Saturday, August 1, 2009

THE PSYCHIC PARADOX

This entry is long overdue. For some reason I’ve been holding onto this one and wanting to re-write it before I add it to my blog. It happened in June and so I’m just now getting around to re-writing this, cutting out all the extra blah blah blah that I do. I know I over-analyze things to death. Everyone tells me so. They also tell me I’m intense. I over-think things. I worry too much. And that I just need to accept things, and not ask so many questions all the time. That pretty much sums up what all my blah blah blah was about in my original version of this story. So here, hopefully, is the shorter version. We’ll see.

Basically what I’ve learned the most from this experience is that if I don’t pay attention, I miss things. Obviously that’s true, but most of the time our daily lives don’t require paying much attention to little details. We get by just fine. But there’s a lot to be delved into with those details. A lot of interesting stuff. Well, what I consider interesting, that is. But then again, I’m an intense over-thinker who analyzes things to death and asks too many questions, and blah blah blah. Ok, until I get a better handle on how all this psychic stuff works, I’m going to continue analyzing it. I can’t help it.

My daughter Abigail had spent the night at a friend’s house, and the next day on my way home from work I planned to come get her. The friend’s mother had moved to a new place, so I was faced with another round of asking for directions. I always hate going to a new place because I hate getting directions. It was a town home complex which meant a parking lot with all its entryways, turns, dead-ends, carports, speed bumps...Oh joy. Here I was on my cell phone taking in all of Abby’s directions, knowing that asking her to put the mother on the phone wouldn’t have made much more of a difference. I pictured all the lefts and rights and speed bumps and landmarks in my head as Abby relayed them, and I figured I’d at least get pretty close to the right town home. If need be, I’d call her again once I got in the general vicinity.

I was doing fine until I reached the final “left” or “right”. I couldn’t remember which one it was and I stopped the car and tried to think, replaying Abby’s directions in my head. As I sat there with the car idling, my eyes fell onto the DIRECTV truck parked directly in front of me. I was at a T and could go either to my left or right. I knew that the DIRECTV truck catching my attention meant something, as some kind of marker in helping me find Abby, although she hadn’t mentioned the truck in her directions and it wasn’t parked in front of a town home. But I felt strongly that it was a marker. I guess if I had to gauge it, I’d say it was a little bit more to the left of me than it was the right, and so I chose to turn left, sort of unconsciously deciding that that’s what the truck meant. Since no other psychic feelings were coming to mind, I didn’t give it more thought. I turned left and rounded the corner and pulled up in front of a row of town homes. I phoned Abby’s cell.

“Ok, I’m here. I’m out front, can you see me?” Abby said she was getting her stuff and heading toward the front door. When she opened it, she couldn’t see me. Since it was 5:15 pm, I asked Abby what she could see out the front door and if she was facing the sun. She said no, no sun, but she was facing a bridge. Once she said that, I realized I was completely on the opposite side of the parking lot. Somewhere along the line I had messed up on one of my rights and lefts.

Now looking back on this, if I had paid more attention to the DIRECTV truck and the fact that my attention was strongly drawn to it as a marker to find Abby, I could have gone back to that spot and taken a right instead. But since the moment had passed, this logic had escaped me. I instead drove the car around trying to come out to what I thought was the entrance to retrace my steps, but came to a dead-end instead. Abby was still on the phone with me. “Mom, I’m outside. I still don’t see you yet. I see a DIRECTV truck, does that help?”

I couldn’t believe she said that. “Yes Abs, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’ll be there in a second.” Somehow, that DIRECTV truck did come in handy after all. I don’t know how or why, but 5 minutes earlier, before Abby had thought of the clever indication of the truck, I had picked up on the significance of the truck as being a marker. It’s as though I had reached into the future by 5 minutes and pulled back Abby’s thought of the truck helping direct me to her. Funny that the name was Direct, as in “direction”, although at the time I perceived the truck as being a key piece of information in finding Abby, I didn’t quite get enough information for it to prevent me from getting all my directions tangled up and causing me to drive in circles and hitting dead ends.

I say this again, and I always say this, that the more I recognize these psychic instances, the more I need to open the flow of allowing more information to come through. Maybe I can construct a set of questions to ask in an instance such as this. Perhaps something like, “Why is this standing out to me? I know it means something, but what?” Maybe if I listen and am a little patient, I’ll get more information. I’ll have to do a thought experiment and some practice to get acquainted with a process that I can easily remember and implement.

