Plum Pudding

❧
I look at my hands even more these days. I started reading palms in my early thirties, and used my own hands as the example for the odd instruction books I used for guidance. I've looked at my hands closely every day for the last forty years now. I not only look at the lines in my hands that come and go, but at the lumps and bumps that appear and disappear as ti-me goes by.

About the sa-me ti-me I started studying the occult, and thus palmistry, I began searching for a pseudonym, a nom de plume, a new me. I found "felix" in the back of a dictionary that provided a list of names and their etymology for new parents to choose a nayme for their newborns. In Latin it meant "happy and prosperous". I felt like that not-me might lead to a brighter, more rewarding future than "the supplanter" handle did.

I didn't want just a single name for my proposed alias. I chose "peregrino" because it meant "a wandering alien priest" in the Latin language of the time. The Irish Catholic priests had been driven out of Ireland by the Vikings or some such, and they withdrew to Rome for their own safety. I thought I had some irish in my genealogy at the ti-me. My older sister who has studied these things claims I was wrong.

There was nothing for them to do there as emigrants, so they apparently went on long walks around Italy of the ti-me, and were considered an odd sight by the locals who labeled them "peregrinos", because they were foreign priests who were really different just in appearance than their Italian priests. I identified with that because of my own wandering.

Eventually I got around to wanting a middle name. I don't remember the details of precisely why I chose the Spanish word for "hands". I have always been able to rely on my eye-to-hand coordination to make me stand out in a way. I've never been too fast on my feet, but I got fast hands. This oddity created a sort of natural misdirection to my opponents back when I boxed a little in the Navy.

This gift of coordination made it fairly easy for me to be-co-me a master welder in a brief ti-me, because I could point to what my eyes saw really well, and doing it daily for a living just made me better at it. My only regret was that I didn't even consider a skilled craft as a way to earn a living until I was literally forced into it at the age of thirty-five.

I was considered a good hand in the industrial construction trades for about twenty years. If I'd been aware I could use my hands better than I could use my brain to make a living I could have been doing it since I ran away from home at the age of fifteen years. My brain ain't for rent. That's why I chose the term "manos" for the middle of my fictitious personality: felix manos peregrino.

It took about thirty years from the ti-me I experienced my remembering vision at the age of thirty years old to realize that I had spent the last thirty years figuring out what happened that special night pretty much exclusively, whether I was consciously aware I was pursuing it like the grail cup or no. I pretended to myself that I could keep on behaving any way I liked, but having that vision, whether my reaction to it proved I was nutty as a fruitcake or not, was my only true interest in life.

The gift of that singular vision only became intimately important to me after studying the occult for thirty years because I randomly (I thought so at the ti-me) bought a book at a church bookstore where I was attending a twelve-step program on a suspicious impulse. The book was titled The Gnostic Gospels, and it was written by a woman called Elaine Pagels.

Professor Pagels provided a description of some early Christians who were referred to at the ti-me as Gnostics that were rejected by the Church of Rome. As I remember it, she described these people as mystics who went to isolated places in the deserts and mountains of the mideast seeking a personal experience with God. They called the successful results of their quest "gnosis", a Greek word meaning "to know".

The scenario Pagels described that seemed to affect me the most was how these individuals would gather and recognize in each other the fact that they had genuinely had that desired encounter with God by the bestowed gifts and talents of poetry, the visual arts, and music they had to display to be believed, including the gift of "tongues".

While reading these descriptions I realized that the all-encompassing content of my remembering vision was mostly identical to what these early Christians called "gnosis". The blunder of misunderstanding that had held me back earlier from the macroscopic image was that my remembering vision was solely about my own subjective experiences. It was all about me. Not some universal cosmic consciousness, and yet...

Reading Pagels book was pivotal to my eventually subscribing to an e-mail discussion group on the internet whose main topic of discussion was the Gnostic Gospels and specifically the Gospel of Thomas. There was a formal academic e-mail group for discussing Thomas, and for the great unwashed (the minions as Jack calls us), a more casual, less formal discussion group for the more emotionally inclined shadow side.

I was excited to discover there was an informal discussion group for this topic. It fit right in with my original excuse to spring for an online account that very quickly became the WWW based on internet browsers and all that jazz. I seem to need some logical rationale for technical decisions. The excuse that worked for me was that it gave me a chance to participate in an e-mail discussion group about NLP.

By participating in e-mail discussion groups I've been able to freely discuss via writing the unusual experiences I wanted to consciously banter about, and had previously had a tedious time explaining face-to-face with the everyday people around me at work and play.

Oddly enow, writing my inane, silly thoughts to what I imagined was a receptive, mutually interested person, turned out to be a lot more revealing to me consciously than composing my thoughts for the world-at-large, or to some imagined person I wanted to impress as if they were real.

When I first started writing in the various discussion groups I subscribed to, my constant mental search for just the right term to get my argument across could become excruciatingly painful. I literally suffered to get what I wanted to say across to average people. I slowly realized when I posted my ideas on the internet I wasn't just responding to one person.

A thousand people or more people from all over the world might read every word I wrote within seconds of me clicking on the Send button. It didn't take forever for me to realize that not all of them agreed with my beautiful, thoughtfully considered words, and so-me were absolutely enraged by what they termed "utter stupidity". What a drag, man. I needed more practice.

The criticism I received, like it or not, really helped me to pin down many of the drifting thoughts that constantly pass through my imaginative faculties with less refutable terms than ever. So-me people still accuse me of being stupid. Why would they not? It's not that I'm apathetic to their pronouncements. I got other fish to fry.

It's worrisome enough that the hypnogogic images I ponder themselves could care less whether I intelligently manifest their more interesting attributes in the sensory-perceived dimension or not.

Granted, I'm sort of insulted that they don't know I'm spying on them via contemplation, or that I become so smugly pleased with myself for being there to observe that I so-me-ti-me silently shout to myself, "Oh, what a good boy am I!"
❦