Chapter Nine: Places
Try to put yourself in my place, please. It is disconcerting enough to think that you have probably experienced something totally outside the normal range of human expectation and belief. It can be more than disconcerting if the experience appears to violate every principle of natural law, and this is especially true if you have been rather extensively schooled in those principles. You have an open mind, sure, and you're willing to consider the possibility that none of our so-called natural laws are absolute—but you have been schooled, after all, to look at your world and to interpret it via the common logic. So anytime you are confronted by the irrational, you are probably going to be looking for a rational explanation. You are trying to rationalize the irrational. That is sort of a contradiction in terms, isn't it? So okay. You can play the mental games, and you can even go along with contradictions—to a point.
So maybe you have succeeded in rationalizing ESP—to a point. You don't understand the vehicle or the medium of such expression because it really does not fit the natural model, but you have had an ESP experience from time to time or you know someone who has. You know that there is now even a quasi-scientific acceptance of ESP. You can study parapsychology at most colleges these days. So even if you don't really understand how it works (as no one does), you've sort of been going along with the idea; and even if you've never experienced ESP yourself (or think you haven't), you probably have widened your window on reality to admit some sort of ESP experience as valid.
I have to warn you, now, that you are in dangerous waters. Dangerous, that is, to your peace of mind if you are one who prefers a tidy reality. Because if any of the extrasensory experiences are valid—if any one is valid—then you've thrown the door open to them all. Give validity to one exception and that exception can rightfully claim the rule.
Dr. Louisa E. Rhine, one of the academic pioneers in parapsychological research with her husband, Dr. J. B. Rhine, put it this way in her treatise Hidden Channels of the Mind: "Scholars trying to comprehend the universe have recognized that back of the world as we perceive it must lie a reality quite different from the psychological concept of it with which we are familiar."
What this respected parapsychologist is telling us, there, is that common reality is a construct of the mind. Think I'm overstating? Check this out, from the same book: "It seems to mean that basically the different dimensions of reality are not divided as our senses show them. It seems as if perception by the senses has superimposed these distinctions on reality, and that in some ultimate way these differences of thought and thing, near and far, present and future, are only superficial, the creations of the human mind."
So where does that leave us, you and me, in our attempts to rationalize the irrational?
Yeah, right, it leaves us in my beach pad at Malibu with a dead woman who does not seem to realize that she is dead and insists on inhabiting space and time with those of us who are not really prepared to acknowledge her ability to do that.
I have had a few bundles of psychical experiences. I have even, I believe, had fleeting communications and "visitations" from the dead. That's okay. I handle that okay. Because except for a couple of small exceptions, that could all be rationalized as occurring entirely within my own mind. I have never had to reach too far outside my paradigm to explain to my satisfaction how such things can fit my tidy concept of reality.
But just look at this mess we're in now! I cannot rationalize Jane Doe as a dream or as a waking hallucination, and not even as some form of extrasensory perception. There is nothing extrasensory about it. The woman died more than twelve hours ago. Her cadaver is at rest in the county morgue at this very moment. Yet that same body—or a damned good copy of it—is also at rest this very moment in my bed. It has weight and warmth, it is animated by a crackling personality, and it seems quite content to just stay there, maybe forever.
So. Put yourself in my place, please. I don't care if you are male or female, pal; put yourself there and assign Jane to the opposite sex. How do we handle this? Do we treat her like a person or like a thing? Do we try to ignore her and hope that she will leave the same way she came?
And—if she won't leave—what then, old pal? What the hell do we do with her? She didn't bring any clothing with her! What if someone drops in? Do we introduce her—and if so, how? Does she need to be fed? If so, what? Should we put down a bowl of water, like for a stray puppy, in case she gets thirsty?
