Sunday, April 3, 2011

Brainwaves And Runaways



Another day encumbered by the rich old man's runaway dog. Now, he's offering a $500 reward. My brother made posters with the dog's picture and the notice of the reward in large letters. He spent much of the day distributing them around town and promoting a search for the dog. Not me. I did look around for the dog as I drove about taking care of my own business, but that was as much as I was willing to invest in it. I don't keep pets, so it doesn't mean as much to me.

Learning how to customize the binaural beats software is finally beginning to make sense to me. I watched the YouTube video for the umpteenth time, and realized the guy was saying to double-click on the various points of the time line to be able to move them around. I was able to do that and get some satisfaction with creating a sequence with some delta brainwave patterns.

I didn't create a new program from the beginning. Instead I altered the default program to hear the results through my new noise-canceling headphones. I sat back and closed my eyes to listen to my handiwork, and the next thing I became aware of was that I had drifted off to sleep. A hard sleep, and I had a little headache and other bodily maladies that were unpleasant.

The default program is designed to elicit theta brainwave responses and lasts 74 minutes. The time is related to being able to record it to a CD disc to make it portable. It can be looped over and over again, however, for as long as the program designer (soon to be me) wants it. It has spikes of alpha and beta brainwaves in the default program ever so often to remind the user that they are hooked up to a brainwave machine. These spikes can be placed at any part of the sequence according to where the designer wants.

The temperature is supposed to get up into the low 70's today, but right now, and a little past six o'clock in the morning it's 37° (2.777° C) and my bare feet are pretty cold. I don't have any heat in my house except for a space heater, and so I'm attempting to get used to having cold feet and to toughen them up for walking around barefooted.

This may seem stupid in these days of central heating, but it's the way I grew up as a child. To me it's a lot like the situation I understand is happening with GPS devices. People get dependent on them so much that they forget how to find their way around the world without them. I have hitch-hiked all over North America many times without so much as a map to guide me. I don't want to lose my sense of direction.

Getting lost is something that happens with older people enough as it is. It's one of the signs of senility. I don't want that happening to me artificially when it's probably gonna happen anyway down the road. How far down the road is a mystery, and when it does happen I probably won't be that much aware of it.

Back when I was traveling all over the country as a homeless bum on my "go-ye-therefore" journeys I saw old people occasionally walking around in a daze. Many of them literally looked confused and the stress of not knowing where they were or where they were going was evident in their faces.

A couple of times I tried to help them out, but to do that brought the attention of the police and other authority figures, and that was the last thing I wanted as a bum. It didn't help to help them except to get them something to drink and move on. It was a frightening thing to know that one day, if I should live so long, the sa-me thing would happen to me.

Worse if in that condition I were to run into evil people or a gang of young people looking for fun. It happened in many forms even when I was young and strong. I think maybe that's why I was sent on this mission in the first place. To learn to live with the way things are rather than behind the protected walls of civilization.

I had to learn to depend on my instincts and that's different than following the advice of a more formal mode of education, particularly books and other graven images. Other people's gospel truth is created for dealing with the world they live or lived in, and things change when the unexpected happens. The adage that scared people will hurt you assumes that it doesn't matter why they're afraid. Being understanding of why the other is afraid doesn't protect me from their response to fear.

Some of the times in my life that I encountered death was when nobody was around and I wasn't threatened by humans or any other predatory animals, but when I confronted by natural situations I didn't grok the danger of it. That's what happened when I jumped off that cliff in Yosemite National Park. I inadvertently got caught up in a freak snow storm, and made some bad decisions that should have cost me my life.

Since the time of that incident I've learned that what happened to me is not that unusual in the high Sierra Nevada mountains. It's the elevation that causes people to get caught off-guard. Particularly hikers that aren't prepared to deal with snow storms that happen in the warm summer months. That happens so regularly on Mount Rainier near Seattle, Washington that it's barely news any more.

I've written before that the cliff I jumped off of was 800 feet high, but since getting a few facts from the Google Earth software program I've realized that it was well over 2000 thousand feet from the floor of Yosemite valley with the Park Lodge is. It was higher than Yosemite Falls at over 2400 feet, and that's the tallest waterfalls in the continental United States. I should have gotten dead instead of surviving without a scratch on me.

This event happened when there wasn't a soul around me. There were no witnesses man nor beast. Well, there could have been some animals I wasn't aware of that saw what happened. Some of them would have had to been birds to have seen what happened on my way down to the rocks below.

If I had not have had my remembering vision when I was thirty years old in which I experienced being practically every sort of animal that's ever been on Earth I might not have been able to remember the various events that happened to me in this very body. I certainly wouldn't have remembered that I had jumped off this very high cliff and survived without permanent damage to my body.

I had to go to insane lengths to keep it from disappearing from my conscious memory. I'm grateful that I recognized during the process of it going away in order to do what I had to do to keep it. I had the feeling even at that time that other events similar to this one had happened, and I had promptly forgotten about it. It also allows me to consider that incidents like this has probably happened to a lot of people that forgot that it happened to them also.

The conscious loss of the more-of-me (memory) than others can "see", might be ubiquitous across entire populations. I'm thinking that's why so many people identify with other people's problems they see in the news so profoundly. Something similar must have happened to them, and they don't consciously remember it. Maybe not as drastic as jumping off a high cliff to an almost certain and desirable death, but some lesser incident with an equal chance of getting the same results.