Accessing the Cloud

I love reading.  Will hates it.  I only recall him ever reading a handful of books in his life, and there are not many books in a handful.

We’d been on one of our train rides together.  He must have been about 14.  He was patiently trailing around a bookshop after me.
“What subject are you looking for?”
“Something about time,” I replied.
He grinned slightly. “Good, that’s relevant.”
“And God.”
“Even more relevant.”

We used to have these rambling discussions as we sat in train carriages, you see, heading off on long journeys to nowhere-in-particular.  He’d been my pupil until a few years before, but I always felt I was lagging behind in our philosophical and metaphysical ponderings.  He knew things I didn’t.  I needed some reading matter which would help me to catch up with him.

The book I selected was called something like ‘Travelling through Four Dimensions’.  He nodded approvingly and glanced with interest at the cover.
“You’re welcome to borrow it when I’ve finished,” I offered, helpfully.
“Nah,” he said, backing away fast.

A month or so later, we were on another journey.  It was a warm, summer’s day and we were wandering through Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, heading for the train station – obviously.
“Remember that book I bought?” I asked.
“The one about dimensions?”
“Yeah. It’s hard going in places but really interesting. It says-”
Head down, a private smile playing around his face, he interrupted me. He started to describe – clearly and in considerable detail – the main points of the book I’d been wading through. It was a masterful summary. He actually made some points clearer than the author had.

I stopped walking and stared at him.  “How do you DO that?  Do you own a copy of the book or something?  Have you read a review of it?  WHAT?”
He looked amused at my reaction, but slightly embarrassed.
“I don’t really know how I do it. I just knew the sort of stuff that would be in a book like that, I suppose.”

Needless to say, he hadn’t read a word of the book, or any similar volume.  He didn’t need to.  His ability to ‘just know’ has been with him for as long as I’ve known him.  There’s a cloud – a place where all knowing, all information is stored – and he has access to it.  It’s as simple and as incomprehensible as that.

Last week it happened again.  I read an article about a ‘new’ theory, called the ‘Many Interacting Worlds’ hypothesis.  I’d never heard of it.  I checked – nor had William.  Yet a year or so ago he wrote an article which covered the same ideas.

I can’t tell whether he feels vindicated or mildly irritated when science or maths catches him up.  He has no qualifications in either, having left school and all education with considerable relief at 16.

I suppose I fear that people who read our recently published Kindle book will assume he cribbed all the ideas in it from books or the Internet.

He didn’t.

His information comes from somewhere non-local, somewhere most of us don’t have access to, some sort of cosmic cloud.  Any bits of information he has gleaned from an ‘earthly’ source – articles about Einstein, for example – are always acknowledged as such.

There’s another aspect to all this, though.  Does his ‘knowing’ mean that the scientists have ‘got it right’ in this instance?  Does his ‘knowing’ hold any more or less weight than that of theoretical physicists, for example, because it comes from this cloud?  Will would argue that it doesn’t.  He doesn’t believe there are wrong or right explanations.  For him and his multiple universes, all things ARE.

A week or two ago, he sent me a carefully constructed theory describing how a crystal had suddenly appeared from nowhere in my cottage.  It was fascinating, but he prefaced his words thus:

I don’t have any evidence to support it nor do I necessarily believe it is the explanation for it. Other theories are just as plausible to me.

Click here to see The Words of William e-book on Amazon.co.uk

Click here to see it on Amazon.com

 

The Gift of Dementia

If someone had asked me, back in 2008, what gift I was being given by my mother’s encroaching dementia, I’d have been hard-pressed to give them an answer.

As anyone who has been in intimate contact with this condition will know, the hardest time is the early stage – the time when a normally functioning, intelligent human being is experiencing very specific and often debilitating gaps in memory and in the ability to cope on a day-to-day basis because of them.

