Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (8 page)

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."

The italics are mine, but
the words are not: Alfred North Whitehead said it, from the
scientific point of view. And what are the "developments of natural
science" of which he speaks? Let Dr. Einstein tell us, in his own
succinct way: "It therefore appears unavoidable that physical
reality must be described in terms of
continuous functions in space.
"
Italics mine.

And consider this one, from Heisenberg: "The
world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, into which
connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and
thereby determine the texture of the whole."

Whitehead again: "In the place of the
Aristotelian notion of the procession of forms, [the new physics]
has substituted the notion of the forms of process."

Still unconvinced? Try
this, from Max Planck: "[In field theory] each individual particle
of the system ... exists simultaneously in every part of the space
occupied by the system. This simultaneous existence applies not
merely to the field of force with which it is surrounded, but also
its mass and its charge. We are (therefore) compelled to give up
the earlier essential meaning of [the particle
concept]."

Finally, from Dr. Einstein
again: "[Before field theory] people conceived of physical
reality—insofar as it is supposed to represent events in nature—as
material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions.
[With field theory] they conceived
physical reality
as represented by
continuous fields, not mechanically explicable. This change
in the conception of reality
is the most profound and fruitful one that has come to
physics since Newton." My italics.

What this means, to me and to you, is that
we should not rely entirely upon the commonsense in our attempts to
define reality for ourselves.

The esteemed gentlemen
quoted above are discussing
the Kingdom of
Nonsense
—a reality composed of electrical
fields and little else, until you add mind to it.
Reality is a process
.
This process, in which we are immersed, is also immersed in us,
always involves us—whether or not we are able to observe and/or
comprehend the involvement. The degree to which we are allowed to
observe is dictated finally by the way our brains are wired; the
degree to
which we allow ourselves to
observe,
within the natural limitations of
the brain, is largely determined by the individual RQ.

What do you wish to see?
Who said to you, "Look and you shall see. Knock and it shall be
opened. Ask and it shall be given." A rather famous mystic said it,
and he was talking about reality too.

What is your RQ? What are you prepared to
see? What are you willing to admit into your reality model?

Are you prepared to accept
the universe that is revealed to us by the very high RQ minds of
Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Jesus, Gautama, Rhine, and a field army of
parapsychologists? It is a world where past, present, and future
exist together without superficial delineation, where matter and
energy and mind are all different names for the same substance,
where space and time and in and out and up and down and far and
near are all describing the same place at the same time, where life
and death are synonomous with
being
and where
being
itself
is mere process.

Are you ready for that?

If not, then you probably will not be
comfortable with my story. I think you should put it down for now.
Because we are now firmly seated in the Kingdom of Nonsense.

Chapter Eleven: Mirror,
Mirror

Alison arrived at a little
after seven o'clock, bearing fresh doughnuts from a nearby bakery.
We consumed a pot of coffee and the entire sack of doughnuts while
exchanging experiences of the night. I said nothing about the
visit at Cochran's home but held back nothing else. The lady was
understandably shaken by her encounter with the living dead. I felt
I owed her total honesty in that connection, and I gave it to
her—but not necessarily blow by blow. Some things, after all, are
sacred—even as between a man and his ghost. Her story was
essentially as she'd given it to me on the telephone; there was
nothing to add to that except her own subjective reactions to the
event. It had scared the hell out of her, jarred her professional
wisdom, upset her framework of reality. I could sympathize with
all that; I'd been through it enough for myself. This was not a
first time for me, but don't get the idea that I was all cool and
objective over the incidents. I still had the wriggles too. And
don't get the idea that I was in a position to explain all this to
Alison. I was most certainly not. I would have been thrilled to
have someone to explain it to me.

But I was the more experienced in bizarre
events. As she said, this was more my sort of thing.

Just so you'll understand
where I was coming from, though, please be advised that a "psychic"
is no better equipped to deal with this stuff than anyone else.
I've never met a psychic yet who could pass an impromptu quiz on
quantum physics. Just because we "see" something doesn't mean that
we necessarily understand what we see or how we saw it.

But please understand also that I was trying
to reassure a badly shaken psychologist and trying to share with
her the admittedly limited understanding I had of the
phenomenon.

Alison asked me, "Have you ever experienced
dissociative phenomena? I mean, personally—have you experienced
it?"

I admitted that I had. "In trance, yeah. I
was playing around with self-hypnosis a few years ago. Did a PH
(posthypnotic suggestion) trick with a kangaroo, took him around
with me everywhere for a couple of weeks."

She said, "But that would be simply a visual
hallucination."

