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ELUSIVE PARAPSYCHOLOGY At Home in the Twilight World "How can a perfectly logical, intelligent person like yourself get involved in all that rubbish", thundered a director of one of my companies. He was so genuinely upset that I half suspected that he was going to ditch it all in and put his job on the table. I could not afford to let him go and in particular because we had developed a trust and mutual respect which was well nigh impossible in the new social medium. "I don´t," I spluttered with amazement, " I haven´t got a clue as to how it all works, but surely you must admit that something is going on ?" The people at the office had often taken fright at some of these goings on and it was always when I was there. I have to admit that I often got myself het up about obvious and demoralizing carelessness and above all with my terrible knack of reading people´s thoughts even when, as they said, they had not uttered a word. They had experienced my bad temper and seen the results in the electrical circuitry which bothered me when every single bulb had blown with all the dramatic consequences. It had been frustrating at the best of time. Practically nothing worked at some stage, fax, computer telephone lines, and even the microven which is what annoyed them most. They even began to think that I had some sort of dry skin, high energy electrostatic current that just flashed off into the switches and caused all these things. I investigated and even asked a scientist at an annual conference what he could tell me about it. I do not think they believed me and all this business of reading peoples minds and talking to strangers about their past, simply by reading my own train of thoughts was, to them,hilarious, until it happened again and again and they looked at me with those strange eyes. Keeping my self respect and even theirs was getting to be rather difficult. One of the annoying factors was the abolutely wretched inability on my part to get together, at any one time, any form of hard core evidence that could be used as a means for further scientific experiment. I even volunteerd to act as a subject having once had a chat with Uri Geller at the Ramada Inn in Knightsbridge, London. But then those were early days and the matter had not become so frightening. When I say frightening, I mean it and because I am the type of nature's optimists who can work away in an industrial warehouse, alone, surrounded by every type of shadowing object in semi darkness with thunder and lightning smashing away and still feel comfortably protected, My attitude had always been that the worst that could happen was that I could get killed and nobody ever find out what had happened. Disquieting, yes, but not altogether that frightening. The improbability of it, somehow kept fear away. That is, until the night that I have just described and my computer screen started to type away of its own accord, slowly and hesitantly before my eyes. The worst part of it was that I felt I knew it was going to do it and although it did not spell anything recognizable, I was not prepared for the printer to do it without as much as a prompt. I had been doing a great deal of research on ancient religions and their Gods and some of these were of a demonic nature. I was therefore already a bit on the edgy side and ready to go home and call it a day when I read what was being printed. What astounded me was the variations of spellings of the same name - all in a line and to my horror, outside the text frame near the edge which I had never seen before, because the cursor always stays within the margins. I did not need much more prompting and for the first time in my life, my hackles not only rose but the feeling of terror took me over so completely that I cannot even remember how I managed to get out and lock those massive doors. They were the early hours of the 25th.of December 1996 and I remember, because as I passed by the huge, smelly bin a little further down one of the industrial estate roads, I heard the muted wails which just about finished my already overstimulated day. Like the highly sensitive simpleton that I really am, I thought that some sort of creature could be severely beaten (as often happened in this part of the world) and had been left to die I was a little nervous at first because it could have been a dangerous rat or wild pet. I flung the lid open from the side and stood back as the stifled wails became louder. I eventually discovered the source of the sounds and gingerly lifted the plastic bag with its gyrating swellings onto the ground and proceeded to cut it open with a pair of scissors that made me go back to the warehouse. My moral strength was now totally restored and the grim, ugly environment almost felt like my childhold neighbourhood. Three little bundles, of fur fell to the ground - bundles that turned out to be puppies no more than a few hours old and which were to change the complete course of my life. From the walk to the petrol station in the rain, the purchase of milk and the attempt to feed them, a complete world had opened up for someone whose life had always been sterilised environments replete with every modern comfort. The very first neurotic sucks that all three drew from the toy bottle in that cold and miserable warehouse sent rays of sunshine straight into a soul that obsorbed it with as much intensity as these pieces of heaven clung for life. The voice of a hardened woman of great wisdom close to the upper levels of British Government office, came to my mind "my mother told me not to trust anyone with a beard who did not like animals" Now I only needed to take off my beard when I next saw her in the depths of Gloucesershire with a broad incurable grin on my face. I slept in that warehouse for over three weeks and until their eyes had opened and they took me into their grateful world. I could not take them to my hired apartment. One died and gave me my first, genuinely abrasive, piece of spiritual hiding. The other is my daughter and for my sins, my unruly, tough, demanding and sloppy, pack leader who shares his authority with me only because it amuses him. I do not even want to pretend to understand just what happened there, but I felt certain that a degree of mathematics - a dimensional mathematics that created equations, was at play. It was all hysterical nonsense but it made sense as the postive side balanced off the non specific and terrifyingly negative other that appeared to have produced this miracle. That aspect perhaps could be attributed to Jungs theory of syncronicity. The