I smiled when I saw my buddy DK Brainard's post after all the science talk yesterday... now science fiction. He's admits to reading tons of science fiction and fantasy genre lately, and not any mainstream or classics. I can relate:
"Part of me has a hard time copping to my current obsession. You see, I have a Master’s in French Literature, obtained jointly from the University of Paris and the University of Cincinnati. I have a double B.A. in English and French
...[Eventually,]
I stopped looking at the world as this fundamentally fixed environment and I realized that the more radically I change my internal reality, the more the Universe I perceive changes also.
We hear all the time, “Change your mind and you will change your life.” But what I’ve found is that this is true far beyond what most of us are willing to consider.
I think that’s why I’m so drawn to fantasy literature right now. Because it’s pushing me further out of my preconceptions about what is possible for me. You see, after nearly ten years of dedication to a meditative practice and the spiritual path, I’ve seen that the mind can work amazing changes on my outer reality. But I also know I’m just scratching the surface of my potential.
The more I read these books – and reflect on the many well-documented accounts of remote viewers, spoonbenders, shape shifters and people who can levitate objects using only the mind – the more I wonder, “Why aren’t we doing more with what we have?”" -excerpt from D.K. Brainard, "Reality vs. Fantasy", WordsForThePeople.com
I've also gravitated toward science fiction and fantasy myself--that is when I read any linear novels anymore. Strange, as I'm the gal who won regional contests in high school for essays on Jane Austen. Why read Cliffnotes--that's like skipping out on desert? I devoured The Classics--even ones that weren't assigned. I wished to study English Literature and Philosophy in college, but I was fiercely into financial indendence at that age and opted for a Computer Engineering degree, instead. Part of me always wanted to be a creative writer.
I put in a whole year coming up a narrative alternate reality game that would push the edges of people's consideration of possibility by relying on the age-old "suspension of disbelief." I put my money where my faith was and even showed up to Book Expo America in New York to grok the publishing world even though that meant I left a weekend job behind, and showed up with $50 (I don't do credit cards) in my pocket at JFK. (That's another story--the prosperity hunch and experiments have altered yet again.)
I found myself being so drawn into the storyworld and its characters, I'd abandoned the original mission... which is Life itself. The whole ARG was to get people more engaged with their own life and see it as an adventure. I didn't want folks to be so entranced by the storyworld that they willingly push aside their own life to find out "What happens next..." to fictional characters. I tabled the whole project recently; although it might find a form later if I make your life the main storyworld.
I wondered why can't we talk openly about possibilities and paradoxes and miracles and marvels without the pretense of fiction (although that can be fun)? Why make taboos or heresies out of exploration and experimentation and edges?
This is the hunch I have: that your life right now as it is is guiding you to the edges of possibility, to the unknown. Yet I'm thinking we also take the lead in asking the questions.
It's pretty tuned to your specifics, too. Don't do bibliomancy?--no problem, it'll spill from the mouth of babes. Don't do external clews?--no problem, you'll get inner inclinations, lurching gut, tingling pulsing currents or emotional beacons. Anything I say may or may not apply, it's tailored for you. Be skeptical of common wisdom and theories and be wary of bandwagons, and go for your own data--directly (sometimes 'experience' is a bit less visual, and more visceral or employs other senses besides the eye).
I recently read The Hunt for Zero Point after a deep quest to learn more about Vickor Schaumberger (originally my interest was water... but I never know what I'm going to uncover.) The point here is that the author started following threads of personal interest in a taboo topic in his field of aviation journalism. It's just "science fiction," they scoffed around his office. He followed his gut and kept digging into anti-gravity propulsion. Years later, he interviews a brilliant scientist at an aerospace company that he thinks might give him more clues.
The main takeaway the scientist tells him is you get to a point--which if you look at Life as the grand experiment--where you've gone as far as the theories take you, or the data pouring in is altogether new and not quite fitting in. That's how new theories develop.
The data is important--not adhering to an established theory.
You have to pay close attention to your life, to reality as it is showing up for you. And maybe even entertain the notion that perceived reality (not necessarily Absolute/Formless reality) is dynamic, so that even a theory that worked yesterday may be obsolete. Or even that that last sentence may be utter nonsense if time is simultaneous.
