Love Story: In The Web of Life

by Ken Renshaw

  I felt relieved as I said, "Yes, it does happen sometimes when I am dozing off. Are there any hazards in doing this form of channeling?"

  "Yes, but only for those like Darren Wileman who trance channels Herondus. He is great, but sometimes other trance channels go kind of bonkers after a while, and start saying bizarre stuff or get their own ego involved in the message.

  "Since you are doing this semiconsciously you can evaluate what is coming through. If it starts to get really strange, tell the entity to stop coming through, or simply stop when it happens. It all is under your control. Does the message seem reasonable to you?"

  I thought a minute and then said, "Yes, I received instructions on some scientific things about space-time that I should learn about. Then, a few days later, I get a legal case involving those same subjects and am forced to learn about it. It is really strange."

  She lit up with a big smile and said, "That may not be as strange as you think. I have heard of people channeling messages from the future. Maybe your 'Uriel' is your future self, a guide from outside space-time or someone else from the future. I'd bet you’ll figure this out someday."

  The waitress brought our tostadas.

  As I was adjusting my plate I added, "I hope I will. I am a little overwhelmed about this now."

  "I am sure you will," she replied as she started to eat.

  We engaged in small talk for a while we ate. As we were finishing, Elise said, "Tina is one of my dearest friends. How long have you been seeing her?"

  "We were introduced by a mutual friend about two months ago. We haven't been together all that time because my travel for work has created some gaps in us seeing each other."

  "You should be very careful with her: she is very vulnerable," she cautioned.

  "Vulnerable? I don't understand. Is she weak? Do people take advantage of her?"

  "We probably should have stayed to hear Herondus for the whole weekend. That was one of the things he is talking about. Men, particularly, need to understand the idea; it comes naturally to most women.

  "I should have said emotionally vulnerable. Being emotionally vulnerable, for women at least, means being willing, or able, to put themselves out there emotionally and go into the depths of feeling, It is like playing Texas Hold'em poker and being able to go all-in. They are willing to bet all the chips, except they are emotional chips."

  She saw the confused expression on my face and said, "Next time Herondus does a workshop we will have to go."

  Back in my office, Monday, I had an email from Dore saying that she had contacted Candice Montgomery, and she would be giving me a call.

  ****

  At mid-afternoon Zaza buzzed me and said, "There is a Candice Montgomery calling. I don't know which one she is."

  I picked up the phone and said, "Hello, this is David Willard."

  "Mr. Willard, I am Candice Montgomery, a consultant for the Colson Foundation. Dore Hamilton asked for me to call."

  "Pleased to meet you," I replied. "I am working for them also. I will be representing them in a civil case involving remote sensing. Are you familiar with remote sensing?"

  "Yes, I did a paper with one of the former members of the CIA remote sensing program a couple of years ago. That paper resulted in me being called on by the Colson Foundation to do some more work. We have had a nice relationship."

  She sounded rather formal, possibly defensive, so I explained, "They seemed in awe of your work. I have spent most of my career as a patent attorney working in the high tech area. The only thing I know about remote sensing is what I read in a book by Steve Manteo. Colson said they wanted me because they thought starting with a clean slate on the subjects would allow me not to be prejudiced by other beliefs on the subject. They said talking to you would be a good starting point. I am your student. I also may want to use you as an expert in the civil case."

  "That is good to know. I find it hard to deal with some people who have made up their mind that quantum mechanics is the explanation for remote sensing and ESP. But, I don't think I can do a good job talking about my research on the phone, without a blackboard, or visual aids. It is quite a way for you to come up here beyond Pasadena. I have some other business in your area first thing Monday morning. Can I meet you at your office about ten?"

  "That's fine with me. Let's make it a lunch too," I replied.

  She agreed and said she would send me the web address for her paper on remote sensing. She would be at my office at 10:00 tomorrow.

  I downloaded her paper and thought, 'Teacher is assigning me homework.'

  ****

  I spent the early morning studying her paper. It explained eight–dimensional space and gave an abbreviated theoretical treatment of how it pertained to remote sensing. It gave a general description of the CIA's remote sensing program. I looked at the references. She had been writing papers about eight–dimensional space for over a decade.

  I spent time refreshing my memory on mathematical concepts with Wikipedia. I tried to read something about Relativity until my eyes glazed over.

  I googled Candice and found that she had been born in Louisiana and lived with, or was raised by, Native American relatives. It didn't show her personal history, but somehow she earned her PhD in math from Tulane University.

  At 10:00, Zaza buzzed me and said, "Your visitor is in the conference room."

  Candice is of average height and a rather frail build. She was wearing a long black, pleated dress, matching her long straight black hair. Her bronze complexion betrayed her mixed racial heritage. She had amazing light blue eyes.

  "Candice, how nice to meet you in person." I said. "I saw you present a talk on Statistical Optics last fall at a conference at Disneyland Hotel."

  She reflected a minute and brightened as she remembered the conference. "Did we meet there?"

  "No," I said. "There were only about five hundred people there. I don't know why you don't recall me."

