How things started with me

[scots_nomad]

WOW!!! Even I can't believe how short that post was

[Dodir_Svile]

WOW!!! Even I can't believe how short that post was

Ahahahahahaha

[VvROMULUSvV]

Hey Scots_nomad, just wanted to let you know i'm still reading. I drop in and out of conversations all the time (life gets in the way) but wanted to reassure you I wasn't just throwing my hands up in the air, so to speak.

Interestingly, the more I read of your accounts, the more I seem to have pushed to the side my skeptical stance. I felt I couldn't absorb it well while I had my guard up. Anyways, the main reason why I've jumped in again is because I'm actually a firm believer of the simulated universe. Here are a few dot points of my thoughts on this.

1. The universe, mass, reality - whatever you choose to call it, is digital at a Quantum level, not analogue. The old Quantum leap comes to mind, where at a certain point there is no longer an inbetween point, merely here or there. That's odd wouldn't you say? ..almost pixelated at the smallest level.

2. Quantum Entanglement. A sure sign of strange 'program coding' behind the facade we see that we shouldn't be seeing.

3. The Observer Effect. Too much to list about how weird that is.

4. The universe is a holographic 3D projection from a 2D plane. That one's enough to render me stupid when I think too much about it!

5. A universe that at times appears to be Deterministic yet at other times, Fatalistic. That's more of a philosophical argument.

6. Carl Sagan (a personal hero of mine) listing the 5 levels a civilisation can progress through (the last one being quite pertinent to your story):

1. A civilisation having the ability to exploit the resources of their own home planet.

2. A civilisation having the ability to exploit the resources of their own solar system.

3. A civilisation having the ability to exploit the resources of their own Galaxy.

4. A civilisation having the ability to exploit the resources of many Galaxies.

5. A civilisation having the ability to exploit the resources of their own Universe, giving them the ability to create another universe of their own.

Interesting... You and I would have much to talk about Scots_nomad. Carry on.

Before I go, I made a reference to Flight of the Navigator. Of course it's a childrens movie, and I only mentioned it as it was a spontaneous memory. I assure you, my sources of entertainment and education have matured since then! I just had to mention this as I dread you rolling your eyes at me over such a vacuous analogy

Edited July 10, 2013 by VvROMULUSvV

[scots_nomad]

OK Dodir, I am back to tackle your next batch of questions from your last post J

First of all, I am back in Scotland just now but hopefully not for too much longer coz it’s driving me nuts (hate the weather here) and I’ve got itchy feet to travel again

Regarding The Matrix, I did see that movie before any one this stuff started but if I remember right I saw the last haft of it at one time then saw the beginning months later and it never really gripped me or made much sense – maybe if I actually watched it from beginning to end it would seem better. So long ago and paid so little attention to it that I can’t really comment on whether it is similar to what I have been describing, but I guess it could be.

Now onto the questions:

Re point one: ‘Why are we needed as some virtual characters in a game? etc’. Good question. I suppose people might wonder whether ‘the game’ is for our benefit or for theirs, but I kind of see it as being mutually beneficial in the long run. Sure we are so far behind them in so many ways just now but with the right guidance and ‘education’ who knows where we might be in a million years or a billion years? There was something in Romulus’s post yesterday which kind of struck a chord with me – it was item five where he was talking about the Carl Sagan’s definitions development of a civilisation where the final stage was where ‘A civilisation having the ability to exploit the resources of their own Universe, giving them the ability to create another universe of their own.’ It struck a chord with me because there was one point during the chat’s when they said something like ‘maybe you will have a universe of your own to look after some day’! Maybe that is the point of it all – maybe we are just embryonic forms of them and we will grow to be just like them someday, or maybe evolve to be a different but equally valued ‘friend’ or ally. That may sound a hell of a long way off now but one thing I learned from them was that what we think of as ‘a long time’ is really the blink of an eye in the overall scheme of things. Maybe some people might think that what I am describing makes us little more than their pets or play things – I guess I could see how people may think like that but I guess all I would say in response to that is that I couldn’t have loved or cared any more for my dog Jodi, and I truly believe that the relationship between me and Jodi was beneficial to both of us

Re: Point two, ‘Can they "turn off" a character if they wanted to and have they done that before?’ – I would guess they could if they wanted to but as I understand it the object of the game is to get as many people through to the next level of the game as possible (providing they meet the necessary criteria) and no one is a lost cause until the fat lady sings. Having said that however they did mention that some people may already have too much ground to make up at this late stage, but just in case such people may decide ‘well if I am screwed already then I may as well just do as I please now’ my friends also noted that ‘any hell can always be made ten times more hellish and any eternity can be made to feel ten times longer, so even the worst of the worst still have something to play for’ or words to that effect.

Re: Point three: ‘Do THEY exist or are they also some kind of virtual characters in a game?’ Well they ‘exist’ in Descartes’s terms (i.e. they think so they ARE!) but I guess you mean are they ‘solid’. I know what you are getting at but it wasn’t a question that I even thought to ask as it didn’t really make much sense in relation to my new understanding of things – i.e. if you discover that EVERYTHING you ever thought of as being real or solid turns out to be no such thing then what is ‘REAL’? Knowledge, intelligence, compassion, love, friendship, humour, logic are all ‘real’ to me whereas mountains crumble and turn to dust, oceans evaporate and disappear, in time our entire universe will either expand and disintegrate and fade away to nothing or it will contract in on itself until it disappears into the infinity of a singularity, so what is ‘real’?

Re: Point four ‘What does the improvement mean? What do you mean by talent? How do we proceed to the next level? Is morality the key, or is it knowledge, or procreation, or changing the world (activism)?’. Basically the fundamental point is ‘taking all things into account is the world a better or a worse place with you in it?’ – Do you do more good than harm? My friends kind of compared the next stage to organising a great big party where it really is a case of the more the merrier with as big a mix of people as possible – anyone who can contribute in any way to make the party even better for everyone is invited but the last thing you want at a party is to have guests who will spoil things for the rest. There is no ‘right type’ of guest but there is definitely a wrong type. It’s not about knowledge or cleverness (You may have noticed the saying in my signature ‘A collection of facts is no more ‘Knowledge’ than a pile of stones is a house! – probably my favourite saying because it is so true), sure you want clever people at your party but you want fun people, funny people, interesting people, nice people – basically anyone with anything to contribute to society…What you don’t want is people who only care for themselves and don’t give a damn how their behaviour affects others. (and re ‘procreation’ – churning out babies isn’t a talent...Although I couldnt do it myself )

Re: point 5: ‘If the reincarnation (or a type of) is true, then how come there's more and more people on Earth? Shouldn't it be the same people over and over again, or even less and less of them as some go "to the next level"?’. I asked that very same thing about the current population level :-p (Although I kind of blurted it out without really thinking, only to realise that there wasn’t necessarily any ‘conflict’ there – for example I realised that there could be 10 billion individuals in the game – 7 billion on the planet now and 3 billion in the wings waiting for their next placement to come up for example). Actually they came up with another explanation. Some of this polulation of 7 billion aren’t actually in the game – they are basically ‘avatars’ created and controlled by ‘them’ to either help us, challenge us, test us, inspire us or whatever. (NB Avatars wasn’t a word they used but it seems appropriate these days – I think the term they used most was ‘empty test-tubes’, which linked to another metaphor they had used when they said that humans start off like a test-tube half filled with talent and it is up to them to learn and develop so as to fill the rest of the test-tube).