"But now that the interview was over, the minders [there's always PR people monitoring corporate interviews] were looking the other way. They'd done their job and I'd done mine. Boyd Bushman had spilled no secrets either on or off the record and that was what mattered. Nor had he in any way tarnished the reputation of the Lockheed Martin company. [Funny, I used to work for what is now known as Lockheed Martin--in the million-dollar video games department, aka flight simulators.]
That I had learned nothing of value must have shown on my face, for without warning, Bushman leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder.
He asked me what was wrong and I told him.
"It's a lonely walk, but a rewarding one," he said, so quietly that I almost missed it. I looked into his eyes, which were quite blue but for that superficial milkiness that sometimes denotes the onset of old age.
He smiled at me. "Keep traveling the road and you might just find what you're looking for."
"What do you mean?" I asked cautiously.
"In all my years with this company, no one has asked me the questions you came here with today." He paused a moment, then said: "Here, I want to show you something."
He produced a videocassette from the folds of his loose-hanging suit and gave me the same smile that had crossed his face a number of times during the interview; usually, I noticed, when he needed a moment or two to think about a particularly awkward question I'd thrown at him. He looked not unlike Walter Matthau, the Hollywood actor, with a kindly, hangdog expression and thick straight hair to match. Instinctively, I'd liked him. But more to the point, I knew that I could trust him. Unusually for someone who toiled in the heart of the U.S. defense-industrial complex, he looked somewhat like someone who was incapable of telling a lie.
Bushman appeared beyond the retirement age of most good man-and-boy company men, which in itself spoke volumes about his ability.
Before I met him, I'd been told that he was a one-off, one of those people who liked to think out of the box--defense jargon for a guy in the trade who looked at things differently. Just how differently, I was about to find out.
The picture on the TV screen steadied and I found myself staring at a scene of such ordinariness I thought for a moment that Bushman had plugged in the wrong tape.
From the graininess of the film and the way the camera trembled, it rapidly became clear that this was some kind of a home movie. It depicted the interior of a garage or workshop. In the middle of the frame was a saw on a pockmarked wooden work surface. Beside it was a pair of pliers and a handful of nails.
For a while, we both just stood there watching a picture in which nothing happened. The minders had taken a quick look and apparently decided it was an eccentric end to a quirky afternoon's work, because they went back to their own conversation.
My gaze drifted back to the TV just as one of the nails in the center of the screen began to twitch and the pliers moved--jumped, rather--a centimeter to the left. Within seconds, everything was shaking, as if rocked by a series of earth tremors. And then, quite suddenly, the nails stood up, like hairs on a cold forearm.
I looked at Bushman, who was studying the screen intently, "Watch," he urged, "this is the best bit."
One by one, the nails took off and shot off the top of the screen. A moment later, the pliers started to do a crazy nose-down dance across the work surface and the saw began flapping around like a fish out of water. Then they both went the way of the nails, shooting out of frame toward the ceiling.
Then, the picture switched: same background, different still life.
Ice cream was creeping up the sides of a see-through tub. A lump of it broke away and rose toward the ceiling trailing little pearls of cream. Seconds later, the whole tub jumped off the bench.
My skepticism was working overtime. But Bushman read my thoughts. "It's no fake," he said. "This is as real as you or I." He cast a look over his shoulder at our companions. "The man responsible is a civilian, nothing to do with the defense business. That he's a genius goes without saying, of course. You needed to see this, because it's confirmation of the data." He emphasized the word as if somehow it would help me understand what I had just seen. "You must get to see this man. I think, then, you will be closer than you think to the end of your journey."
"Data? What data?" I looked at him more closely, hoping for more, but he said nothing.
As I was ushered out of the room, the scientist looked down at the thick pack of material he'd handed me before the interview. I hadn't had time to look at it. Now, I wished I had.
