Best Wishes

                                                             Best Wishes

                                                      by Marco M. Pardi

Note: All comments are appreciated, read, and responded to accordingly.  Although I do not wish for things, I will certainly look forward to your comments.

“What time would it be if all the clocks were stopped?” Zen Koan.

Few words stop me cold, bump me into neutral like “Make a wish.” I have no sense of how that can in any way be logical. Never did.  Through the decades I have been fortunate that my circumstances, and perhaps my personality, almost entirely prevented those few willing to do so from having birthday parties for me.  My ex-wife did so once, complete with candle festooned cake and people gathered around telling me to make a wish and blow the candles out.  Always open to possibilities, I acquiesced.  However, when the celebrants failed to drop dead my faith faded.

I have written elsewhere about Hope, and so will not reprise that missive.  Hope is usually more amorphous, while wishes tend more to the specific.  And since the advocacy of wishing seems to crop up everywhere,  I find it worthy of examination.

Of course, the origins of wishful thinking are lost in the soft matter of our evolution.  But, I do not doubt they evolved with our sense of “time” and, for those who think/feel this way, a sense of some power to be either coerced or cajoled into bringing to being a state or result which the wishing individual feels incompetent to accomplish alone.  Many books have been written on these two options, coercing or cajoling, and two within my arm’s reach are: The Book of Ceremonial Magic, A Complete Grimoire (1970) by Arthur Edward Waite;  and, Etruscan Magic and Occult Remedies (1963) by Charles Godfrey Leland.  Like other books in this area of study, they are fascinating as examples of just how obsessive people can become.  Of course, as society seems to become more complex and individual circumstances less navigable, the genre thrives. Social disorder drives a need for personal order, social impotence for personal power.

Having somehow missed being fully vested into the social order, I was always freer to explore my own order, my own coherence, my own sense of waking up basically the same person I was the night before.  That also meant that if I awakened without what I had gone to bed missing the night before it was because I did not spend the night getting it, or at least developing a plan.

I mentioned in a previous blog the event wherein I surrendered my virginity on the psychic altar, going to a psychic for the first time.  I was accompanied by a fellow Strike Team Leader, a deeply caring and good hearted chap with a flinty exterior; he would shoot your grandmother and spare your dog.

Expecting burning incense, plastic trumpets descending on fishing line, and ghostly sound effects from a tape loop, I got a kitchen table, a deck of plain playing cards, and a command to make three silent wishes.

Once opened, as it were, to that kind of experience I found myself encountering more “psychic readers.”  Soon I felt able to distinguish between those who use fairly objective tools – I Ching or Tarot, in which both reader and sitter can see the device and the textual interpretation and those who use items merely as props – tea leaves, playing cards, crystal ball, cracks in a burnt scapula, etc.  While the tools interest me to this day, the people who only use props have been of greater interest.  

Most of my adult life has been involved in the practice of engaging people in ways which get them to divulge information.  Debriefing psychics has been no different.  As with other categories of people, the unreliable witnesses, fakers, and just plain loonies are quickly sorted out.  The remainder, the ones with that stunning accuracy, are the gems shining up from the floor of Shit Creek.   

And so, after several gem interviews,  I was able to arrive at what seemed a common denominator: Most reported that in a very short time they enter a mild trance state, no longer really seeing the crystal ball, the tea leaves, or even the sitter himself.  Instead, in what some would call an aura and others would call a kind of internal state in the reader, they see facets of and episodes in the life of the sitter coming into focus, fading back and giving way to more such until they are all done.  These usually occur in no particular order, the chronology being up to the reader, especially since the sitter will almost invariably ask.  The significant take-away from this is that these events,  while hinting by their content at chronology, are for the reader equally valid and occurring concurrently.  There is no This Now and That Later.  In short, all is equally real and equally now; it is only our physical dimension which, like an old ice tray, insists on putting the cubes in their proper order.