See ... this is the kind of stupid shit the mind retreats within when it is confronted with the inexplicable. I was not thinking sanely at all. I should have been pondering eternal truths or something equally noble; or maybe I should have been thinking of how sweet it would be to trot Jane Doe down to some sacred halls of science and watch those guys try to rationalize her away. There were any number of deep implications, having to do with the nature of life and death—religious implications, legal implications, scientific implications—medical implications, for God's sake.
But I was worried about what the neighbors might think. Like, I have a friend who teaches CPR, and she left her dummy at my place for about a week once. Bothered hell out of me, like having a sex doll lying about the place and what would people think.
See, this is not sane thinking, and I knew it at the time. I was busying the intellect with meaningless frick-frack, avoiding the necessity for really dealing with this situation. I got away with it for most of an hour, too, but then Jane herself began to force the issue. I heard her getting out of bed, and that shivered me with some nameless dread. Like, a monster was up and moving about my house. That was insane thinking too. It was nothing whatever like a monster but a very lovely woman who came into my office. She was sipping a Coke from my refrigerator. One of my bath towels was wrapped about the very shapely body. She sat in my chair at the computer and offered me a sip of the Coke. Her eyes were beautiful, compelling.
But, see, I had to deal with that Coke. I tasted it. It was the real stuff. I handed it back and watched her take another sip. It was going somewhere, sure as hell. An illusion—even an ectopiasmic emanation—would not, one should think, be able to interact with time-space matter. I could hallucinate an interaction with myself—even a sexual interaction—but unless I was in some weird mental warp, some kind of dissociative phenomenon, I very much doubted that I could hallucinate the biological processes involved in the disappearance of that cola.
I asked her how she felt.
She smiled, eyes and all, assuring me that she felt just fine.
I whistled a couple of bars of "Summertime."
She picked up where I left off, in the same key, humming softly for a couple more bars.
I made a verbal note that she was now in physical control of both sides of her body. She seemed a bit confused by the statement, suggesting that she understood what I said but could not relate to it. So I said it flat out: "Your paralysis is gone." She still seemed unable to relate to that, so I dropped it.
The paralysis was gone, yes, but the aphasia was not. She seemed quite a bit more alert and mentally responsive when spoken to than she had shown earlier, at the hospital, but there was not even an attempt at verbalization. Earlier, in bed, she'd cried out passionately several times. Except for the brief humming, she had not otherwise used her voice.
I was trying to deal with that—trying, you know, to intellectualize the body first of all, then this body responding normally with only half a brain, then why the paralysis was gone but the aphasia was not—all the while realizing that I was trying to deal with an impossibility, anyway. I mean, if she could resurrect a perfect body like that, why the hell couldn't she resurrect the whole brain with it—or did she? And I was not really thinking in terms of a resurrection, anyway, not in the usual sense. I mean, look, this simply was not the same body. Pretty good copy, yeah, but the original was lying on a slab at the morgue. And if it was not a real body, what about that Coke?
Dammit, it was a real body. I knew it was. The throat, now—that th
roat had never been slashed. It was perfect. On the other hand, the cigarette tattoos had been reproduced. Why? And if there was voice enough to cry passion and hum a tune, then why not brain enough to formulate language for it?
Are you in my place? Can you understand the mental confusion I was experiencing and the psychical crisis I was approaching? Here was a flesh-and-blood, living being, an obviously human being, strolling about my house and raiding my refrigerator in total contradiction to the known natural laws governing the situation.
I fired up the computer and loaded in the designs I'd copied from her living memory and showed them to her. Then I did a couple of freehand designs with the touch pad, hoping she would take a turn at it, but she showed no interest in that.
I took her temperature. It was within the normal range for Homo sapiens.
I put her on the bathroom scale, and everything checked out there too.
I broke out the Polaroid and took several pictures. They came out beautifully.
I fixed her a sandwich and she ate it. She also drank a glass of milk and polished off half an apple pie.
Then she took me back to bed and screwed my brains out again.