It was me who grassed Mum up to the doctor.  That was certainly the way she saw it.  By telling her GP of my concerns, I unleashed a battery of humiliating tests and visiting busybodies.  She never forgave me for that.  When her condition became so bad that I had to give up work and move away from my family to become her live-in carer, she threw it in my face at least once a day.

Those were easily the hardest months of my life.  So the gift?  I was given the most incredible insight into the way minds work.  Usually, minds are sophisticated, faster than light and keep their backs, so to speak, well covered.  As Mum’s slowed, though, I was able to watch and observe – to see how a trigger experience could change and shape subsequent behaviour.

Let us take, for example, the story of the washing up liquid bottle.

While she was still living alone, an occupational therapist came to assess Mum in her house.  Mum found that threatening, insulting, patronising and intrusive.  She realised she was being ‘tested’ but didn’t know why.  At one point, the OT held up Mum’s bottle of washing up liquid, covered the label and asked her what it was used for.  We never knew whether or not Mum had been able to answer her correctly.

Mum retold that story many times afterwards, but in her version, the OT asked this question of the grandchildren.   That was the only way Mum could justify someone asking such a stupid question.  In her version, the grandchildren giggled, rolled their eyes and then answered correctly.  In the event, Mum had had no one to giggle with.  She had been face to face with a person who, in her own home, was checking whether she knew what washing up liquid was and she’d felt violated.

Several months later, when I was living there, she suddenly stopped using washing up liquid when she washed the dishes.  I asked her why she didn’t put some in the water.
“Well,” she said hesitantly, “I don’t know.  I just get a funny feeling about it.  I mean, they keep coming in and turning the bottle around so you can’t see the label.”

I looked and saw that the bottle was on the worktop, but the label was facing the wall.  Seeing the bottle with its label concealed had clearly triggered memories of the therapist’s visit that were sufficiently uncomfortable to make her want to stop using the product.

She could no longer remember the trigger, but the resulting emotion remained and affected her behaviour.

A visiting professional would have viewed Mum’s behaviour as illogical and a symptom of her disease.  Because I could follow the trace of events, though, I was able to recognise that she was attempting to avoid an unpleasant feeling by ignoring the existence of the obscured bottle.

How many of our behaviour patterns, I wonder, stem from a suppressed unpleasant memory?

 

I the Beholder

Musing again this week – that’s partly free-flow thinking-at-a-keyboard and partly inspiration from the Muse – the wider consciousness that manages to squeeze into my awareness from time to time.

The Muse turns up in dreams sometimes: In the latest, scales were falling from my eyes in a slightly alarming manner; first a clear membrane slipped from each of them – rather like a contact lens.  Then another layer fell from one eye.  No pain, but now there was no iris there, no pupil, just blank and white.  That scared me enough to wake me up, but when I slept again, I was seeing people differently.  At first they looked normal and were most certainly alive, but as I changed my position and viewed them from different angles, I saw gaps in them.  There were uneven holes in the covering – skin, hair, clothes – and I could see the sky through them as they stood on a cliff top.  The bodies were merely husks – hollow and incomplete. Cast off, perhaps, like an empty chrysalis?

So, I decided, the Muse is pointing out that perception is not as straightforward as it may seem…  In fact, like beauty, it is very much in the eye of the beholder.

I had to look that word up: from Old English behalden/bihaldan/behaeldan (depending on the dictionary you choose) meaning be + hold/keep/cling to.  Plenty of truth in there; we ‘are’ in our day-to-day 3D existence very much defined by the ideas we cling to.  Those, in turn, are defined by our senses – with sight often the most trusted of these.

So I will look at a tree, for example, and see the gnarled trunk, the waving branches, the ripening apples, the goldening leaves.  That is the image of ‘tree’ I be-hold; it defines my ongoing perception of the tree.  If I use a camera, the image – despite losing a dimension – backs up my be-holding.  My camera was made by humans, to view as we view.