Re: point 6 ‘Are there any glitches in "the Matrix" that we can experience? Maybe some of the paranormal stuff?’. Calling them ‘glitches’ makes it sound like they are there by mistake – if that’s what you mean then there are no glitches, because even if there was and a glitch was spotted ‘my friends’ could just rewind things and remove the glitch before it was ever spotted if you know what I mean J But if you read my earlier post about ‘good deeds earning ‘signs’ then I guess you could call some of those glitches ‘signs’. For example, about 10 years before all this started something REALLY weird happened in my house in Glasgow. One of my mates was over on a Saturday and we spent the day playing pool in my pool room then watching TV. He stayed in my spare bedroom that night and on Sunday morning we got up and went in to play more pool. At one point my friend had lit a cigarette so he went to place it in an ashtray so he could play a shot but then he noticed that the ashtray (which was on my window sill) was full to the brim with water (and cigarette butts and ash from the previous night). He called out for me to go have a look and explain what had happened but I didn’t have a clue – there hadn’t been any leaks from the window or ceiling (it hadn’t rained outside anyway) the water was ONLY in the ashtray with nothing ‘spilled or dripped anywhere around it. I was completely baffled but wanted to think about it more so I told him to leave everything exactly where it was and use one of the other ashtrays scattered around the place (me and all my friends are quite heavy smokers). He went to use the other ashtray on the window sill but it was full of water too…AS WERE THE OTHER FIVE ASHTRAYS IN THE ROOM! (and they were literally all over the place – one on top of a shelf about 6 feet in the air, two which were on the floor underneath small sofas, and a couple on a set of shelves at the other side of the room. Every single ashtray was filled to the brim to that point that one more drop of water would have led to it spilling over and yet nothing had spilled out from any of them. The ONLY possible logical explanation I could come up with (to myself) was that my mate must have done it as some kind of weird joke (and apparently he was thinking the same thing about me!) but I didn’t really believe he had partly because of his reaction but mostly because it had been done so precisely I didn’t think he could or would have taken the time and effort to fill them with such precision without spilling any water anywhere else.

Anyway, I really wanted more time to think about everything to see if I could explain it so I brought some more ashtrays from another room and left all the others exactly as they were. We played pool for a few hours and then went into the sitting room to watch TV for a while. A short time later another mate came over. I took him into the pool room to show him the ashtrays and see if he could come up with any possible explanations but when we got there I found that the water was all gone!!!! The cigarette butts and ash in the ashtray were still damp so you could see that there had been water in the ashtrays before but the water itself had vanished! This time I knew my mate had nothing to do with it because we had both been watching TV together since we left the pool room, and tto make it weirder still the ash that had been floating on the water had left a ‘tide mark’ at its highest level and those tide marks were all intact (i.e. if you had tipped the ashtray to empty the water it would have washed away part of the tide mark). I was completely stumped by that and insisted that the ashtrays be left exactly where they were so I could think about it later. The next morning I got up for work but before I left the house I decided to have one last look at the damp ashtrays to see if I could come up with any new theories…AND THEY WERE ALL FULL OF WATER AGAIN!!! (but this time I had been the only person in the house when it happened!)…I came home from work that evening and the ashtrays were empty (apart from damp ash and cigarette butts)! I left the ashtrays there for days but nothing else happened and I never did come up with any possible explanations for it so during my chats with my friends I asked if they had anything to do with it:

‘Of course it was us! Who else do you think it could have been?’

‘But WHY??? What was the point in that?’

‘Just to keep your mind open! To stop you from ever thinking that you understood ‘everything’ already!’

So yeah Dodir – glitches like that can happen and can appear ‘paranormal’ but they don’t happen by accident.

Re: point seven: ‘Is everything happening to any of us already written in "the Matrix"? For example, if we're only virtual, is cancer written in "the Matrix"?’

That’s really two very different points and its easier to answer the cancer bit first – It’s kind of like the last post I made last night where I said (in response to MySummerJob’s question) that we learn from our limitations – we also learn by overcoming the difficulties we face (such as cancer etc etc etc). People seem to imagine paradise as some kind of ‘perfect place’ but really would you want to live in some perfect place where you never had any problems and where food just appeared in your hand whenever you were hungry? Anything you actually did in such a place would effectively be damaging it and making it worse so would that feel good? Maybe in that kind of paradise any damage you caused would automatically be regenerated instantly, but where would you ever find satisfaction? To me a true paradise would be somewhere that was ‘good enough for now’ and getting better every day (partly by my efforts). We hate cancer because it kills people we love, but in ‘the game’ no-one ever really dies, and if anything my friends see a ‘passing away’ as a good thing for us as it gives them a chance to find a more suitable place for us back in the game to help us grow more and more complete.

Re: ‘Is everything happening to any of us already written in "the Matrix’. Yeah life would seem pretty pointless if everything was already ‘pre-determined’ but it isn’t like that. It’s maybe hard to explain this quickly but my friends already know what is ‘probably going to happen’ because they have seen it all before, however to them that is a ‘worst case’ scenario. Basically everything is written but nothing is ‘cast in stone’ and all things are subject to revision where appropriate so if someone comes up with some new idea or does something new that will make things better in the long run then they will run with that future instead. It’s hard to explain this but maybe this wee bit of one of our chats might help (or maybe it wont ):

There was one point in the conversation where we were discussing quantum theory (in the most basic layman’s terms) and they asked me if I believed in the parallel universe/multi-universe theory (which basically says that every decision that you, or anyone else, ever makes triggers a whole parallel or alternative universe where the alternative future(s) is played out in the way things would have happened if you had made a different choice). I said I was familiar with the theory in basic terms and that I understood that it could explain actual observations that couldn’t be explain by Einstein’s theory of relativity but that I couldn’t really say whether I believed it or not as it didn’t really seem to matter in real human terms if we were always going to be completely unaware of any of those alternative universes. My friends told me that I didn’t really have to worry too much about it, because although it was basically right in a way, it was also completely wrong in a way. When I asked them to explain what they meant by that they explained something along these lines:

“Ninety nine point nine percent of the decisions that people make every day are totally irrelevant – sure they will trigger a parallel universe for a while, but if they aren’t going to make anything better in the long run then those parallel universes just fade away after a while ‘like ripples on a pond’. The same sort of thing happens both individually and globally – the fact is that nothing that ninety nine point nine percent of your people will ever do would ever have any effect on the overall scheme of things in global terms, but even for the zero point one percent of people of people whose decisions can make a difference to the overall picture, ninety nine point nine percent of the decision that even they make will have no real long term effects, so they too will just fade away like ripples on a pond as well.”

