Drifting Away

    Just to answer your puzzled mind, this is the post flagged by Google's AI, the image of Trump and his fellow alien (not yet deported by ICE) replaced with an innocent early July 4th display, a bit of good ol' Americana.  Thanks for bearing with me...if you're reading the following paragraphs, then you'll know that posting photos of Trump walking with any undocumented alien is a no-no (and since Google doesn't tell you what specific text or image is banned, it's a guessing game all around).  Anyway, all is good (I think).  A lesson to me that there is always something to learn.  That said, the post follows...

ORIGINAL POST (minus photo):  Although this post was ready to go over a week ago, I almost scrapped it entirely.  For one, it was a bit personal (and possibly boring because of that); and two, it may come across as a bit bizarre, although nowhere near as bizarre as what Trump posted on his social media site, that of his striding alongside a lightly-shackled alien, one now captured by our forces and likely to be interrogated for its amazing workout program.  Equally bizarre was the lockstep decision by the GOP-led House to approve Trump's "arch" but not approve the building of a women's history museum, AND to give Trump the final say on its location if it is ever approved.  Anyway, this post was a topic that went back and forth in my head: what did it mean, if anything?  Was I supposed to figure it out?  And then over a week later, to have that dream.  Let me explain...

     Quick question: have you ever closed your eyes and, as if hypnotized, heard a voice?  No?  Many of my friends meditate but this was more of an inner voice, an ethereal voice, calm and soothing, but obviously (to my mind, anyway) of a higher power.  If this has never happened to you, no worries because up until the other day, I would have answered in the same way.  I've felt gut feelings and semi-conscious thoughts (such as "this is a bad decision"), but never a voice.  Much of this may seem familiar for those of you who have undergone hypnosis.  And just as with so many such professions, there are good hypnotists and probably many bad ones.  My first experience with a "good" one was a fluke, a curiosity in a time when Groupon deals flourished and an ad for a person I'd never heard of appeared (I'd only gone "under" once before some 20 years ago and found it quite interesting).  But this guy, once the session was over from his simple but cramped office space, told me to go back to my car and wait about 20 minutes.  I don't want you driving, he said; you won't be ready.  What was he talking about, I thought, and why did I see so much maroon while I was hypnotized?  So I got back to my car, waited a few minutes, and darn if he wasn't right.  I was more than a bit groggy.  Wide awake but somewhere else, my mind still not in sync with my body.  And just as he had told me, a full 20 minutes later it was all gone (that hypnotist has since quit the business to pursue his passion which was to be a wrestling coach).  But the field of hypnosis offers a guide of sorts, their questions and comments meant to carefully lead you to pockets in your mind that you may or may not want to visit (and I should note that you always feel in control while hypnotized, and indeed can self-awaken at any point).  But this "voice" was different because I wasn't being hypnotized but was undergoing a session of acupuncture.  Wait, hearing a voice during acupuncture?  And the voice told me to start preparing to leave...

     We all tend to drift off now and then, whether it's because of being bored or of having too many other thoughts on your mind.  And sometimes we drift off to that nether world of in-between when you sink into or awaken from a nap or a deep sleep, a time of clarity that quickly vanishes from the material world the more you try to grasp it.  There are also other times when you drift away when reading a book or watching a movie, your reality succumbing to another as if you were living another life.  And then there's that drifting away each of us experienced in the classroom.  Many school districts now ban students from bringing cellphones into the classroom during school hours; but I had little idea how involved big tech companies were in targeting students as their next market. Noted a piece in the NY Times: Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.  Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.  TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.  Said part of the article: Exactly how much the National PTA has received from social media companies remains secret, but some details emerged in the documents.  In 2024, a National PTA official told Snap executives that companies generally paid the organization $250,000 to $500,000 a year, and that a handful gave millions of dollars a year.  Wait, the PTA?  My drifting off in school was more because I was eyeing a cute girl two rows away instead of listening to a lecture about whatever it was that happened in 1066.  But there I am, drifting off again because for another couple, there were much more serious complications...