  She laughed and said, "I kind of go somewhere else when I lecture,"

  "And you take your audience with you. I really enjoyed the lecture. Statistical Optics has never been the same for me since your lecture."

  When Candice looked at me, it was as though I was the most amazing person she ever met. Her wide light blue eyes seemed to portray a mix of great curiosity and admiration. I had seen that look when she lectured at Disneyland, and had wondered if it was the result of overzealous plastic surgery. She looked natural in person. She was radiating curiosity and interest, as though something unknown and good were about to happen, something mystical.

  While opening her eyes even wider she said, "Tell me about your science and math background to give me a frame of reference. Also, tell me about the case you are working on."

  I complied, described my undergraduate scientific education, and described my more technical patent cases. Then, I described the Colson case and mentioned that the trial would be in a court in Rocky Butte County.

  "It sounds like another Scopes Trial to me," she observed.

  "We call it The State of Tennessee vs. Scopes," I joked.

  "Well, in Tennessee, Scopes was guilty of challenging a belief system, creationism as described by the Bible, with a belief called Evolution. The Sheriff, who sounds like a redneck, probably has a high school science education, except for some forensic stuff in whatever sheriff's academy he attended. You are challenging his conventional belief system derived from what he learned in high school and has observed in his three-dimensional reality.

  "They will probably throw some technically obsolete scientists at you in the trial to show that 'there is no scientific evidence that....' Instead of a contest between the Biblical beliefs and science, as in the Scopes Trial, you will have a battle between the beliefs in physics from a couple of generations ago and modern physics."

  "I guess that is where you come in," I observed.

  "That is really where the Colson Foundation comes in. They hired me to write a script for a film that would expose people to
higher–dimensional thinking. It is a way, we hope, to bypass the waiting for bastions of old ideas to die or retire in academia.

  "Lets get started," She said with a wide-eyed smile. "Tell me what you know about higher–dimensional realities. Give me a starting point,"

  "I was exposed to the idea that time is an illusion and that reality is like YouTube."

  Her eyes grew wide, and she said, "That is really interesting. I have never heard that analogy before. Please go on."

  I explained what Uriel had told me about a movie only having an illusion of time. Then, I explained about R-Tube.

  "That is really good as an analogy. From talking to people who do remote sensing I have found that some have the belief that information is only accessible in space-time if there was a human observer, someone 'recording the R-tube video' so to speak. That relates to the old philosophical riddle, 'If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if there is nobody there to hear it?' Remote sensors can't observe the tree falling unless somebody heard it.

  "I like the idea of keyword assignment as part of the accessibility argument. I believe that much of our own memory recall may be the accessing of information from space-time. Physiologists haven't identified long term memory mechanisms in the brain with enough storage capacity to contain all we can recall from our lives. If you can recall the time when you were six years old and your dog Spot got run over by a car, there may be many keywords that can move you there in R-Tube: grief, tires screeching, dog yelping, screaming, red cars, dirt roads; all the sensory input you experienced at the time can be a keyword. Some would be stronger that others. The incident would have been of great enough interest to record. However, you probably wouldn't be able to recall feeding Spot his dinner the night before.

  "Are you familiar with channeling?"

  "Yes, I went to hear a channel last week. It was Herondus coming through."

  "I am not familiar with him. Maybe long-term memory recall is a person 'channeling' himself from a different space-time. Psychologists and physiologists are beginning to find mechanisms for synchronizing neural activity between people. Experiments have shown that people can synchronize heartbeats, for instance. Perceptual synchronization is still on the to-do list. The field is stunted because any effects observed at a distance are against the old laws of physics.

  "That brings me to the central thesis of my work in mathematics. Normal observation happens with one set of laws pertaining to four–dimensional physics. Information transfer happens according to complex eight–dimensional physical laws."

  "Nice segue," I observed.

  She laughed. "I guess I digress. I am a mathematician and not an experimental psychologist.

  "Let me start at the beginning. When Albert Einstein was at the Zurich Polytechnic, a school for training math and science teachers for secondary schools, his mathematics teacher was Herman Minkowski who didn't get along with Einstein very well because Einstein wasn't very interested in mathematics and often cut his classes. Z-Poly was a small school, with only seventy-one students, eleven of which were in Einstein's entering class.

  "Einstein barely graduated because he grew indifferent to the professors and courses offered. Since the head of the department refused to write the letter of recommendation required to obtain a teaching job, Einstein was unemployed for a couple of years, until a friend helped him get a job working in the Swiss Patent Office. Then, the hot technical topic for patents was synchronizing clocks throughout the railroad systems, so that all stations could have the same schedule. Einstein's office window looked out on a clock tower and a railroad track.

  "Some people who have studied Einstein's biography have placed him in the Autism–Asperger's syndrome spectrum: that he only could think, or at least was most comfortable with visual thinking. When he 'over-thought' the idea of synchronizing clocks at railroad stations, he came up with his Theory of Relativity. He could visualize trains traveling near the speed of light and visualize what would happen to the clocks on board. Einstein's wife, also a mathematician at Z-poly, helped him in the math of his famous paper on relativity. Some say she did most of the work of converting the visual thinking to a scientific paper.