They told me that I was in that zero point one percent of people whose decisions could make a difference and then they said something like,

“In the future there are certain things that we need you to do, there are certain things that you have to collect, there are certain places you need to be at a particular time and there are certain people that you will have to meet, but the rest of what you do will not really matter, so you may as well do what you want and have as good a time as you can while we get everything else into the right places”.

Rather than being a comfort to me however that actually made me panic a bit as it seemed almost certain to me that I would miss something which – based on what they had just said – could have very serious implications.

“What have I got to collect?”

“Lots of things, but don’t worry about that for now, you’ll come across them in the future.”

“But what if I don’t realise that it’s something I was supposed to collect?”

“Don’t worry about it Wee Man, we’ve got ways of giving you a hint when necessary, but even if you don’t collect it the first time we will make sure it comes your way again, and again if necessary, and the same thing goes for all the other stuff. We’ll make sure that you don’t miss anything by accident so let’s now worry too much about it now.”

Well I haven’t gotten through all your questions yet but I guess this post is long enough already so I’ll leave it there and finish the rest of your questions another time.

[MySummerJob]

This might be a dumb question, but have they ever hinted at the possibility of alien life?

“Ninety nine point nine percent of the decisions that people make every day are totally irrelevant – sure they will trigger a parallel universe for a while, but if they aren’t going to make anything better in the long run then those parallel universes just fade away after a while ‘like ripples on a pond’. The same sort of thing happens both individually and globally – the fact is that nothing that ninety nine point nine percent of your people will ever do would ever have any effect on the overall scheme of things in global terms, but even for the zero point one percent of people of people whose decisions can make a difference to the overall picture, ninety nine point nine percent of the decision that even they make will have no real long term effects, so they too will just fade away like ripples on a pond as well.”

They told me that I was in that zero point one percent of people whose decisions could make a difference and then they said something like,

“In the future there are certain things that we need you to do, there are certain things that you have to collect, there are certain places you need to be at a particular time and there are certain people that you will have to meet, but the rest of what you do will not really matter, so you may as well do what you want and have as good a time as you can while we get everything else into the right places”.

I don't know... Wouldn't every action (no matter how small) cause some reaction that will lead to a huge reaction?

I mean our actions do have to effect everyone (just not ourselves). I mean deciding to go to school (when you go, and what type), and what job you get into. The people you meet, and the people you interact with change how the world see you, or how you effect the world.

I've been an advocate for the Butterfly Effect (or something like it) since High School because "it just makes sense to me". Although, I am open to being wrong (I usually am wrong XD).

[scots_nomad]

OK I am back to finish off the rest of the questions from Dodir’s post but before I do that I want to clear up a couple of things from yesterday. Firstly, in one question you asked ‘if the reincarnation thing is true then how come there are more people on the planet now than ever before, surely it should be less if some of them have already moved on to the next stage?’ – NO ONE has gone to the next stage yet! It is something that will happen to everyone at the same time when this stage of the game ends (and it will happen to everyone for even those who don’t make the cut will still go on to a new stage of the game…although apparently they will wish that the game had ended completely!). I guess I could compare it so what Christians call ‘The Rapture’, however at the time of the chats I had no idea what ‘the rapture’ was as I went to a catholic school and they never mention the book of The Revelations of Saint John much (possibly because it refers to the catholic church as ‘the prostitute of Rome’…Oh and while on the subject of Revelations, apparently no one ever mentioned an ‘Antichrist’ to John…The original word should have been translated as ‘The Antichurch’ but it has since been deliberately mistranslated because the powers in charge felt that was safer/better for them!).

The other point I wanted to clarify was in response to your question about whether anyone had been ‘killed off’ already. Yesterday I said that I wasn’t sure but that I didn’t think they had as it didn’t seem to fit with the rules as I understood them however just after I sent my post I remembered that in at one point in my chats my friends had told me that everyone who has ever lived was alive today – At the time they said that I automatically assumed that they meant that everyone who has ever been was alive and on the Earth at the moment but I now understand that even people ‘in the waiting area’ are still alive as far as my friends are concerned.

Actually the bit of the chat that followed on from that (when they told me that everyone who had ever lived was alive today) would also be a good way of answering your question about what do you need to do to be considered suitable to be contacted ‘by them’. As I mentioned yesterday my first reaction when they said that was to challenge how that was arithmetically possible – At first I assumed that we sould have far more people on the planet unless they were doubling people up and putting two into one body, but then I remembered hearing that there are more people on the planet now than have ever existed in total before which implied that some of the ‘bodies’ on the planet must be ‘empty’ (or avatars as I described them yesterday. I’ll pick up the conversation from there (Even if I edit it down it will still be quite a long but it does answer a lot):

“Don’t worry about the arithmetic for now, and none of what you just said is stupid because the truth is that we can and do do both of those things – sometimes we do have more than one person sharing a test-tube for a while either because they have the same type of lessons to learn or because they all have very different lessons to learn and so they can use their combined talents to help them all grow together and there are a whole variety of reasons why we sometimes put ‘empty test-tubes’ down there but we will get to all of that soon if you just accept that everyone who has ever lived is alive at this very moment. OK?”

“OK…So who is the Hitler?”

“Why ask about him specifically?”

“I don’t know, the question just sprang to my mind straight away – Maybe so we could all keep an eye on the b*****d and make sure he doesn’t get up to all that **** again!.”

“So who else could you have asked about?”

“Well I suppose you might have expected me to want to know who/where my Dad is now or maybe who Lester (a close friend who had died a couple of months earlier) is but really I’m not interested in that because I know who they were and that is what matters to me and I guess now they are both just young kids somewhere so let’s just let them get on with their lives in peace.”

“Who else might other people have expected you to ask about?”

“Mmm I guess a lot of people’s first question might have been ‘Who’s the Jesus?’ or ‘Who’s the Muhammad?’ but I certainly don’t wanna know any of that stuff – If those people are back here then fair enough but just imagine the pressure someone would feel under if you suddenly told them that they were the reincarnation of Christ or Muhammad?”

“Who else might some other people have asked about?”

“Mmmm…Well actually most of my friends here in Vietnam are Buddhist but I’m ashamed to admit that I know so little about Buddhism that I am not even sure if Buddhists think of Buddha as being a ‘God-thing’ like Jehovah or Yahweh or Allah or whoever or whether they think of him as being a ‘special human’ like Jesus or Muhammad or maybe even just a good human like Gandhi or something so I don’t know whether Buddhists would want to know who Buddha is now…Or do they actually believe that the Dali Lama is the reincarnation of him?...I mean I know that each time the Dali Lama dies they seek out a new born baby who they believe is a reincarnation of the previous one but I’m not sure if that is supposed to stretch all the way back to Buddha…Like I said before I really know nothing much about Buddhism.”