      Maurice & Maralyn (her preferred spelling) never expected or planned for a whale to hit their 45-foot boat in the middle of the Pacific ocean...the middle.  What were the odds?  The whale was wounded, thrashing about in its death throes, but there was nothing else in sight.  Nothing.  No other boat or whaling ship.  No pod of killer whales or sharks.  The only reality was that the injured whale had damaged their boat beyond repair and that they had wasted precious minutes watching this huge and bleeding sperm whale slowly sink out of sight.  Their boat would soon follow.  They frantically loaded their life raft with what they could as the water poured into the doomed boat, piling enough food and fresh water into the raft to last them for 20 days.  Then they attached their dingy to the raft and pushed away, watching as the sea water filled the remainder of their wounded craft as it, too, slowly sank out of sight.  Surely 20 days of supplies would be plenty, they thought.  20 days seemed like a long time.  They would certainly be rescued by then.  They would be off by over 90 days, a time so long that the raw eyes of fish would become delicacies for their precious drops of liquid, a time where once-lively turtles and passing sharks became prey for the now-ravenous humans, as did the occasional booby birds who made the mistake of resting on the rails of their raft.  A time past delirium, a time past worrying about the green scum forming in the jugs of collected rainwater, a time past waving at the dozen of so passing container ships that couldn't see two faint sticks waving something, all because the many flares they had brought were duds and wouldn't light.

     When captain Suh Chong-il of the Korean fishing vessel Wolmi somehow made the decision to investigate the two tiny, tiny dots floating up and down between shifts of waves, here was what he saw: They were moving, these bodies, but they hardly looked human.  Suh could just about tell they were a man and a woman.  The man's gaunt face was half covered by a thick beard.  The woman had long, ragged hair, and legs that looked as fragile and thin as willow branches.  They appeared ancient and so emaciated he could see the shape of their bones beneath their skin...Once they were on deck, Suh could examine them.  Their clothes were rotten, barely covering their bodies.  A fungus was growing all over the man's skin, livid and red.  They both stank...[he] found a small crater, brimming with pus.  He pressed out the ooze and a deep hole opened up; he could see straight through to the bone.

     The award-winning writer, Sophie Elmhurst, combed through diaries and news clippings to bring the wanderlust-gone-wrong story of this 117-day journey into one of those rare tales that keeps you reading until you finish.  But almost more than the actual story of the couple's will to survive, was Elmhurst's observations on life itself, life and marriage (her book is titled A Marriage At Sea).  Here's one such reflection of hers, tying together the joyous day the boat departed and any young married couple's expectations: Beneath the performance lies a sense of ending.  It's not just the departure -- newlyweds driving away in a car, the boat cutting through the water until it disappears from view.  Something irrevocable is taking place in the spirit of hope.  In that sense, it's a beginning too.  A new chapter, as people like to say, giving credence to the falsehood that our lives unfold like stories.  There's such trust in that moment.  Trust in what is to come, trust in how well it will all go.  And then what?  After the wedding, after the honeymoon -- well, then it's just days.  Ordinary days.  The insurmountable, self-renewing chores.  The bins, the laundry, the procession of meals.  And those are the golden days, it turns out.  The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong.  It's not as if we weren't warned.  The old vows knew what they were doing: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.  The storms are right there in the words.  Misfortune can seem abstract in the midst of celebration.  At the beginning, we imagine the bad weather might pass us by.  It's only natural, part of the long business of self-preservation, because how impossible it would be to go through life in full awareness of all that will befall us.  Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must know, we do know, that we'll all have our time adrift...In any case, they're not always right, these lines we draw to make sense of our lives, or the lives of others.  As Leon Russell wrote (and George Benson made famous): Are we really happy here with this lonely game we play?  Looking for words to say?  Searching but not finding understanding any way.  We're lost in a masquerade...

