[Edited for her Privacy. E-mail me if you have any questions.]
I wonder whether you think I am out of touch with reality based on the e-mails I have been posting lately. I also wonder based on the individual conversations I have had with some of you whether you think this whole topic is my mind playing tricks on my eyes. I have "come out" when it comes to the distortions I have been seeing, and while this may seem non-exciting to you, it has secretly been the driving force behind many of my actions for many years to explain what I have seen and what I have experienced.
I was sitting with my rabbi today learning Kuntres Uma'ayon, which is a hardcore book on Chassidic (mystical) concepts, but from the point of view of understanding spirituality as it relates to one's own attachment to objects and desires of the world. We got into a conversation about how when people do certain acts (mitzvahs), what they do with the act literally transforms the object used to do the action whereas if one imagines that a giant needle injects that object with spiritual goodies, transforming it into something spiritually different, their visualization wouldn't be far from the literal truth as it is described in the Torah. This also works the other way, as we may infect certain objects with impurity and cut it off from its spiritual source by using it in an unholy manner. Same too with speech -- a word is a physical thing comprised of sound waves that are projected from one person and can physically affect other people.
We even discussed radio waves and information traveling through the air via wi-fi and bluetooth internet access, and how they can carry sound waves, and how those waves move literally through us all day long. Sound waves and radio waves are physical things. It would be foolish to think that the messages they contain do not affect us.
What I was trying to bring out from the discussion with the rabbi was whether thoughts are physical just as are sound waves and physical acts. He seems to be of the opinion that thoughts are private and while a person radiates their thoughts through emotions, emotions can be controlled. I agreed with him about the emotions, and how they cause people to possibly create chemicals that are shot out from the body, but I could not agree that one's thoughts are private, especially not after what happened on my shidduch date on Friday morning.
We met on Friday morning. Our random discussions picked up where they left off last time before she told the matchmaker that she was not interested in continuing our meetings. After picking her up at her apartment, I took her to a hotel where the managers hate Jewish individuals like us who come to their hotel and sit there for hours. While we frequent their bars and buy drinks, I can understand their frustration with people who come to sit and talk without staying at their hotel. Anyway, in the middle of our date, we were hiding out in the lobby trying to look like all the other hundreds of business people who were participants in a seminar taking place that day. I was not wearing my black hat, and other than my long beard, we looked like everyone else. In the middle of a conversation about the benefits of putting up psychological barrier to shield a person from getting hurt (she thought it would be a good skill to be able to put up barriers, and I, having many barriers, thought they were a bad idea because they distance me from getting emotionally connected to many experiences), my focus shifted and I suddenly was able to hear everyone's conversation around us, to the detail of each word each person was speaking.
I was able to repeat each person's conversation; one conversation was taking place around 20 feet behind us, and two conversations were around 15 feet to our right. I also heard the footsteps of the hotel worker and the detailed events that were going on in the room. Thinking that she heard these too, I started to repeat word for word what I was hearing (joking around as if we were having the conversation from the couple behind us). I said, "Would you like me to give you my business card?" She looked at me strangely. I smiled, "Perhaps I can fax that to you." She asked me "what are you talking about?!?" When I told her that I was paying attention to all of the conversations in the room and asked her if she was hearing the same thing, she said, "no, I hear only your voice -- I was listening to you." I realized that I must have spaced out for a second, but to my defense, I heard every word she said too.
A few minutes later when the manager asked us to go downstairs if we were going to sit and talk, "we have a place for religious people like you", [I know, it's discriminatory, and from what I learned in Constitutional Law class, they broke the law. It would have been smarter for them to say that they do not allow patrons who are not staying at the hotel to loiter. However, the fact that they made a room for "people like us" was nevertheless a nice act on their part because they could have kicked us out since we weren't staying at their hotel.]
Sitting at the table with my rabbi, I could not accept his point of view that thoughts are private and they are not broadcast outside of the mind of the thinker. We debated this for more than an hour while we were learning Kuntres Uma'ayon. While our discussion led us onto another topic, namely that we do not know where the bridge (in Hebrew, memutzah) is between spirituality and physicality, and how one thing interacts with another thing. I am still of the opinion that thoughts are somehow physical and can have physical effects on other objects and on people. My rabbi believes that thoughts are spiritual.
Lying non-dormant in my mind is my experience, which I have videotaped on many occasions, that a human mind with a certain intent can look at a cloud (ideally a small to mid-sized puffy cloud) and with a thought can make the cloud disappear within a minute. I showed my friends this trick in yeshiva (rabbinical school), and I even spoke to rabbis about it in private. With the exclusion of my select friends in yeshiva who witnessed this on many occasions, my rabbis told me that either I was imagining it or that if I was using magic to accomplish this feat, that I could be doing harm to my soul by using angels to do something silly like melt a cloud.
I learned how to do this by my prior studies in Hawaiian mysticism often referred to as Huna. It was Dave Frederick who explained to me how to melt clouds at a convention in the late nineties, and since then I have been trying to find out exactly how it works. A credible author I found the subject of Huna in general was Max Freedom Long. As with any mysticism, it is important to avoid the space cadets who throw around words they don't understand and cheapen the information by making it mainstream. I entered yeshiva with the intent to figure out what I was doing when I choose one cloud of many and think, "you, disappear" and within minutes, the cloud is gone. This proved to me the existence of the spiritual, and showed me over and over that the conventional philosophies of physicality are incomplete and there is more physical stuff going on than we can understand.
I have not yet figured out how or why this happens, but I know that the mind can exert an influence over a physical object far away from it at will. This is why I became religious, and this is why I have such an interest in brain entrainment through technologies such as Hemisync and Holosync, described supra, in a previous blog entry. I hope you don't think I am nuts for devoting so much of this blog to these topics, but I am searching desperately for an answer, now more than ever.
The thought about how synaesthesia, the overlapping of one sense onto another, can explain why I hear a television turn on hundreds of feet away from me and why I have dark metallic shapes that move through my field of vision at all times. However it does not explain why I can look at a cloud among many clouds surrounding it and make one cloud disappear while the others remain intact. This question haunts me all the time.
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