“It’s OK we’ll get to all that stuff but the first thing that we really want to tell you here before we go into ‘all that’ is that you’re not the Hitler!”

I laughed!!!

“Why did you say that?”

”Why did you laugh when we did?”

I laughed again!

”OK! Got me!...I laughed coz I was actually ‘braced’ for you telling me something like that!....Or actually ‘telling me THAT!’, coz what could be ‘something like that’ Big Yin?....”

OLLEZ!!!

”….But I was kinda bracing myself for it ‘just in case’….And don’t ask me why specifically but it just seemed to be one ‘bush that you could possibly have been beating around’ so to speak!...So! Thanks for the good news Big Yin but don’t dare tell me who ‘the Hitler’ actually is at this moment - Not unless there is a good reason for it because I just blurted out that question without really thinking about it before but if Hitler is out there just now he might just be some young kid going through school or something and it would be unfair to put that kind of burden on anyone!”

OLLAH!!!!

”Don’t worry Wee man, coz we’re not gonna hit you with that either….But tell us Wee Man….Do you really think that Hitler was clever enough to have become clever enough to be you in so short a time if you understand what we mean?”

”Phhhewwww….How the **** do I know Big Yin?.....There are loads of different types of ‘clever’ Big Yin, and Hitler wasn’t stupid!!!....He may have been a crazy ****, and you can take that ‘maybe’ right out of there right away coz he WAS a crazy **** Big Yin….But he wasn’t a stupid one!...”

OLLEZ!!!!

”…You don’t get from a working class family in a wee town in Austria to being ****ing Fuehrer of Germany AND ‘Greater Germany’ for a while by being stupid Big Yin!!!....Maybe you need to be stupid a bit to want to but you’ll never actually get there unless there is ‘something clever’ about you!”

OLLAH!!!

”Well thank you Wee Man, coz that’s just saved us the five minutes that we had set aside to convince you that Hitler was actually quite a clever guy to start with, but seeing as you’ve already reached that conclusion for yourself we can just move on already…..Coz ‘You’re right!’ he was a right clever **** as a wee boy….A clever wee boy with loads of potential and he could even have been you one day if he had gone the right way about things.”

”ME???....He could have been me???”

”Oops! Sorry Wee Man!...Not ‘YOU’ as such, but at one point in his life Hitler was actually clever enough in enough ways to have put enough of the jigsaw together to have become the one sitting in your position right now listening to all of this stuff…..Except of course, if he was here then we and him wouldn’t have been talking about any of this stuff, now would we?”

“I guess not…So what happened then?...Why did he go off the tracks so much?”

”Greed Wee Man, nothing but greed!...There’s more than one ‘clever’ and there’s more than one greed and that greedy wee **** had the biggest greed for power that your world has ever seen before his time became ‘up’ but even at the beginning, or right near the beginning of that life, that greed for power was becoming a monster Wee Man!”

”Go on!”

”At the beginning we tried to turn him around and turn that greed-monster away and we tried ****ing hard Wee Man, coz we always hate seeing that much potential going to waste but he just wasn’t having it Wee Man!”

”OK! So what?”

”So now is the time when it would help if you can try to imagine us as ‘the fountain of all human knowledge’ for a minute…Do you think you can do that?”

”Aye!!!...I suppose I can ‘metaphor-ise that’ in my head and in my mind without too much hassle – I’ve seen the way you put good ideas into my head and I guess you do the same thing with everyone else.”

”Good….So now can you picture us as THREE fountains of knowledge?”

”EH???”

”Think of it like this Wee Man!....Everybody always comes to us asking ‘What should I do?’, or ‘What can I do?’, or some variation or other on that theme, OK?....And when we say that they come to us with those questions, we mean that even if they don’t actually know that we’re here and they think they are just asking the question to themselves…Coz we’re always on the lookout for inquisitive humans asking themselves questions that we can help answer for them, so sometimes…And in fact ‘often’!....And in fact ‘Always!’,….We will answer those questions that the human asks and they will hear the answer, but they never know that it comes from us….That’s how we usually pass on our knowledge or guidance or whatever to your people…. Whether they actually believe in us or not…OK?”

”OK!...I’m ‘with the theory’, at least….Or ‘with the logic’, or whatever”

OLLAH!!!

”OK!...So!...That ‘information exchange’ is actually a bit of a two way thing….Or actually we mean, it is a thing that is used in two ways by us….If we have something really clever that we feel it is time for your people to know, then we will look around for the cleverest people around on the Earth at that time….In the right kinda place on the Earth at the time too coz as often as not it is where the person is rather than who the person is that helps us to decide which particular human we will pass on the next ‘nugget to…OK?”

”OK!...I think that I follow that, but what kinda stuff are you talking about here?”

OLLEZ!!!

”EXACTLY WEE MAN!!!”

”Eh???”

”Sorry Wee Man, that didn’t make much sense there, did it?...But the thing is that we are actually talking about EVERYTHING here…Everything from how to make fire to how to crack an egg to how to make and change a light bulb!...EVERYTHING!!!...”

”Oh!”

”If we happened to have something really, really big and really, really clever, then we have to take a long time and wait for just the right kinda human to come along….Not just one that just happens to be in the right place at the right time, and not just someone who won’t take advantage of it, but in those kinda cases we need to find a special kinda human that is capable of getting their head around the stuff that we want to show them, so whenever we have stuff like that to deliver to your people then we need to look around for special humans like Leonardo or like you or whatever, so you can just imagine how difficult it can be to find someone like that ‘just when you need one’!”

”Oh hey wait a minute here!!!”

”Do you object to the comparison?”

”Phhhewww…I can’t say I ‘object’, coz it’s actually a hell of a compliment I suppose but it just seems a bit much, that’s all!...I don’t need that Big Yin!....Maybe it’s meant as flattery, but honestly Big Yin, I don’t need ‘crap like that’ on my back!”

”It’s not flattery Wee Man!”

”Whatever! Can we move on?”

”OK!...But the point we are making here is that there are things that your people just get entitled to get to know ‘from time to time’ just for still being around, so we like to spread that kinda stuff around a bit in as imaginative a way as we can, but really, when it gets right down to it….If you’re people need a light bulb then you’re gonna get one, and we never usually have any hassle in finding someone in any civilisation that we can pass on ‘useful but profitable’ wee inventions like that….OK?....Let’s just say for now that when it comes to ‘dishing out’ wee secrets like that, there are always enough clever-enough, convenient-enough, and useful-enough candidates around to pass wee nuggets like that to any civilisation just about as soon as it is getting ready to have a need for them, OK?”

”OK!...I suppose!”

