This started out being comments on the Documentary on Reality and the Extended Mind below, but I think it’s going to be more than that later. Is it me or is it MacClaine?
I tend to think there are no such things as anomalies of consciousness. We are so unaware of ourselves we often refer to what is truly the manifestation of an unconscious event, as some kind of anomaly. It may feel like an anomaly but what one is experiencing is more a projection or some unconscious event.
Some of my experiences have been quite different, similar to possession and then synchronistic events occur as a result. Not being a writer I have not had the experience of this through writing but I suspect writers know a great deal about it. I have been forced to become conscious of it for reasons of survival and am basically driven because I intend staying out of jails and hospitals, places where the problems seem to flow from one person to another. Snake Pit and Caged are a clear example of this, only wish I had seen it before I got into trouble but it is clear now I was the object of the projections of many who may have seen these films. Sometimes these so called anomalies are more like wake up calls for us to pay more attention to our interconnectedness and that we are affected by our connections to others. It is likely the person staring you in the face had been psychically aware of you, maybe even looking for you and influenced your appearing where you were at the time. Maybe he saved your life, maybe he was just testing his skills. Numerous times I have been in life threatening situations knowing someone was intervening somewhere in someway, sometimes I could hear them. Now it is clear these were likely novels people were reading and responding to mentally. On the other hand there have been other experiences in which I wish there were someone intervening. I recall Jung's story about the scarab beetle. I so deeply wanted to have an experience like it I think I actually influenced an event on the nearby campus in which a ladybug lit on my coat and I had, just days before that, written something about a person nicknamed "Lady Bug". I was quite surprised by the incident. I discovered, after reading that story, Jung had actually robbed the woman of her intuitive self. Had he coached her into overcoming her fear of her own psychic awareness, she would have marched over to the window at the time the beetle appeared and opened it, grasping the beetle in her own hand. In my youth I played with beetles all the time, picking them up and even tying a string to one leg and flying them like those small airplane replicas. Children have less fear than adults who have been programmed to be a certain way.
The reason we don’t affect everyone with our thoughts or input is because we likely have no psychic connection to them. Shirley MacClain’s, Out on a Limb was the first book I read on the subject, her work being described as channeling, and with whom I have felt a connection. She is one of the few people I have found to be realistic and honest about this phenomenon, although she has talked about it in a way the general public could more easily accept and given my personal experience on viewing The Exorcist I can see the necessity.. MacClain certainly is “no fatalist”, to quote her in one of her interviews and one has to really grasp her ideas and intent to understand what she is about on this subject. I will reiterate her comments that sometimes one has to hit rock bottom like the alcoholic to be willing and willingness is the key to being teachable. The book had a major impact on my consciousness which would not be revealed to me until years later. I have also read other self help (pop psychology) books that have aided my consciousness. This is the kind of learning, from the personal experiences of others, you will never find in four or five years of academic psychology courses. Mind to Mind is also another example of the documentation of this kind of personal experience. JW Dunne's book, An Experiment with Time, put me onto this phenomena and the idea of aging outside the human body. I only read a portion of the book but I picked up on the implications in the parts I did read. I also read Dream Telepathy and Entangled Minds. I also read Experiments in Mental Suggestion published in the 1920's. The film, What the Bleep Do We Know was also helpful. I suspect Tibetan Monks and other cloistered people are far more aware and adept at this level of awareness than most of us in our noisy busy lives. One must surely appreciate and thank actors and actresses who are adept at this kind of impulse work. I use the term impulse as it is the only way to reveal what actually happens. Clearly it is very dangerous, to which I can attest, having had no consciousness regarding what I was doing at the time. I simply never expected to find myself in the middle of someone else’s history.
I too was strongly influenced by the film Anger Management, when Nicholson's character, Rydell asked Buznik "who are you". At first I didn't get it but then it hit me what he was talking about. I had a clue about it after resolving what I thought was my fear over The Exorcist, but wasn't sure until I started digging further into my own personal experiences. I discovered the design of our apartment in Portsmouth, Virginia was different from what I had seen while growing up. I have always denied experiencing any hallucinations on several visits to Psychiatrists because I didn't know what I had experienced was an hallucination, I thought it actually existed and believed this until recently. I'm sparing you all the details. Suffice it to say I was shocked when I made this discovery.