      As to that voice, an interesting article in Smithsonian wrote of what our unconscious and anesthetized mind may be aware of regarding our surroundings, at least more than we imagined.  In a very small study of seven volunteers: They played roughly seven-minute-long segments of the podcast “The Moth Radio Hour” and found that the participants’ hippocampi were processing language in real time.  Some neurons responded more often to nouns, while others sent signals in response to verbs.  What’s more, the cells fired at similar rates for words that carried similar meanings, such as how “dog” and “cat” are more closely related to one another than either is to “pen.”  The neuronal firing patterns revealed that the anesthetized mind could anticipate the next word in a phrase...The participants in the new study did not consciously recall what they heard while they were under anesthesia.  In my case, I felt fully "awake" vs. that paralyzed feeling when dreaming or under a dose of propofol.  In my case, I could hear the music in the background and was aware of where I was, and that all of it was "real."  But really, what was --or is-- real?

     This was asked in The Sun interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly.  On his site he wrote: There is a real hunger in individuals and communities outside the study of religion to engage in nuanced conversations about "religion."  He explained this a bit more in the interview: My point is that if you take a paranormal experience or account seriously --by which I mean you believe such things happen, which I do-- you have to take all these experiences or accounts seriously.  So when someone says, This is what’s going on, I’m like, OK, that’s your experience.  I get that.  But these other people say something else, so let’s listen to them as well.  It’s not just a matter of saying we don’t know.  It’s a matter of putting it all on the table and then having a conversation about everything that’s on the table.  Will that lead to certainty or some singular answer?  Probably not, but it will lead to a much better conversation about what’s actually going on.  I think we will develop theories of what’s going on, but they’ll become more and more complex.  They won’t be simple or singular...On the science side, it’s a kind of nuts-and-bolts explanation of the seemingly impossible: mostly from astronomy and physics, but also genetics.  There’s a lot of discussion of energy and radiation.  From the social sciences, it’s mostly anthropologists looking at concepts and experiences of reality that are very different across cultures and time periods.  It’s the idea that people actually have different experiences of reality.  Models from anthropology in particular, especially the shamanistic and the Indigenous cosmologies, are really useful because they throw a lot of light on the topics of people leaving their bodies, contact with what we call “the dead”--who may not be dead at all-- and entity encounters.

      And speaking of the dead, an earlier visit to my acupuncturist found me as my dead brother.  Wait, what?  Again, this had never happened but there I was, again aware of the music and the background noises, and yet, my eyes closed, I was my brother feeling alive just moments ago and now realizing that opening my eyes wasn't going to happen again.  I realized (as my brother) that I had moved on, and that while aware of the background, and feeling oddly normal, I was also no longer alive.  And it was surprisingly peaceful.  No white lights or ethereal music or looking down from above, but an almost relaxing calm as if content to just take it all in.  And after what seemed only a few minutes (my mind now back to me) the "connection" broke and I was back as myself, lying on the acupuncture table while my body healed.  When I told my wife about this experience, she told me that I should consider what happened a gift, as if my brother was perhaps reaching out to me well beyond the dream state.  And the next week, when I told my acupuncturist about it, she told me that in Chinese medicine there are many forms of energy and many dimensions, and that perhaps a "connection" had occurred between my brother and I, adding that energy is always searching in these dimensions and that my connection was both fortunate and possible.  