That evening, I sat down with Bushman's file in my hotel room. He'd loaded me down with so many papers, I didn't know where to begin or what I was really looking for. There was a stack of photostats relating to the patents he'd filed during a long and illustrious career that had included stints at some of the giants of the postwar U.S. aerospace and defense industry: Hughes Aircraft, Texas Instruments, General Dynamics and Lockheed.
There was his resume, which noted his top secret security clearance, as well as copies of scientific papers, stapled neatly at the corner, with exotic-sounding titles that meant little to me.
My eyes swam over pages of complex mathematical equations and algebra sets. I was looking for clues, but seeing nothing that made much sense.
I pressed the "play" button on my tape recorder.
From the tenth floor of my Fort Worth hotel room, the lights of the city shimmered in the sizzling 90-degree heat, even though it was a good half an hour after the sun had slipped below the skyline. Inside, the air-conditioning was cold enough to prickle my skin.
". . . I went back to some of the first work on gravity done by Galileo. . . "
[Aside on Galileo: "When he later defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy," forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.]
Bushman's voice crackled in the darkness, clashing for a moment with that of a CNN reporter on the TV. I adjusted the volume on the tape recorder, hit the fast-forward button and pressed play again.
"So, what I think is: Follow the data and log your data very well and don't throw it away because you have a theory. The theory of gravity is just a theory. Einstein improved on the original theories of Newton and he was verified by data--and data gave precedence. No one believed Einstein until the data arrived. Well, our data's arrived. . . "
I scrolled the tape again. As I did so, I spotted something among the collection of papers Bushman had given me. Tucked beneath the patents and company brochure material on weapons technology was a grainy photocopy of a UFO flying low over a straight stretch of desert road. A handwritten caption underneath identified the location as Santa Ana, California, and the date as 1966.
Flicking past it, I found another cluster of photostats taken from the "Ramayana of Valmiki--Translated from the Original Sanskrit." A stamp on the title page identified the book as belonging to "Lockheed/Fort Worth."
Puzzled, I toggled with the buttons on the tape recorder and finally found the part of the interview I'd been looking for.
"Nature does not speak English," Bushman had been telling me. "Not only that, but if we verbalize it, we're probably approximating, but not telling the truth. Math comes close, but it isn't there either. What Nature tells us is what must be honored. It has been talking to us on many domains."
I let the words echo in my head for a moment.
Bushman was a senior scientist for one of the world's biggest defense contractors; a member of the fraternity that I'd looked to for expert comment all my professional life, and he was telling me to trust in what I saw. Folllow data, he's said, not theory. He worked on programs that lay beyond the cutting edge of known science.
"I can't talk to all the theoreticians," he'd told me, "because there don't exist theorires where I am."
"For the past ten years, I had been following data and the data had shown me that existence of something real. And yet some of the brightest minds on the planet were struggling to produce theory to underpin it. How could there be no theory for effects that were genuinely manifesting themselves in the environment?
What Nature tells us is what must be honored. It has been talking to us on many domains.
And we'd only understood a fraction of what it had been saying.
If we verbalize it, we're probably approximating, but not telling the truth.
And then it hit me. That's all theory was or ever had been--an approximation of the truth. Sometimes that approximation worked out and held fast, becoming scientific currency; other times it didn't and was superseded by another theory.
In this case, there were so many holes in our knowledge, it had allowed for people like Podkletnov and Schauberger to fall through the gaps, to show us things that science couldn't account for. Because science theory hadn't mapped them yet.
...
Einstein had followed Newton and data had verified them both. But in this field, as with other fields of scientific endeavor, the data was still coming in." - Nick Cook, The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology
Bonus: I have my own notes from the book I'll share. It's worth a read if you're peering over edges, especially related to energy research.
Art/Photo Credits: Sylvia Ji's Spring; can't find the original artist source, but I got this whimsical illustration via Copper Witch's cached blog; going for the labyrinth myth and clews angle too, this awesome digital composition is by loutremauve on DeviantArt.com; gravity-defying levitator is a photo effect via Geekologie; the 3D rendered anti-gravity propulsion vehicle is by Victor Alatorre (can't find his website) via Paranormal People; and, whoa 'miracles' that look really fun...walking on water ball.
"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living." - Joseph Campbell
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