This matched very nicely with phenomena I have experienced through most of my early life.  I did not see things for or about other people; I saw them about myself.  Wishing had nothing to do with them.  I am not by any means a competitive person; I don’t care if you win, I win, or we both win – unless you are trying to kill me. Then, I win.  I look at what people do, no matter what it is, and assume I can probably also do it.  Aging has narrowed that focus.  Somewhat.  So I began to examine memories of these early life phenomena, these vivid and living perceptions I had seemingly “before” the events.  Around age 9,  I saw myself as one day developing a life threatening illness.  Decades later I did so, and obviously recovered.  At 11 or 12 I saw the blonde haired Swiss girl I would one day marry.  After a Scandinavian detour, I married her some 35 years later.  At 13 or 14 I saw myself as the father of a little girl.  I had no sense of being married to anyone during this fatherhood.  As my daughter was being delivered – to my Scandinavian then-wife, people in the waiting room asked me what names (boy – girl) we had picked out.  I said I had never considered a boy name since it was a girl.  The marriage did not last much longer.  At around 16 I saw the make and model of an impossibly expensive English sports car I would own.  Eight years later I bought a new one from the showroom, straight up cash, as I buy all my cars.  In no case did I ever experience a sense of wishing for the event or result; I simply saw it as fact, like it or not.   

And, in one of my sojourns accompanying a person who had died the person pleaded with me to come along (to the other side and into the light).  No one else was around, no robed dudes intoning solemn words.  I simply stopped at a threshold I sensed and said (mentally) “It’s not my time.” (Note: Every such Sympathetic Death Experience I remember was verified at the time by information I received quickly following my return.  In this case the phone rang some 20 minutes after I regained consciousness on this plane and I was informed of the sudden death of a woman I had a tangential connection with.  This is the usual pattern for me.)

So how does this square – or trapezoid, or even rhomboid with our quickly growing understanding of quantum mechanics?  Unfortunately, the make-a-quick-buck-off-the-gullible crowd has swamped the popular scene with books, cd’s, seminars and workshops on “creating your own reality”, a fundamental misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.  And, even among those who are seriously interested, there are still some misperceptions – or incomplete perceptions.  A fascinating and readily demonstrable principle emerging from quantum mechanics is Quantum Entanglement, the phenomenon in which two entities (usually electrons) separated by extreme distance react simultaneously as a pair when change is introduced to only one of the pair.  Leaving aside questions on the nature of the intervening “empty space”, problems arise when one views this phenomenon only on a concurrent, horizontal plane.  When viewed fully through the lens of Space/Time,  we understand that entanglement applies universally, it applies in all “directions”.  Thus, “past” is entangled with “future” and “future” with “present” and so on.  Just as there apparently is no discreet “here” and “there”, there is no discreet “now” and “then”. What is, is. Time and space are simply arbitrary measures needed for some levels of human brain function.  The psychic temporarily steps out of brain function and into mind function, perceiving what, in translation, we will render as “past, present and future” when pressed to do so by the sitter.  The psychic, without cues such as a vision of the sitter at a particular age,  will commonly say that fixing a “time” to the vision is difficult if not impossible.

Lest we protest that this smacks of Fatalism, let us consider that Fatalism itself is premised on a separation of present from future; “You’se gonna’ take a dark trip wit’ a long stranger.” The real message seem to be that the dark trip was never not you, at conception or (if you are so inclined, even before). The future is entangled with the past and we live in a practically immeasurable present (“When you can take the pebble from my hand, Grasshopper”).

In studying the phenomena associated with dying and death I have encountered many claims of “my life flashed before my eyes” and/or a “review of episodes during life”.  My suspicion is that these events are mind breaking loose from brain, mind seeing without the brain bound dimensions of artificial temporality – the “past, present and future” stuff, mind seeing What Is. Some of us, either by training or by some as yet unknown function of development are able to do that without having to go through life threatening circumstances.  It “comes naturally.”

It follows (pun intended) then, that wishing is simplistic nonsense; it is a detour away from what IS into a fantasy of what isn’t, with a dose of hubris added in: If I wish it, I can make it so.

“There are two tragedies in life: one is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.” G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman, 1905