  "The paper did not get much attention for a couple of years. Then, Minkowski who knew of Einstein's work, because he was still working on his doctorate, took an interest in the theory. Einstein had been considering the three-dimensions of 'space' separate from' time' in his idea of relativity. Minkowski pointed out that time was also a dimension. He 'corrected' the math in the paper, in a way to make it compatible with other hot topics in physics, by making 'time' an imaginary dimension.

  "You remember about imaginary numbers?" I asked.

  "Yes, the square root of minus one. To someone like Einstein who mostly thought in visual pictures, the idea of an imaginary number must have been a stretch. How do you visualize a train traveling at ten miles per (imaginary) second? It doesn't make any sense. Where is the train going?"

  She laughed and continued, "Minkowski almost hijacked relativity and took it into the realm of mathematics from Einstein's physics. Minkowski, the mathematician, would have taken it into abstract mathematics where nobody has to visualize anything, where everything can be formulas. Unfortunately, Minkowski got sick and died.

  "Einstein got to keep relativity. He didn't appreciate Minkowski's mathematical approach, which he described as 'too complicated.' He did keep the idea of imaginary time as kind of a dirty little secret in his mathematics. For instance, he couldn't have come up with his famous E=MC2 without using imaginary time. That expression wouldn't have become so famous if he had said, '...when time is imaginary, E=MC2' Without Einstein's visual experiments, which became his hallmark, such as people on railroad platforms observing trains passing at near the speed of light, Einstein might not have become famous. His visual experiments made his ideas accessible to more people."

  "Not to me, so far." I added. "I spent most of the morning trying to get my head around some of his concepts."

  "Don't feel bad, you're dealing with a graduate level subject that requires lots of course units and a degree in mathematics or physics. The point about talking about all this is:

  "First, Minkowski is a reputable source for ideas, a mainline mathematician, someone who is more than a peer of Einstein, not one of the kooks on the Internet, the self proclaimed mathematicians, pushing some incompetent theory unifying physics;

  "Second, something can be true in physics although it can't be visualized, especially imaginary dimensions.

  "I think the problem you will have in convincing a jury will be getting them to believe in eight-dimensional space. The Scopes trial was about Biblical beliefs versus scientific beliefs. The Rocky Butte trial will be about a belief in visualizable reality versus a higher dimensional reality: science as taught in high school a generation ago versus modern physics."

  "Yes." I agreed, "But my cup runneth over Let's go have lunch and talk about something else for a while."

  Captain Ahab's is one of those theme restaurants from about twenty years ago, with antique diving helmets, worn ropes, fishing nets, and oars decorating the walls. Our table was made of a recycled boat hatch, covered with epoxy over a variety of seashells. I thought the informality of the restaurant would be a welcome break from our stern office surroundings and a good place to talk and develop rapport.

  We chatted as we read the menu and ordered. Candice declined my suggestion of wine. "Only on very special occasions, and, besides, I'm working today," she said, rolling her piercing blue eyes and chuckling."

  "I guess I should abstain if I am going to try to keep up with you this afternoon," I added. "Tell me what you do when you are not being a mathematician or teacher?"

  "We live right on the edge of the mountains of the Angeles National Forest in Altadena. We hike there or going to the Sierras when we have time."

  "We?' I said quizzically.

  "My significant other is Tom Watson. He is a Hollywood-type arranger an
d composer. He works at home most of the time on scores for films. We have lots of flexible time to enjoy being with each other. He also counsels people, helps them with their problems. We also meditate and have many close friends who are spiritually oriented. We have a wonderful life together."

  "That's wonderful! I like your distinction between 'do' and 'have'," I observed.

  She added, "I like to talk to attorneys, they listen to you. Many of my students seem to be in some other space-time when I talk to them. So, what do you do when you are not being an attorney?"

  "I spend a lot time in the desert in a place called CrystalAire. It is over the mountains, north from where you live in Altadena. I have a sailplane and a little mobile home at the airport. I often soar for hours a day. From the porch of my mobile, I can see a hundred miles on a clear day to the southern Sierras. I must say I have learned to really enjoy the desert, the open space, the flora and fauna."

  There was a pause. I felt that she was waiting for the "we" part.

  Then, she continued, "My grandfather was a Native American. When I was little, we visited him in Oklahoma for a few weeks in the summer. We used to hike together, and sometimes we would sit and watch the soaring birds. He said you could learn a lot from them. Those visits contributed a lot to who I am. I learned to appreciate the connectedness of us to nature."

  "How did that lead to a career as a mathematician?" I inquired.

  "Part of mathematics is the search for unity. I think I got that appreciation from my grandfather. My grandmother on the other side of the family was from Louisiana and was a shamanic sort of person, real old school, with lots of ideas about magic. She taught me the magic of how to make up my mind about something, following intuition or my heart, and then letting it happen. That also is of value as a mathematician, allowing yourself to be vulnerable."