”But there is some kinda special stuff that not every civilisation ‘always gets automatically’….’You’ve got to make your own luck’ as they say in some parts of your planet!....You’ve gotta have someone around who deserves to know the secret or secrets, both in terms of being capable of understanding the answer AND in terms of just ****ing deserving it!...Do you get what we mean Wee Yin?”

”Maybe!!!...But are you talking about ‘Leonardo stuff’ or ‘Christ or Muhammad Stuff’?”

THE PLACE WENT BANANAS!!!!

”EXACTLY WEE MAN!!!!”

“Eh???”

”Oops!!! Sorry! We did it again!!!....But when you always keep asking ‘just the perfect question’ all the time, we keep thinking that that is because you must already know the answer….PROBABLY!....Do you get it?”

”Maybe I would if you answered my question!”

”Well think of it this way Wee Man….There wouldn’t have been much point in us showing a helicopter to Christ or to Muhammad, now would there?”

”I suppose not Big Yin!”

”Now we cannae actually say the same thing in the other direction here though, coz Leonardo was a lot like you in a lot of ways Wee Man, and he wanted to know about EVERYTHING, so maybe we could have passed on some of ‘the Jesus Stuff’ or ‘The Muhammad Stuff’ to Leonardo if we hadn’t already done so, but then again, you’re people would never have been ready to see helicopters ever if Jesus and Muhammad didn’t do their stuff with their stuff long before Leonardo got so inquisitive, but now we are getting back into complete speculation for you, so let’s just stick with the logic for now, shall we?”

”Sounds good to me!”

”So this IS sounding logical to you so far then?”

”Go on!....That’s all I’m saying for now!”

OLLAH!!!

“…It’s ‘horses for course’ when it comes to the real special stuff Wee Man…If we want to show someone a helicopter then we need to find someone who could imagine what a helicopter could do AND imagine HOW it could do it….But let’s not get bogged down with helicopters Wee Yin, coz you’re people would have got helicopters ‘no matter what’, coz they are really just in there with the light bulbs and stuff….But not many civilisations get to see helicopters as early as yours did Wee Man, coz that Leonardo really was a special wee guy, so we gave him the helicopters WAY before your people could possibly use them, but we gave him a lot of other stuff too Wee Yin….Special stuff…..Stuff that no civilisation is ‘entitled to get’, but only actually ever receives IF and WHEN one of its ‘civilians’ actually does something to merit such gifts from us….Can you follow all that?”

”I can follow the logic, but I don’t have a clue what you’re actually talking about!”

”That doesn’t matter coz it’s only the logic that counts here.”

”OK then…So we’re OK then, coz I do follow that!...I think!”

OLLAH!!!

”….So let’s just say that both Jesus and Muhammad were other real special humans that merited a special gift from us…..Or maybe they were just special humans that were in the right place just when we desperately needed to find someone among your people who we could talk to in order to stop your people from going right off the rails or from destroying a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that your people were gonna need if they ever reached the latter stages of the game….OK?”

”Mmmmmm!...I think so!”

”So let’s just say that when ‘crises times’ like that come, then we won’t necessarily look for ‘the fullest’ test tube around…Coz maybe it’s the cleanliness of the test-tube rather than the depth of fluid in it that proves to be the key factor at decision times like that for us….Can you follow that bit a bit?”

”Aye!...But maybe just ‘a bit’, coz I am still not seeing where we are going with this, and where it fits in with the Hitler and the Buddha bits….Although I suppose that you could be telling me that Buddha was another ‘spotless-test-tube-job’, kinda thing!”

”Naw!...Stop guessing and just keep listening for a while, coz we are about to tidy up the Hitler bit now….Coz when he was a wee boy he had tons and tons of potential….Loads of ‘test-tube fluid’ to splash around with, and like all clever wee boys he was curious too, and so he always wanted to find ways to do new things or to find ways to do old things better, but unlike yourself Wee Man, he almost always asked the wrong kinda questions whenever he came to us or whoever looking for answer to his ‘What should I do?’ questions!”

”Go on!”

”Well, remember we asked you to picture us as three separate fountains of knowledge?....Well that is because there are three basic questions that your people always ask us….Or actually, the question itself is usually the same ‘What should I do next?’, but there are three basic kind of answers that you’re people are always actually listening out for.”

”What ones?...Oops! Sorry! Maybe if I shut my mouth here I’ll find out soon enough!”

OLLEZ!!!

”You’ll find out right now Wee Man, coz when your people ask that question they are really looking for the answer to one of these three questions: ‘What’s the best thing I can do for me?’ or ‘What’s the best thing I can do for my people?’, or the real clever and nice ones usually ask ‘What’s the best thing I can do for me that won’t cause any harm to my people?’…So do you see the difference there Wee Man?”

”Aye!...Obviously!”

”But is it really that obvious to you?”

”Aye!...It is actually!...I really didn’t have a clue what you were talking about with the ‘three questions in one stuff’, but I get it now…Or at least, I get that bit….I think!”

OLLAH!!!

“So here’s how it works Wee Man….In the beginning, when someone asks ‘What should I do?’, we will give them an answer from each of those fountains and we will see which fountain the human chooses to drink from…Do you follow?...Obviously you do!...But now here is a wee extra thing, coz we don’t always hand out the best answers straight away!”

”Why not?”

”Why should we”

”Why shouldn’t you?...If you want us to get better, that is!”

”But how are you gonna get better if someone just hands you the right answer all the time? How are you ever gonna learn anything for yourself if all you’ve gotta do is ask, and ‘it shall be given’ kinda thing?”

”OK! OK!....Point taken!”

OLLEZ!!!

“OK then!...So we’ll give them a range of types of answers to choose from at first but if they are clever enough NOT TO just run off and do the first ****ing thing that comes into their heads then we will give them cleverer and cleverer answers until the answers just get too clever or too subtle for the human in question to really understand…..Do you remember that bit Wee Man?”

”Do I ‘remember it’, or do I get it?”

”What’s not to get Wee Man?”

”OK!...So I guess you are asking me if I remember that bit from that crazy day in my kitchen when I suddenly got hit by an avalanche of good ideas I suppose!”

(I have edited a big bit of the chat out here as we were talking about something else that I haven’t mentioned in this forum yet)…..

“….But anyway!!!...What the **** has any of that got to do with Hitler?”

”**** all Wee Man!...Absolutely **** all!...We’re just making sure that we’ve given you all the answers that we owe to you and we just wanted to make sure that you had got that one enough for now!”

”OK then!...More than enough for now Big Yin!...And the next time!....Please gimme some kinda warning before you do something like that to me?....Even if you only shout ‘Grab your balls’, or shield your eyes, or even ‘Brace yourself Sheila!’, or something, coz I really don’t want anything like THAT creeping up on me ‘all unawares’ again!...OK?”

”Nae bother Sheila!”

”Aye! **** you too! So what about Hitler then, should we be keeping an eye on anyone?”