I know that this probably sounds terribly immoral or unethical or perverted or whatever, but I am asking you to understand my ambivalence in the matter, my mental confusions, the state of my emotions. There was certainly no sensation of making love with a ghost or a hallucination, absolutely not a corpse, and I was as awed as I had a right to be while at the same time, thoroughly captivated by the sensuality and passion of my partner in this madness. But it did not seem like madness. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. I was beautiful. The whole world was beautiful, and we both were tumbling through it, locked together in a total interchange of mind and body, fused into a single entity. For how long I simply could not say. It seemed endless, timeless. I do not remember the end of it. I just remember awakening in the awareness of daylight, alone in the bed. The telephone was ringing far away. I could also hear the water running in the shower, and I remember wondering about ghosts taking showers. The clock beside the telephone was showing six o'clock. The voice on the telephone was Alison's. She seemed very disturbed.
"What's wrong?" I asked thickly, trying to pull myself into the objective world.
"Something very strange has occurred," she told me, somewhat breathless.
I growled, "Ditto."
"What?"
"Tell me yours first."
"I—I don't know, I—this is more your kind of stuff than mine, I guess."
"What is?" I was waking up quickly.
"I—this will sound crazy—I believe Jane was here."
"When?"
"Just now. I woke up and there she was. Wrapped in a towel. Seemed to be trying to tell me something. She kissed my cheek. It was very ... real. I was scared to death! She removed the towel and showed me the ... the thing on her tummy, the design. I thought, Oh God I'm dreaming and I wish I'd wake up. I took my eyes away for just a second, to turn on the bedlamp, and she was gone when I looked back. Ash ... I was not dreaming."
"How do you know that?"
"Because the towel is still here, on my bed. It's damp. It's ...Ash ...?"
"Yeah, I'm here."
"It's one of your towels. I recognize it. The big blue one with the embossed—"
I growled, "Hold the phone," and rolled off the bed, staggered into the bathroom. The water was running in the shower, yeah, but no one was in there. One of the towels was missing. I turned off the water, went looking for Jane. But I was alone in that house. My computer was up. I vaguely remembered trying to encourage Jane to use it, guessed I'd forgotten to download it. But then I looked again. It was not as I had left it. A totally new graphic was displayed on the monitor. I shivered, picked up the phone in there, told Alison, "It's okay. You had a valid experience. Don't sweat it. But if you want to talk about it ..."
She said, "Be there in an hour." She sounded better, relieved.
I just wished there was someone around to relieve me. I hope you understand how I felt about all this. Are you in my place now? And are you, then, as unglued as I was?
Chapter Ten: Kingdom of Nonsense
If we are to finish this story together, I guess I'd better talk a bit about my view of reality.
I actually see two basic realities, or two ways of experiencing the one reality. Let's make no mistake about it, there is but one overriding reality. The differences in view, or experience, are a product of the way that you and I are screwed into that reality, our orientation to it.
Do not consider for even a moment any chance that the world you understand is anywhere near the same world that your dog or cat understands, the same one understood by the bird in the tree, or the tree itself, or the parasites clinging to the tree. For each of us, all of us who are caught up in this experience called life, the understanding is somewhat different. There is, I think, a more or less "common experience" that is shared to some extent by members of the various species. Most of us in the human species view the same world, more or less, though each of us in our unique way. I think probably birds do that, dogs do it, snails do it, flowers of the garden do it, the bees in the flowers do it; each group to their own common reality.
In my formal thinking I call this "shared experience" the Reality Quotient, or RQ. This may be somewhat arrogant, but I assign an RQ of 100 to the human species, as a measurement of self-conscious apprehension in the space-time continuum. Any RQ rating below 100 would indicate an intelligence that does not appear to have the capability of reflective thought; that is, consciousness but not self-consciousness, reactive awareness but not creative awareness. This category would include a spider as he spins his web; he spins not because he has rationalized this "creative act" (the creation of the web) as his best means to acquire food, but he spins because he is programmed to spin and his internal wiring provides him with no alternative solution to the survival problem. I arbitrarily assign the spider an RQ of about 30, considerably lower than a dog, although the dog shows no creative designs whatever. The dog, along with his peers the whale and the chimp, scores in the 80 to 90 range because he does frequently exhibit some sort of reflective thought process, however rudimentary, and sometimes displays altruistic behavior.