I replied, "No, Rudy was more than that. He
was present in all the sensory dimensions. He was very real. Only
to me, of course. Sort of like Jimmy Stewart with Harvey."

She was thinking about
that. "But I meant ... dissociative ..."

I knew what she meant. Dissociative
experience is when a piece of your personality breaks away from the
whole and "dissociates" itself from the rest of you. A
hallucination, of course, which utilizes your own consciousness is,
in a manner of speaking, a "piece" of you. A "split personality" is
defined this way. I told Alison, "Rudy became dissociative. I had
to consult another hypnotist to get rid of him. Became a real
problem. Started showing up totally independent of the PH."

'This ... kangaroo ...
evidenced personality, then."

"Sure
did
. Kept trying to involve me in
nutty intrigues."

The pretty brow was knit
in thought. "Okay, so ... how would you compare your experience
with Rudy and the experience with Jane Doe?"

"Already tried that," I said. "Doesn't wash.
None of—"

"No, no," she said
quickly. "I wasn't trying— That would be even more farfetched than—
We
both,
after
all, experienced her. We didn't both ..."

"Neither of us dissociated," I assured
her.

"Well, what I was going
for... what I was trying ... say, just for argument, that the
personality does survive death and that Jane's somehow managed
to—what do they do, hover?—she stayed close, somehow, and
she
telepathically
stimulated our minds to ... well, to hallucinate."

I said, "That doesn't wash, either."

"Why not?"

I sighed and reminded her
of the towel. Then I produced the Polaroids I'd taken of Jane. "And
how would you explain these?"

She said, "Yeah, yeah," in hushed
excitement, tapped one of the photos with a nervous finger, added,
"Same towel, that's it. God, this just blows my mind, Ashton."

I said, "There's more," and took her into my
office.

"Message from Jane," I
explained, and handed over the printouts from the Tandy's graphics
program. There were three sets. "The first set is mine. My
interpretation of the images from Jane's mind while she was dying.
Second set is just doodling. Jane was here and I was showing her
how it works, inviting her to communicate. She passed. I found the
third set on the computer this morning, after you called
me."

That third set was very
heavy stuff. If someone had said to me, "Draw me a map of the
subconscious mind," I might have produced something like that, if I
had the imagination and talent to do it. I have neither, so knew
very well that this was not
my
stuff, from whatever level of consciousness. It
was a riot of images, much of it very distorted spatially, like
images on a TV screen when the vertical and horizontal controls
are messed up. Numbers appeared here and there, distorted faces,
unrecognizable shapes and geometric patterns all jumbled together
in a dimensionality that showed no respect whatever for space-time
conventions. There were several feet of this, at an
eight-and-a-half-inch width, all appearing as a single "painting"
without borders or breaks.

It awed Alison, as it had me. I left her
with it, to puzzle over on her own without distraction while I
showered and got dressed. She appeared behind me in my bathroom
mirror while I was shaving, held up the graphic, and pointed to a
particular design as she inquired, "Did you get the significance
of this?"

I stared at the image in
my mirror. It all looked different, in reverse image. For some
reason the spatiality seemed somehow more congruent. The particular
design at question was a strange three-dimensional cube colored
solidly except for tiny "unpainted" background areas that now leapt
out at me as small numerals.

I told Alison, "Looks like a number buried
within a cube, doesn't it?"

She replied, "Yes. And I've spotted four of
them scattered about the mural. They—"

I growled, "Well, dammit!"

"What?"

"Mural! You didn't
mean—you meant ...!"

Alison was affected by my
excitement. "Well, like a mural, some murals. I know, a mural is a
picture painted on a wall. I meant ..."

"Pictograph!" I nearly
yelled. “It's a hieroglyphic, dammit! Pictures representing an
idea. It's the most primitive form of writing!”

Alison seemed confused but still affected by
my excitement. "Like the Etruscans? Early Egyptians? That kind
of—?"

I said, "Sure. Straight out of the right
brain. That's the way they did it. The writing matched the
nonverbal symbols, not the sounds of the spoken language. It was
fucking mind-to-mind communication!"

"I never heard it put that way before,"
Alison said uncertainly.

"Neither did I," I admitted. "But I'll bet
it's true. And I'll bet Jane handled it the same way."

I was dying to get my hands on that graphic,
but my hands were wet and I didn't want to smudge anything. Of
course, the whole thing was stored in computer memory and I could
run off all the copies I wanted, but my head was not settled enough
to think of that. I told Alison, "Let me get this lather off my
face and we'll have a go at that message from beyond. Do me a favor
while I'm finishing up here. Take a mirror off the wall—the little
hall mirror will do fine. Set it up on my desk in such a way that
we can study this graph in mirror image."