     My wife and I have been going to this acupuncturist for nearly 20 years, she being a registered MD in both Germany & China (but not in the US) and a believer that both Eastern and Western medicine have things to offer and can work together.  Her experience allows her to read and interpret both X-rays and MRIs which in turn allows her to pinpoint her treatment along the proper "meridian" of your body (traditional Chinese medicine feels that the body has 12 such meridians) .  My wonky knee was related to my liver meridian, she told me (as were the ridges in my one thumbnail).  Thus it was no surprise to read that medical scientists in the west were amazed to discover that the ink from tattoos traveled in the body in an entirely different way from that of our circulatory or lymphatic systems, a "new" field they termed the interstitium.  Wrote the piece in the NY Times: The existence of an apparent conduit between skin and the fascia beneath it --two tissue layers not known to connect with each other in this way-- broke accepted anatomic boundaries.  The researchers also found that the same was true for other previously unknown microscopic connections between organs in the abdomen...the idea that there being a circulatory system involving the body's connective tissues was not unfamiliar to some medical systems.  "This knowledge is actually quite ancient," says Leah Walsh, an osteopathic physician and an assistant professor of family and community medicine at Ohio State.  "It's something that other systems of medicine have been offering for a long time, but they didn't have microscopes."  As Theise [Neil Theise, a professor of pathology at New York University] told an interviewer from "Radiolab" in 2023, an expert in traditional Chinese medicine approached him at a conference in China where he was speaking on the interstitium and said, "We've been talking about it for 4,000 years."  When I mentioned the article to my acupuncturist, she just laughed.  We call this energy "chi," she told me (sometimes spelled qi)...thousands of years old (ancients believed you could channel this energy, something Bruce Lee often displayed in his one-inch punch).

Graphic: Scientific American

     Two more quick things: before each visit she checks this "chi," her fingers on each wrist, separately checking 3 points, the flow of blood in each direction, and my chi.  This is your liver meridian, she told me as she had me feel a point on my wrist.  Much stronger, she told me; it is important to soothe the organs, help them to work better (she advised me to drink something sour each morning, such as straight lemon juice or a vinegar; not much, she said, maybe just half a teaspoon -- the ridges on my thumbnail have slowly started to disappear).  The second thing she does in her pre-exam (this before she has you lie down on her table and begin inserting the acupuncture needles), is to show her my tongue.  When I asked her about this, she pulled out a book the size of a large city's phone directory (when such things existed), each page filled with a dozen photos of different tongues, hundreds and hundreds of pages.  The tongue is very important in showing your overall health, she told me.  And so it would seem as a piece in Scientific American wrote about the new AI database being assembled by one facility...on tongues: The authors of a 2024 study in Technologies used machine-learning models to classify tongue colors and predict several associated conditions --including diabetes, asthma, COVID and anemia-- with a testing accuracy of 96.6 percent.  The authors of the study warned that because Western medicine is so hesitant and basically untrained in using the traditional Chinese medical pre-diagnosis, that their new app is --so far-- meant to be used only as a "wellness" gauge (and my own caveat, what my acupuncturist recommended for me was indeed for me, based on my symptoms; as with anything medical, you should consult your own acupuncturist or doctor before trying any of these).

     But back to that voice.  What did it mean when it told me to start preparing to leave?  Did that mean leaving this life, as in weeks, or months, or years?  And as if replying with a shrug of the shoulders, I could "feel" that the answer back was that time was irrelevant.  Marty Stevens-Heebner, founder and CEO of Clear Home Solutions and AgeWise Alliance, told The Washington Post: When your closets, cabinets and garage are crammed with who you used to be or who you might be someday, where does who you are today live?  When you let go of anything that isn’t a tool for the life you’re living now, you’ll be living in a home rather than inside a storage space.  That unused treadmill, those years-old craft supplies, the dusty golf bag are not investments in your future self.  They’re expensive reminders of the person you wish you were, taking up space that the extraordinary person you actually are needs to live in.  And maybe that was what both my brother and the voice were trying to convey, that "leaving" wasn't about my physically leaving here but rather that I should be leaving all of the reminders of what I was in the past, and become "the person you actually are."  That said, should this blog may not have any posts for a few months, you'll know that my interpretation was not the right one...I will have left to join my brother. 

