Doing The Unasked For Without Permission

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The ted.com talks continue to fascinate me. there are over 500 if them to chose from here:

http://www.ted.com/

I've been a little picky about which videos I watch at that site. Watching any of them don't take long. I think they get 17 minutes to get their point across. The last time I visited to see if they had any new video to watch they had a video of Steve Jobs giving a graduation speech at Berkley. They ran the whole speech on youtube. Very interesting.

That's one of the reasons I like the TEDtalks. They feature individual speakers who are excited about what they do. It's contagious. Watching the TEDtalk videos is therapeutic and uplifting. I had no idea Steve Jobs came from such humble beginnings. In the past I figured he was just another trust fund kid who got lucky.

This morning I listened to this 8 year old girl play the violin and explain why she chose the violin over the piano. I have certain expectations when I witness a child prodigy perform. Mostly about the excellence of their talent. This little girl did a standup monologue between her songs and pulled it off with aplomb. How in the world... ?

Dean Kamin is an inventor who is probably most famous for coming up with the Segway scooter and prosthetic parts. He has been in the news frequently over the last decade or so. Usually in association with the Segway. I know what he looks like but had no sense of his personality, so when I saw that he was featured in a TEDtalk I decided to watch to see if I could catch his drift.

I didn't get very far into the video before I had to shut it down. Kamin possesses an eerie resemblance to an old friend called Noel Carter. He's dead now. He died of a pain in the ass when he was 52 years old. These two guys even looked alike in certain ways. They mutually possessed an inquiring mind. Noel's was encyclopedic by nature.

It didn't shock me so much that Noel died so young. He was a fragile dude. He was also a dyed-in-the-wool alcoholic and his drinking got worse as he got older. Noel was a story-teller. That was the basis of our relationship. I drank with him off and on for ten years in order to hear his stories. He was a tool and die guy who was a Nascar freak. He was a big fan of auto racing and was the chief mechanic on several racing teams at a very young age. A prodigy in his own set and setting. Kentucky. He liked country music.

I felt forced to listen to Noel's stories because not many people could listen to him without a lotta interruptions that demanded too many explanations over what should have been simple to understand if you were a genius, but for just about nobody else.

He liked to perform his stories. When he got to just the right point of inebriation he would suddenly thrust himself up in a single movement into a squatting position atop a government surplus bookkeeper's stool, and begin the beguine. I knew exactly where he was trying to get to in order to employ his encyclopedic understanding of a subject or topic of current interest, and I composed questions to ask him that would get him motor running.

We were useful to one another in that sense. He had accumulated all this encyclopedic, voluminous tomes of book-learning, but he couldn't boot it up without due cause. I was an I Ching freak whose total goal in life was to teach myself how to ask just the right question to elicit genius through the other as if myself. When it works, unsuspecting people be-co-me genies to fetch the boiler plate I need to goof on and eventually find the rhythm of the nayme of that tune.

I didn't fully realize the implications of what I was doing until later, but even before I woke up early one morning hearing a familiar voice telling me to "Stop using the I Ching." My inner voice must have been preparing me to use ordinary people for oracular consultations rather than the graven images of a translated Chinese Classical book.

Until my friendship with Noel I didn't realize that could be done. I suspect a lot of that lack of knowing had to do with my not associating with the sa-me people long enough in one stretch to catch on to the true dynamics of the mysterious ritualistic practices I had surreptitiously gained over decades of daily practice.

"Inch by inch, it's a cinch!" ~ Richard Sylvester's Mother

Using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle and studying it as a book of wisdom by using it as an oracle was an obsession that I let happen because as I used it to ask my most personal questions that came up about life every moment of my ex-is-tense transformed my outlook about a lotta early habits that weren't getting me the results I preyed for.

It took at least twenty years for me to learn to consistently produce well-formed questions that retrieved credible results from the oracle on a fairly regular basis. My only mentor in this situation arose when the reading I got from tossing the coins didn't make sense. This is a very enigmatic oracle. It answers your real question, and if you've ask about another topic as if that's the problem the oracles answer only confuses the inquirer.

In my opinion all the questions any homo sapiens requires an answer to can only be provided by themselves. There are lots of questions a person needs to have answered that might not need to have public knowledge about. What?? Try again...

I have questions about situations and events I don't want nobody else to know I have questions about. I suspect that's true for about anybody. Elsewise there would be no need for oracles to exist. That's not going to happen. Either people who need their questions answered need for an oracle to provide a convincing answer.

The trick is in learning how to turn people into oracles of universal reach. Practically none of them know that can be done, and probably fewer than that realize they can let go of their personal identity to go there to be-co-me that. Granted, if it was left up to them, they would have to wait on serendipity or random chance. No need for that if I know the right questions to ask. I don't need permission because they don't remember once they return to beta consciousness. They always seem to like me after that, but for reasons unknown. Friendliness embroidered with quizzical looks.

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