posted on May, 29 2006 @ 12:51 AM
Wade,
Thanks for the reply! I felt one of those strange little shivers go up my spine when you said something about a connection between the intersection of
physics and conciousness and the whole free energy conundrum, and here's why.
When I was 15, I had had about 6 months of high school German, so I knew a (very) little of it, and one day I found myself in the tiny Foreign
Language section of my local library. My eyes landed on an old yellow book with the title Als ich ein Kleiner Junge War and the odd thing was
that I recognized that title; I knew that book, which was impossible. With a kind of nervous excitement, I took the book home and read it. Impossible!
It's more like I remembered it or something, which is very spooky, but the story gets even weirder. My grandma was dead-set against my learning
German in 1975, because she was still angry over her son's death in WWII. The son, my Uncle Lenny, was studying to be a priest at a seminary in
Indiana in 1942 (this is what the 2nd son in German Catholic families was supposed to do--I'm one, too), but was "spotted" by visiting
plain-clothes "government men" who had caught wind of his fluency in German. Off he goes to some intelligence school in Nebraska. Grandma is
furious, and a little confused, because while she and my grandfather had both come from rural Canadian families which still clung to German in the
home, they only spoke it in front of their kids when they wanted to hide something--how did the kid know german so well (or at all, really?)
Somewhere along the line, Uncle Lenny finds a girlfriend (my dad said she was his one and only), decides he isn't all that interested in the cloak
and dagger stuff, nor does he relish going back to the seminary at this point. His "handlers" get a little resentful at his attitude, and boom!
he's off on a troop transport, bound for England and some sort of behind the scenes "language work". Upon arrival, however, his papers are
missing--no record of where he's supposed to go--so, he's given a rifle and assigned to an infantry unit just going into a hot area near the Bulge.
Two weeks later he's killed, in November, 1944, less than twenty miles from the town from which his great-grandfather had emigrated, as a boy, in
1848.
My dad didn't like to talk about what happened to his brother, except to say that he was tricked, or lied to or something odd. My grandma, though,
was even more tight-lipped. She never spoke a word of German to me, ever, but she did say a very cryptic, odd thing: "If you learn that language,
it'll get you killed, too!" How could I resist?
So, yeah, I became fluent without ever really trying, to the point where I often fooled Germans when I lived there, briefly, in the '80s. But I
always remembered that first moment when my glance just happened to land on that book,When I was a Young Boy--it was the strangest experience
of my life because it was like looking out of someone else's eyes. Now (sorry about all the build up, really!) when I read that description from
Goswami about delayed choice that I quoted in my first post, damned if I didn't have the same feeling, only this time it was more that I had had that
thought, in some other connection before! Again, it's impossible. I had never heard of, nor had I read Amit Goswami before, but as I read those
words, the thought formed in my mind that this was the key to something I had been looking for for a long time--tapping into a source of energy that
was unlimited and utterly unlike anything availabe in the here and now. I have been toying around with it ever since, like a tooth that needs to be
pulled.
Wade, if you've made it this far, I'm very sorry about the long, dramatic story. I don't ever carry on like that; it's just that you seemed to
have confirmed something I seemed to have intuited, so it just got all New Age-y in a hurry. (Please don't imagine I'm as nutty as this sounded, and
thanks again!)