“You don’t need to worry about Hitler making a comeback coz the fact is that he isn’t around anymore.”

“Eh? But you said that everyone who has ever lived is alive just now…Oh wait! Was Hitler just an empty test-tube that you sent here to stir up some **** for some twisted reason?”

“You’re guessing again Wee Man!”

“I’m just trying to make sense of what you’re saying coz you just seemed to contradict yourself but I guess I should just shut up and listen for a while so go on.”

“So here’s the thing with ‘The Hitler Thing’ Wee Man, you see Hitler wasn’t just an empty test-tube that we created and then ‘filled full of ****e’ just to teach you lot a lesson….Although that’s not a bad guess, coz it is theoretically possible that we would do such a thing….Coz we DO create empty test-tubes from time to time….Just to give us something to play in some times, and sometimes just to give us a ‘right good vantage point’ for something or other, or sometimes to help teach some human or other a lesson, either for better or worse…Coz sometimes we just create humans in order for them to be shot or murdered by another human, or sometimes for reasons that we really cannae go into now, sometimes a family needs to lose a child during its childhood when maybe there’s no human around that could actually use any more ‘good childhood lessons’ at the time….But we’re not saying that every lost childhood is ‘only just us’ so to speak, coz sometimes the most important lessons in life are learned in the earliest years of life, so sometimes if you don’t pick a lesson like that up ‘first, second or third’ time around, then sometimes you get a quick chance to learn that wee lesson again….”

PAUSE

”…But anyway Wee Man, we’re getting into complicated territory here that we don’t necessarily have to, coz all we’re trying to tell you here is that we do use the old ‘empty test-tube trick’ quite a bit…And it not always for ‘big divine intervention stuff’, or anything that obvious coz usually we like to keep our hands off everything for as long as we can and we always prefer to use ‘human hands’ to do all of the real big stuff on your planet….Both ‘the ugly’ and ‘the good’…But we can ‘create our own humans’ for special tasks if we really have to, and that’s all you need to know about that bit for now, coz as far as The Hitler is concerned he wasn’t one of them ‘empty test-tubes’ even though he could well have been.”

”Eh?”

”Well…It seems from our findings that ‘having a Hitler’ is just like ‘having a Great war’…..Every world seems to need one at some point in time just to give enough of the rest of each world’s people a good enough example of how bad things can get!....So!...I guess that if there wasn’t a ‘home-made Hitler or the like’ on your planet, then I suppose that we would have had to have thought about whether we should create one ourselves but it has never actually come down to that Wee Man coz we can always find a greedy enough, clever enough, **** enough **** around on any planet to make him or her into a Hitler thing when we have to…OK?”

”Mmmmm!...I think so!...I think I’m still following you!”

”OK!...So!...Hitler started out as a wee boy with a lot of potential!...A lot of potential for himself, and a lot of potential for the good of his people if he had actually ever bothered to bother about stuff like that - which he pretty soon didn’t!...OK?”

”OK!... I think!”

”OK!....So!...If you keep coming to us and asking us ‘What should I do now?’, we know after all of this time that you are not gonna chose to do something that would really **** someone else up, so we don’t even bother wasting either your time or ours running you through that old mill again….And if you or someone like you asks us ‘What should I do next?’ then we know that we can give you a much cleverer answer than we could give most other people, so we don’t ‘start you off with the two times table’ anymore!...OK?”

“OK!”

”Maybe we don’t give you the very best answer ‘first time all the time’, but maybe we can start doing more of that kinda thing now as long as you feel that you can trust yourself to keep yourself ‘in check’ when necessary….Or maybe we should still stick in the odd ‘stupid answer’, just to keep you on your toes kinda thing…What do you think Wee Man?”

”Why change a winning team Big Yin?....I know where I stand when I’m thinking like this so why change anything that I’m used to and comfortable with….Although I don’t want that to sound like I am asking to be ****ed around with stupid answers all the time!....Just keep it ‘real’ Big Yin!...Don’t change anything too much coz this is gonna be hard enough to get my head round as it is!”

OLLEZ!!!

”Another perfect answer Wee Man!...we’re right ****ing proud of you up here!...But anyway!...To get back to The Hitler fella!....That **** always knew exactly what he meant with his questions….’What’s best for me?’ so it got to the point that he just never bothered to visit any of the two other fountains at all…..And from then on he just went straight to the ‘Me!, Me!, Me!’ fountain before he even bothered to think about what question to ask….Are you OK with that bit so far Wee Man?”

”Phhhewww….Aye!!!...But I take it that we ARE talking metaphorically here!...You’re not telling me that Hitler actually saw fountains, are you?....You’re just telling me that he only ever really listened to one of the three wee voices in his head that could have fed him the answers!”

OLLAH!!!

”EXACTLY Wee Man!!!....Except, like we said,….He wasn’t always like that, and he actually did chose to do some good things as a wee boy but not many, and not for long!...And his greed and his thirst for power soon got to the point where we decided that HE was the one to make into the Hitler-character for this planet, so instead of just filling him with knowledge and answers from our fountain, we actually just started to fill him up with ‘any and all’ of the ****e that we had lying around up here at the time….All of the dregs of everybody else’s filthy test-tubes….We sent them all in that ****s direction, and we ****ing had to Wee Yin coz he may have started out with ‘most of a test-tube full’ when he went back that last time but he was already right down to ‘the dregs of himself’ before we started to refill him with all of the dregs of humanity that were at our disposal at the time….So can you follow all that in a way?”

”Aye!...I suppose I can follow all that in a way.”

”And do you now understand why it’s not possible for us to give you a straight and direct answer to your ‘Who’s the Hitler’ question now?...Coz ‘The Hiltler’ is out there Wee Man….All of him is out there somewhere but you won’t find the kinda Hitler that you might have been looking for coz that rotten **** has been ‘spread far and wide’, so to speak…But we hope that that kinda answers your question Wee Man….Even if you didn’t really want a direct answer to it!”

OLLEZ!!!

”Yeah!!! That ‘serves the purpose’ Big Yin!...Yer right….If ‘The Hitler’ WAS out there somewhere, I wouldn’t really want to know who it is….But then again would I have to know just to keep an eye on the ****?....And why should that be my ****ing job anyway?....I’m just glad it wasn’t me! That’s all I’m saying here….And thank **** I didn’t have to point at anybody out there and say ‘It was him!’….Coz that would probably be about the most horrible thing you could say about any ****er on our planet as far as I am concerned…And what if the **** has turned over a whole new leaf this time or learned from all his wrongs or whatever?.....Or does he deserve a good ‘ball kicking anyway’, for what he did last time he was here?....And that is getting onto territory that is way too complicated for me Big Yin….So I’m just glad it wasn’t me!...that’s all I’m saying”

OLLAH!!!

”Naw!...It most definitely wasn’t you Wee Man!...But do you want to ask about anybody else before we move on?”

”No ****ing way!!!”