Ok, so I was able to easily drive back to where the DIRECTV truck was parked and expected to see Abby but once I got there, no Abby. I wondered why she’d use the truck as a marker when she was really no where near the truck at all. Now this was getting more confusing. Realizing I was still on the phone with her, I told her I was right in front of the truck but didn’t see her. She said, “Well I’m not anywhere near the truck, but I can see it in the distance and just figured it was a marker that you could easily find.” Wow, she was right. In fact I got that message 5 minutes ago! I just hadn’t had a way to really put the information into action for me. But like I said earlier, if I had realized that turning left at the truck was wrong, I could have then gone back to the truck and taken a right. (Looking back at that layout, it seems I would have actually reached Abby before she would have had any chance at coming up with the indication of using the truck as a marker for me. After all, she was still inside her friend’s house when I phoned her the first time. Her thought of telling me about the truck hadn’t reached her mind yet when I first saw the truck. If I had realized I needed to turn “right” at the truck since “left” was wrong, I would have driven right up to where she was before needing to get more directions from her. And actually now that I think about that, if that had been the case, then I probably would not have discovered how the DIRECTV truck had grabbed my attention. Without Abby needing a reason to use the truck as a marker, I never would have made the connection).

So I turned right and followed a line of homes and finally found Abby and her friend waving at me at the end of the block. When I pulled up to her, I asked why she thought of pointing out the truck. She said, “Well, it was the furthest thing I could see from where I was standing. It stood out. I figured you didn’t know which way to turn. Remember when you asked me if I could see the sun? I couldn’t see the sun but I could see a bridge. The bridge is over there.” She pointed. She was right. Her line of thinking was good logic, and the DIRECTV truck had come in handy. But it had all come to me too soon and didn’t make sense at the time.

If I had realized I needed to turn right at the truck and had reached her before she mentioned it, would I still have received the psychic information of the truck being a marker? Obviously yes, or I wouldn’t have thought of turning right at the truck the second time around. It’s one of those conundrums that’s so fun to think about. It’s kind of like asking, what came first? My psychic reception that Abby would have a future thought of using the truck as a marker? Or Abby’s need to use the truck as a marker? Obviously it sounds logical to deduce that if my psychic link was to Abby’s future thought, and I interceded it and thus eliminated the need for her to have that thought, then how could I have picked up on a thought that didn’t exist? It seems to be saying that Abby’s need to give me more directions along with her thought of using the truck as a marker were things that were going to happen anyway. Is this a correct line of logic? Is there anything logical about trying to figure out how psychic stuff works? Maybe not, but it is fun to ponder.

Oh, so when I said I learned from this experience the need to pay more attention to things, what I also learned is that I need to remember that the next time something stands out to me as meaning something, I will immediately deduce that it has everything to do with exactly what I’m dealing with at the moment. No more of this, “Oh that seems to mean something but I don’t know what. Oh well.” Next time something like this happens, I’m going to find the shortest, straightest line between the two things. As usually is the case in life, things are generally pretty simple and straight forward. We, however, tend to make them complicated.

Why I didn’t get the feeling of “turn right” while my eyes set upon the DIRECTV truck, I don’t know. That feeling never came to me. That’s why I think this was simply a case of me pre-perceiving Abby’s future thought. In her directions, she didn’t say to turn right at the truck, only that she could see it. The bridge didn’t come into play until I had already turned left (wrong) and called and asked her what she could see out the front door. It would have been greatly impressive if my psychic thought about the truck being a marker would have included “turn right, and she’s in front of the bridge”. Like I said, maybe next time if I have the presence of mind and the patience, I can fish for more psychic impressions and see what I get. As I analyze this right now, I realize that getting all that extra information is not entirely impossible. It would seem improbable because then I would have found Abby before asking her what she sees out the front door and before her telling me about the bridge and the truck. But an improbability is not an impossibility. And now that I think about how many times I’ve had psychic impressions of things without having a clue why I had them, I see now how our choices in life can help us to skip over some time-consuming efforts. So perhaps it is simply safe to say that my getting a little lost and tangled up in my directions was one possible outcome, but not the only possible outcome. Perhaps I had picked up on the information from one probable reality line, which happened to be the one I actually went down and so therefore was able to see why I got the psychic impression that I did. However, if I had made different choices, thus skipping over getting a little lost and thus reaching Abby before those indications of information could be played out, I would have skipped over that set of events and gone down a slightly different reality line, one just as likely probable as the actual one. I would have reached Abby before she had a need to mention the truck and therefore I would not know why the truck stood out to me.

Ooh this conundrum stuff is fun, isn’t it? Ok, so here’s the thing. The next time I have some psychic episode such as this, I’m going to do my best to find the “skip-over” probability reality line and see if things don’t work out much more easily and smoothly, seemingly remarkable. I won’t have the satisfaction of being able to analyze the line of events as I’ve done this time around, but it will be a giant quantum leap in my psychic development.

You can add “very impatient” to the list up above. Yes, I’m very impatient. I hate inefficiency. There’s got to be a reason and a better way for me to utilize my psychic abilities, and I’m determined to find out what they are. I kind of feel like with every revelation, I’m graduating to a new level of awareness. Why things can’t just be simpler for me, I don’t know. I guess it’s all a matter of our thoughts and choices. I’ll need to definitely add patience to my to-do list though. I’m sure that with patience comes grace, and through grace comes those awesome and amazing experiences that have no explanation. Ah, now I can see why I need to stop analyzing so much and worrying about details. I need to get over the whys and hows and just accept what’s before me instead of trying to over-think it.

Wow, I think I just solved my own conundrum.