      At this point, you may be thinking that what I "experienced" was a few episodes of lucid dreaming.  And maybe hypnosis is a form of lucid dreaming.  As the NY Times put it: Most of us experience our dreams — we’re chased through our childhood school, our teeth fall out. The dream happens to us; we’re not deciding how it unfolds. Then there’s the much rarer lucid dreaming [where] the dreamer can often determine how things play out.  Only about half of people will have even one lucid dream in their lifetimes.  Roughly one in 10 has a lucid dream once a month or more...Lucid dreams most frequently occur in the second half of sleep, when REM cycles are longest and brain activity increases, lighting up the prefrontal cortex and the precuneus, which is involved in awareness of consciousness...Regions of the brain that are typically quiet during sleep or regular dreaming --such as the precuneus, which is also involved in memory retrieval and self-reflection-- activate during a lucid dream.  Hmm, sounds good but not quite, at least for me...

     What I heard or saw during my recent visits for acupuncture was something I couldn't "explain," nor did I want to.  Whether others believed me or not didn't matter.  But in both instances, I never felt scared or worried that I had tapped into another realm or that I was imagining it all.  There was, as with the feeling of seeing through my brother's mind, a calmness as if I were let loose in a warm space to just absorb and observe.  As my wife said, just feel honored.  Here's how author Matt Haig's character tried to describe what she felt when touched by La Presencia: I was letting go of the fixtures of time and identity, moving into the fluidity of pure and all-encompassing life.  I had a moment of brief release, like taking off a tight helmet, and then I was somewhere and someone else entirely.  

     So realistically, why me, and why then?  Was I just more "open" at the time, even though I never expected or hoped for such an experience (much as one generally doesn't expect to dictate what one will dream).  And in all of my many years of occasionally going to acupuncture, I have never had such occurrences, and perhaps will never have them again.  It may have simply been chance, or where my mind was at the moment, or the wild experience of somehow being "out there."  Who knows?  But as the earlier interview with Professor Kripal said, shouldn't we just accept that it happened and add it to the table?  For me, I don't discount the words of someone facing dementia or someone drifting away from what we would view as our "normal" world.  Instead I am curious and puzzled and open to what they are seeing or hearing, because for them it is so real.  They may simply be touching a bit of what else may be "out there," a  something which we simply reject...a world of shamans, and Chinese medicine (my knee is much better, thank you,*), and traditions, and animals talking and Earth itself "feeling," as many ancient Hawaiians believed.  All of it reminded me of the young daughter in Madeleine L'Engle's book, A Wrinkle in Time, who sees a  "something" and tells her mother, "I hoped it was a dream," to which her mother replies: No, Meg.  Don't hope it was a dream.  I don't understand it anymore than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.  As astronomer Maria Mitchell once said: The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power.  We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.

*My acupuncturist made clear that tendon and bone-on-bone problems aren't really fixed by acupuncture but rather acupuncture tends to help the body heal by moving its energy and fluids back to a balance.  Within 4 visits, my knee was about 90% pain-free.  That said, I also know that eventually I will need a knee replacement.  But as my acupuncturist said, the body wants to heal itself; acupuncture just helps it along.  And finally (finally!), that dream mentioned earlier.  In it I had arrived at an exceptionally large house, its entry doors oddly clipping onto a rail above before sliding and locking together (how impractical, I remember thinking), then being given a tour of the place, its many levels, the views of a channel or river outside with people casually sitting in its natural pools, the scattered rooms everywhere, all the while being told that this was my house.  The bottom line, the place was HUGE and when I asked what I had done that allowed me to buy this house which I felt I really didn't want because it was just ridiculous, no one could really answer, including me.  And then came the ending (my dreams sometimes play out like movies, one dream even having had closing "credits" roll by), the closing movie theme written by Andre & Dory Previn and made famous by Dionne Warwick: When did I get, where did I, why am I lost as a lamb?  When will I know, where will I, how will I learn who I am?  Is this a dream, am I here, where are you?  Tell me, when will I know, how will I know, when will I know why?  The answers in my dream, like the voice, left unanswered...