”Are you sure about that?”

”Yes-****ing-way!!!...Boom-boom!!!!....Coz I take it that you are expecting me to ask ‘Who is the Christ’, or ‘Who is the Muhammad’, or maybe even ‘Who is the Leonardo’….But I don’t wanna know Big Man coz either of them would be too much of a burden to put onto anybody down here now Big Yin so let’s just let sleeping dogs lie as far as the rest of all that is concerned!”

OLLAH!!!

”Perfect again Wee Man!....Except in one tiny detail!”

”What’s that?”

”You said that you thought we were expecting you to ask something like that and maybe that would seem like the logical kinda things to ask to most people but we KNEW that you wouldn’t be that stupid Wee Man coz we knew that you would be able to see beyond your short term curiosity before asking BIG questions like that, but we were thinking that there were maybe some other or others that you might want to know about, so that was why we asked you that question again.”

”Others?...Oh!!!...Ma Dad you mean?.....Or maybe you even mean Big Lester!.....But no!!!....Just let sleeping dogs lie with them too Big Yin….If they’re not the person or people I remember them as then they’re not the person or people I remember so what’s the point in asking where they are now?.....Don’t get me wrong here, coz I know that they must be nice people whoever they are and wherever they are so maybe it would be a pleasure to bump into real nice people like that at some point in the future again….But I’m not going out there looking for them and I didn’t even think that I would want to recognise my Da in someone else who wasn’t my Da….But really!...I’ve got no ****ing idea what something like that would be like, so how the **** do I know?....”

OLLEZ!!!

”…But let’s just let sleeping dogs lie on all of those fronts for now Big Yin….Coz I have no idea what I could do with information like that if you did give it to me coz what use would it really do anyone?....So you can tell me a bit about Buddha if you want to, but I don’t really want to know any more about who used to be who, and all that stuff!”

THE PLACE WENT BANANAS AGAIN!!!!

“OK Wee Man!...Now, to answer your Buddha question, and to finish this last wee bit off without courting any further controversy in a world that just doesn’t need any more controversy can we just tell you that Buddha always knew exactly which fountain to drink from and he was never once tempted to try drinking from any of the other fountains….Not even just to see what they were like….So can we just answer your question by telling you that much and just leaving it at that for now Wee Man?”

”Well, that depends!....Do you really mean ‘always’, and do you really mean ‘knew’ when you say that he always knew which fountain to drink from?”

”Look Wee Man!!!...Can we not just leave it at that, just like we asked?”

”Oh!...OK then!...I suppose it answers my question a bit even though it doesn’t really mean all that much to me!....But why don’t you want me to ask about that?...Is there some kind of big controversy going on within Buddhism too?.....Well I know that there is a bit of a dispute going on between the Dali Lama and the Chinese and the ‘Penshun Lama’, or whatever the other Lama’s name is but I’m not getting into that now….But is there some dispute even within Buddhism as to whether Buddha was a God or a man?....Is that what your telling me here?”

”We’re just telling you that the last thing that we need down there right now Wee Man is more religious controversy, so can we not just leave it where we left it and move on to something else?”

[MisterCee]

Hi scots_nomad, I've enjoyed your story and have read through the thread tonight. Especially enjoyed the Billy Connolly (a comedic genius) references. I'm sure you've asked your friends 'please tell me Billy Connolly isn't an empty test tube!' Anyway, your experiences remind me of the story of a family in "The Project At Earth." Similar in how their friends 'introduced' themselves and communicated. Also, the life experiences and reincarnation themes sound similar to the movie "Cloud Atlas" - produced and directed by the team that did the "Matrix" trilogy. The same actors portray different characters through a historical timeline. Some are good, some are evil, some are male, some are female. I remember bumping into a similar theme regarding the Chani Project on another forum board about revealing knowledge and answering some of our questions.

I think overall, as 'homo sapiens' we are getting ever closer to figuring out this 'game' or 'puzzle' that is life. Some of the same themes seem to keep reoccurring with slight variations. I've seen a few of the series 'Ancient Aliens' which puts a spin on historical, religious and academic historic beliefs in light of contact from extraterrestrials or outside influences. (Those episodes led me down a separate path where I'm reading a book from one of the contributors - David Icke) Time is nothing more than a construct of man, etc...

Anyway, the only questions I can think of at the moment are: 1) Do you happen to recall whether you were questioning from the appropriate fountain the correct question at the time of your first (recalled) contact with your friends? 2) Are serial killers, rapists, child abusers and their victims 'empty test tubes' or are the baddies the ones that are not worth bothering about? 3) Not to jump forward too far/too many chapters, has the theme of 'universal consciousness' been discussed or discredited?

Thanks for sharing your experiences!

[scots_nomad]

OK back again to answer the last question Dodir had asked i.e. (if we are never reincarnated as animals then) What are animals and why are they here? When my friends were explaining about how reincarnation really works they said something like ‘You are never reincarnated as animals. Animals are our gift to you, they are us and ours but they are never you’. There are many reasons why animals are here – we couldn’t have survived this long without them nor can we make it from here to the end of the game without them but I don’t just mean as a source of food and raw materials like leather, fur, horn etc etc etc because they are far more important than just that – they work for us, they inspire our progress (how many times in history have our inventions been inspired by studying how some creatures overcome problems and dangers that they face? Would man ever have dreamed of flight if he hadn’t seen birds and insects doing if first?), they protect us, comfort us and provide love and companionship, they challenge us and test us and all sorts of other things besides. That is what my friends meant when they said that animals were their gift to us. The animals can also be used as ‘avatars’ by my friends (just like empty test tubes) if ever they want to test us, challenge us or even to help or comfort us in times of need – which I guess is what they meant by ‘they are us and ours’). I would stress however that that they are a gift to us most certainly doesn’t mean that we can treat animals however we please! There was one bit in the chat (not long after the bit I just referred to) when for the first time I heard anger in my friends voice when they were talking about how some humans behave towards animals. I asked them if they were talking about the pigs (Vietnamese people have some horrendous ways of transporting animals around and I had previously talked about the way they transport live pigs to market):

“Sure we are talking about the pigs here - YOUR PIGS! The pigs that treat our special gifts to them like s**t!"

"WAIT A MINUTE HERE! There NOT 'my pigs'! - **** that! Yeah I eat animals, but I have to eat meat to survive! You have no idea how limited my diet is Big Yin - if I didn't eat meat I just wouldn't be here. Look at me! I'm a skinny b*****d no matter what I eat but meat is the only thing that ever builds my weight up. 'I LOVE PIGS - they’re delicious!' is one of my 'frequent sayings', and it’s meant to be a joke, but it's right in a way coz I do like pigs! I can see that they are intelligent animals and I hate to see the way the b*****ds here transport them around on the back of motor bikes, or to see when they pack them in lorries in layers, one on top of the other, just to save themselves from having to make two trips to the market! I ****ing hate all that! Charge me twice as much for meat if you want, if that means you will at least give the pig a better ride to the market, but I still gotta eat meat or I'll die!"

