Walking a mile in his sandals

It's really annoying that pseudo-psychic experiences are such BS... that we really have no clue what they are. Very likely some combination of regular intuition, and aspects of the way the brain and the mind work that we don't fully understand (but are not "psychic"), and suggestion from our pop culture.

It's annoying because there certainly ARE wonderful and amazing things going on, but we can't differentiate them from the ordinary or the downright false. What kind of wonderful and amazing is that?

I know it's not just me, because the whole social conversation about psychic-type stuff is like this... Everyone has the borderline experiences, and no one knows what the heck they are, and any time you examine any claims that sound more amazing, they evaporate under the scrutiny. If anyone knows anything supernatural, they're not explaining it very well.

I happened to be reading this article, and I got this shiver down my spine, and hair standing on the back of my neck kind of thing... as if something was telling me "you walked those streets". Or as if I was actually walking them now, back in the past. Looking around at the dust-caked streets and the bright blue air and the mud, at the people walking past with their stringy hair, ragged robes, and strong bare arms; at the mothers, the donkeys, the children. Looking through my own eyes, inside the mind of another, who was myself.

But it's all such nonsense! I hate having what feels like a real experience, which is most likely a simple passing fancy, a combination of the beautiful day just outside, a bit too much mental fireworks firing randomly after I've just finished off some work-related writing, a bit of wishful thinking, a dash of suspicion that my crazy aunt just might be closer to the truth than I am, that all my hard-won insight is just self-deception after all, and that if I opened my eyes, the universe would be on.

I was telling someone in a letter recently that I often experience what is sometimes called "remote viewing" -- pictures (and smells, and once in awhile, sounds) that are completely unbidden and unexpected, out of the complete blue, at random moments, having nothing to do with anything I'm thinking about or doing, of people and places I've never seen or imagined before or after. But I think it's probably nothing.

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In other news, in case anyone reading this has not listened to the album The Road To Here by Little Big Town, or to All The Roadrunning by Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, you've got some things to do, man. God, what great music! What's the line: "O brave new world, that has such people in it"...