-dimensional, or The Cloud, as you call it, provides shortcuts for information transfer between space-time points that may be other lifetimes."

  I interrupted and said, "In the trial we will avoid confusing the jurors with too much on the complexities of eight-dimensional physics. We will introduce the idea to give the argument scientific validity and then refer to it as The Cloud."

  Tom continued, "Instead of your soul being attached to that previous–life person, and somehow migrating through time into your body of today, it is more as though you are channeling ideas from that prior–life person. Their soul is their’s and your’s is your’s: there is only a channeling connection.

  "By the way, I have had clients whose whole nonprofessional lives had been tied up in some hobby, such as owning a sailboat, who found ties to lives in earlier times, such as the great age of sail in the eighteenth century. Typically, they might spend enormous time and money maintaining a sailboat without ever taking it away from the expensive slip it occupies. Once they deal with these perceptions, they no longer need to own a sailboat.

  "I remember one client who had a web connection to someone who was swept off the deck of a sailing ship by a wave coming around Cape Horn during the Gold Rush in 1849. He perceived the wave, fate had prevented him from striking–it–rich in the gold fields. The client had difficulty in this lifetime establishing or realizing goals because he believed fate would stop him from achieving those goals. He lived on a sailboat in a marina. He did move on with his life after he dealt with the connection to the 1849'er. He even sold his sailboat and bought a house."

  I added, "I love hearing about all this. It fits so well with what I have recently learned. Tell me more about your process of having people 'crawl' through the information of their web."

  Tom smiled and said, "The best way to demonstrate the process is to do it with you. Want to try?"

  "I'm game."

  "Then, close your eyes and relax...."