The man or woman who paints a picture of the spider and his web deserves a 100 + score even though the painting is less utilitarian than the actual web because RQ is a measure of awareness, not survivability, and the evidence suggests that the painter is considerably more aware of the spatial relationships of the web than the spider is, despite the fact that the spider depends upon the web for survival while the painter does not.
There is no evidence even to suggest that the spider is "aware" of any objective reality beyond his web. Like us, he creates his own world, but it is not a world of consciousness. The spider's web is his universe; objects that become trapped within it must seem (to the spider, if be thought about it) to have magically appeared from some other world.
But even the aboriginal human receives an RQ= 100. Surprising, really, how few of us have reached beyond that point. A genuine mystic or gifted theoretical physicist would score closer to the 200 mark. Most of us, you and I, fall somewhere between.
But we are discussing, remember, the perception of the one reality. You may recall something I said earlier about "the common logic" and the quotation from Dr. Rhine concerning the superficiality of common human perception. I must emphasize that there is but one reality, though the superficial distinctions of that reality that are superimposed upon it by the way our minds work produce conflicting versions of what that reality is.
At the aboriginal human level two basic views, or "superimpositions," tell us that the world is at once both physical and nonphysical, tangible and intangible, logical and magical. This is the RQ=100 reality. It is also a very innocent reality. As the human psyche develops, begins rationalizing and synthesizing experience, explodes into intellectual and utilitarian (technological) so
phistication, the one (right-brained) view goes into eclipse and the other (left-brained) view begins to dominate in such a way that the human world has become almost singularly physical, tangible, and logical—in the common reality. This is a natural consequence of our apparently innate fascination with the dissection and analysis of reality. To dissect and analyze is to use the linear processes of the left brain. Both philosophy and science have led us along this narrow trail to the present, more or less common, worldview of a linear, cause-effect universe, which is validly perceived only by the senses. Thusly we have seen a general evolution of "the common sense" to a point where it no longer serves or even fuels our researches; it is a linear, material, mechanical model of the universe—a sensory universe—and a dead end for science. That dead end moved us to an RQ of about 120. So those of us who are comfortable there have also reached the end of our individual evolutionary trail, stuck at around 120.
Look at the words we live by: nonsense (foolishness); senseless (irrational, unconscious, incapable of feeling or perception); sensible (of good judgment, understanding); sensibility (discerning judgment, power to perceive). Our most hallowed concepts of the sane reality all deal with sense perception. Thus any idea or knowledge gained by other means is immediately and prejudicially declared to be "nonsense" (right; nonsensory, therefore unworthy of consideration; insane). Not by science, not in today's RQ=200 halls of science, but by the commonsense notion of the man in the street. Which is one major reason why the man in the street today finds science more and more incomprehensible.
The verbal left brain will brook no "nonsense" from the "senseless" intuitions trying to cross over from the right side; only "sensible" (perceived by the senses) "sensibilities" need apply.
But the leading scientists began to tell us quite a long time ago the same things the mystics have been trying to get across the corpus callosum (the neural trunk between the two hemispheres) since RQ = 100. Check this out: "When we survey the ... course of scientific thought [as of about the seventeenth century] up to the present day, two curious facts emerge. In the first place, the development of natural science has gradually discarded every single feature of the original commonsense notion. Nothing whatever remains of it, considered as expressing the primary features in terms of which the universe is to be interpreted. The obvious commonsense notion has been entirely destroyed, so far as concerns its functions as the basis for all interpretation. One by one, every item has been dethroned. [And yet] this commonsense notion still reigns supreme in the workaday life of mankind."
Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective Page 5