babies that would never know any other father or mother than the eccentric thing that gave them too much to drink to be able to walk better than a drunken sailor, always watched me closely wondering what I would do next. They removed all my fears, but their presence and transmitted responsibility could not explain away those terrifying moments when I thought that there was something there beside me, manipulating the keyboard and somehow making up legible words - words that did not belong to chapter headings and were exclusively picked from the the long text and twisted around into different aspects of the same word. Why these words and not the thousands of others and why variations of the same and why the name of a Demon God when there were other subjects included?". Some writers on similer objects of study, now well known, had told me about their own experiences but I do not remember any more about them other than that they were more like the sort of coincidences that the Psychologist Jung called non causal synchronicity. In my case it did not seem to apply. It was more than coincidence. It seemed to carry a voice or an identity rather than a non causal coincidental exercise. Again, despite all efforts to secure professional advise, I got the funny feeling that they thought the less of me for even daring to believe it was anything other than fantasy. Hundreds of such incidences and mainly more amusing than frightening made me suspect that I caused them somehow but whether they had something to do with my having some sort of unknown biological equipment on board, I have still not found out. I offered the Royal Society for Pyschical Research to tear me apart but not being an ectoplasmic derivation, they ignored my offer. An affair on the beach had driven me to a British University, I think Leicester, but I have the correspondence from the Chairman of the Chair of Parapsychology founded by the well known author Arthur Koestler and which carries his name. I had I told him, been taking the sun on the beach and half asleep in the process when the feeling of alarm came over me and fo which I was consciously trying to find a natural reason. I turned to face the sun and looked around half expecting a tractor to loom over head, but it was all as it should be and no one stirred. I felt I had to walk along the shore almost as if I was being beckoned by clues in a paper chase, My mind was full of images which had one thing in common - black and shiny and like the patent leather of my childhood days. I could hear myself thinking incoherrently - diver with snorkel and wet suit - dolphin - then, dying dolphin or drowning diver. I searched the horizon and the slight swell for no reason at all, looking every inch a desperate and confused man. I did not even notice the group of people surrounding me quizzically and the beach guard asking me if there was anything wrong. I remember asking him to look towards the point at where the swell started to break and did he see something. I had been watching at a point some 100 metres from where I had been lying and I thought I could see a shadow in the swell. He said he could only see what he thought was a plastic water bottle and asked why I thought there was anything strange about it. I blurted out that I thought there was a dying dolphin somewhere and or perhaps a diver in trouble which of course spread alarm. I insisted because by then I knew there was something there even though I could not see anything other than what could have been a bottle in the swell some fifty metres away. It was bobbing up and down as a bottle would and that was probably what that was. Nothing stirred, nothing changed and I stood full of grief and playing the part as they say in this part of the world, of the bear , to the titters here and there. I forgot about it completely until I came back the following day to face, to my concern, a reception party of (and some very agitated) bathers. One idiot was showing me a clenched fist. I saw it then , exactly where I had been standing. Its whole beautiful length still glistening. I bent down to stroke it and noticed the feel of the black top which was every inch exactly like patent leather - neither rubbery nor sticky. I felt its soft almost transparent underside which reminded me of dog bellies. Nothing at all like a fish, but of course, it dawned on me that a Dolphin was like us, a mammal and it was still warm, probably from the harsh sun rays. I had never been close to one before. They were all firing questions at me "How on earth did you know - There was nothing to see. - We had to wait till you came despite it being illegal - It must be buried or it will stink -We could not let them take it away especially since it landed exactly where you were standing." they were all talking in unison and the guard just watched my eyes. "Why did you know?" he said with the faint wisp of a tear in his eye. I was overwhelmed and cried that night blaming myself somehow for not saving or being with that beautiful creature whose last thoughts were probably full of hope that I would remove the fear or pain somehow, during those last, probably terrifying moments. I knew and I cared very little for those who could not believe that a message had been sent and that somehow I managed to translate it. Even now, I attempt to convince myself that there was nothing I could have done other than send out an unavailable boat. A good swimmer in shallow waters, the depths produced panic. No one would have gone out with me even if they had believed me and there were no signs of bleeding or collision marks or as is often the case. The Chairman of the Koestler Chair at the University was not even surprised. "Don´t even talk to me about Dolphins", he said, "I cannot even get government files on their reseach. Its all classified as Top Secret and of National Interest. Heaven knows what they are doing to the poor creature." He said he would write and he did, but the questions on the subject of the exercise, the dolphin and my experience, was taken for granted and the last inexplicable comment on who did what to one of nature´s most beloved creature, was never fully explained. This was probably the most heartwarming of the parapsycological experiences that would keep me searching all my life, but not the most awesome later ones and which took place in front of others too.
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parapsychology, altered consciousness, twilight zone, dolphins, telephathy, thought transference, telekinesis, symbolism, Jung, Koestler,
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