My Muse is prompting me, though, to widen my concept of perception.  How is this tree perceived by the small bird singing in its branches, by the beetle burrowing in the bark, by the ant or the clump of grass in the meadow below, or indeed by the tree itself?

To any of them, I’m guessing, my be-holding would mean nothing.  Those with eyes may see ultra-violet or infra-red aspects of the tree which are invisible to me.  Those with different – non-visual – means of perception would interpret it in ways I can’t even imagine.

Is there, for them, a place where tree stops and air, earth or self begins?

For us human BE-ings, the self is a useful repository for our concepts, memories, senses, feelings.  It can, though, be limiting.  What and where (and even ‘when’) are we when we move beyond that husk and be-hold something wider, deeper, wilder and greater, I muse?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinner than blood?

Blood, they say, is thicker than water.  Maybe so.  Sometimes, though, the thinner, more watery relationships can show a surprising strength and tenacity.  Ours has.

Wondering what might have happened if… is a fairly pointless occupation, but I do sometimes find myself considering how my life and William’s would have been, had he not, at the tender age of six, joined the class I was teaching and had his mother not, almost immediately after that, developed breast cancer and slowly and sadly passed over just a few years later.

Regardless of what might have been, those things all happened.  I believe that’s the way all three of us – at soul level – planned it.

I was destined to devote many years of my working life to helping children with speech and language difficulties and autistic spectrum perception communicate with the rest of us, and many more years helping this one boy in particular.

William was a child with a formidable intellect, an enhanced sensitivity which made ‘normal’ sounds, tastes or smells virtually unbearable, a gift for strategy bordering on brilliance (he was the school chess champion at 7, thrashing talented 11-year-old opponents – and me! – with consummate ease), marked telepathic skills, a smile that would melt the hardest heart and hardly any comprehensible spoken language.  While he would spend endless hours contemplating life, the universe and everything, watching Star Trek and devising codes and cyphers, he was totally baffled by everyday life and found other children particularly puzzling.  He couldn’t read facial expressions or tones of voice.  He could follow only the simplest of verbal instructions and idioms or sarcasm threw him into a meltdown.

I was fascinated – totally hooked – by this intriguing little kid, long before the tragedies in his life threw us together.

I did my best.  I befriended and supported his mum, did what I could to help the family – taking the children out to give the parents some time together or sitting with the mum so that Dad and the boys could have some afternoons doing normal family stuff together.  My head teacher came and read stories to the class once a week, so that I could give William some individual time to draw pictures, talk through his fears, his nightmares, his frustrations and fury.  A strong bond started to form between us.  Inasmuch as he could trust anyone in those days when his world was falling apart, he trusted me.

Later I’d visit his mum at the hospice.  We talked through what was to come and she begged me to stay in touch with him and keep caring and helping him after she’d gone and after he’d left my class.  I promised.

Caring was never a problem.  Helping often was.  There were times in the years that followed when we got along amazingly well together.  We shared many interests – chess, train journeys, a fascination with cosmology, time travel, past lives and the like.  There were times when he retreated totally and refused to speak to me.  There were times when he wanted to talk on the phone for hours every night.  There were dodgy mates and dangerous situations.  Adolescence is something of a tightrope for even the most well-adjusted boy.  Add in difficulties reading social situations and hidden motives, family rifts (he didn’t get along well with his new step-mother), childhood trauma and residual speech difficulties and you have a drug-pusher’s dream client, a bully’s perfect victim and someone guaranteed to swell the coffers of the local off-licence.

I carried on doing my best.  I made it plain that I’d be there, whatever happened, and somehow – even when I’d more or less given up all hope – he’d eventually drift back into my life, start to share his amazing and original ideas with me again, and I would keep them safe.  There would be strange predictions about the future, diagrams of the cosmos, theories about anything from life after death to interdimensional portals.  I kept them in old journals, on scraps of paper and in all manner of files on my hard drive.  It felt important.

What happened to William, and all those words, will follow.

To be continued.