I was p***ED OFF! I started off p***ed off at my mates for tarring me with 'that' brush, but the more I talked the more I could recall 'horrifying' ways that I had seen Vietnamese (and Cambodian!) people transporting animals. They don't give a ****! And THAT makes me sick!

"THAT'S IT! THAT'S IT WEE MAN! THAT IS EXACTLY THE MESSAGE THAT WE WANT YOU TO SPREAD TO YOUR PEOPLE!"

"Eh?" (I was still fuming privately!)

"There ARE NO TABOOS! All of the things on your planet are special gifts to you. They contain all of the keys that your people will ever need. One of the most important uses for some of our animals is to be used as food - what kind of place would it be if 'nothing' ate animals. There are some places where some people 'need' to eat meat and there are some places where 'all the people' need to eat meat, and there are some people that need to eat meat wherever they are. That's not a problem! That's what some of the fish and some of the animals are for - meat - but some of them have a much better purpose."

"Which ones?"

"Some of them!"

"Wouldn't it be safer if you told me which ones in particular just in case we make some of the really important ones extict?"

"Just some of them. Don't start missing the point now Wee Man, come on!"

"Aaah! I get it! You mean some of all of them!"

(HUGE APPLAUSE!)

"Everything on your planet has loads of uses, and loads of uses you cannot possibly understand yet because the need for those uses has not arisen. All that we ask is that you treat our gifts responsibly, efficiently and respectfully. We understand that some of our animals are to be eaten, but all we ask is that your people give them a decent life when they are alive, and that they treat them with respect when it is time for them to die. Don't bother about all that bull**** about 'the right way' to kill something - that's always how problems start!- the right way is the 'the most humane way under the circumstances' -WE EXPECT YOU ****ING B*****S TO DO A BIT OF THE LEARNING FOR YOURSELVES! Why would we want your people to stay in the dark ages with stuff like that when we are trying to send you advances in science and medicines? Can you explain that to them for us?"

"I get everything you are saying. I follow the logic! I will try to get all of that out before one of the stupid b*****ds shoots me, but I can't promise anyone will listen much to me."

"WELL MAYBE SOME STUPID B*****DS BETTER START LISTENING, BECAUSE THE NEXT TIME THAT WE SEE SOME OF YOUR STUPID B*****DS LEAVING OUR PERCIOUS GIFTS TO SUFFER IN THEIR OWN S***,....WELL THERE'S JUST NO TELLING WHAT WE MIGHT DO, COZ THINGS LIKE THAT REALLY p*** US OFF TOO!"

That really was the angriest I had ever heard them talk, and even though I knew it wasn’t directed at me it was still pretty scary. I really would advise anyone reading this to take that warning seriously because you REALLY don’t want to see what my friends can do when they are angry!

(I’ll just finish this post with a quick response to one of the questions MisterCee asked in the last post – I don’t think for a minute that the fact that my friends used Billy Connolly’s voice when chatting with me means that Billy Connolly is actually one of the ‘empty test tubes’ – I certainly hope not, as I have loved Billy Connolly since I was about 9 at a time when no one outside Glasgow had ever heard of him and when even within Glasgow very few people had ever heard of him! A comedic genius indeed and one of the two funniest entities I have ever heard in my life…In fact in a way he is both of the two funniest entities I have ever heard in my life! )

[MySummerJob]

That really was the angriest I had ever heard them talk, and even though I knew it wasn’t directed at me it was still pretty scary. I really would advise anyone reading this to take that warning seriously because you REALLY don’t want to see what my friends can do when they are angry!

Yes, that it is one of the important things I have learned very early in life, "Never anger the thing with power, you'll regret it".

I have a couple more questions than the one question, and comment in that one post you ignored.

1) Have they ever purposely caused a major storm, or plague because they were angry at us?

2) They mentioned that they have avatars to come in. Couldn't we get avatars to go out?

I also already asked this in the post you ignored, but it's fine if you ignore that post I guess =/

3) They seem to focus solely on earth. Have they ever talked with you about aliens?

Edited July 13, 2013 by MySummerJob

[scots_nomad]

Hi MySummerJob,

I didn’t ignore any post but have spent the last three of my posts answering the list of questions that Dodir had asked in a post before yours, but I thought I had answered your questions within those posts, i.e. re your post about why we can’t have superpowers, I said we can’t run till we learn to walk and that we learn from the limitations that we face in this level (But from what I have heard of the later levels I think you’ll love em ), and re your post about the Butterfly effect, I had already explained that while all decisions cause ripples most of those ripples just fade away like ripples on a pond and very few ripples would ever lead to a tidal wave, but I think you may be missing the full logic of The Butterfly Effect

Actually I have found that people can be talking about two different things when they refer to the butterfly effect, or actually it is the same thing but coming from two very different sources so maybe I should clarify that first – One comes from the saying ‘A butterfly flaps it’s wings in Tokyo and causes a hurricane in the Atlantic’ (albeit that there are many variations on where the butterfly flapped its wings and where the storm took place) and the other goes back to a SciFi short story whose name escapes me just now (it was by Ray Bradbury if I remember right) where in the future people discover the secret of time travel and are able to go back in time to see the dinosaurs however on one visit one of the time tourists accidentally stands on a butterfly – He doesn’t think it is a big deal however when they return to their own time they find that everything has changed and that USA is now being run by a Fascist dictator all due to the changes that have been caused as a result of that butterfly’s premature death. The sources maye be very different but the point they are making is the same, I’e’ that even small changes can have huge consequences. What they are NOT saying however is that EVERY small change will have huge consequences! While logic may say that it is feasibly possible that the tiny pressure fluctuation caused by a butterfly flapping it wings in one location could (if a million other circumstances happen to exist at the time) cause a storm in some remote part of the world it is obvious that not every flap of every butterfly’s wings will cause a storm somewhere. Similarly with the SciFi story – It is logically possible that if that butterfly had survived one more day it may have laid eggs or fertilised eggs or it may have been eaten by a predator who would otherwise have starved to death, and that predator may have been eaten by a bigger predator etc etc etc it could have huge long term consequences, however the fact is that butterflies don’t live long anyway so the chances of one dead butterfly having such far reaching consequences would be pretty remote. It’s the same with the decisions we make in our day to day lives – small decisions you make could have serious consequences for you but the vast majority of them won’t, and the chances are that no decision you will ever make will ultimately prove to be the single triggering even for a new president in your country (or whatever leader you have in your country).

Regarding the questions in your most recent mail:

Re: Have they ever purposely caused a major storm, or plague because they were angry at us? Well I did say in one of my posts that they told me to remember that ‘They were THE big fan of Katrina and the Waves’ so I guess you could take that as them saying that they started Katrina (but since they design the game and moderate it subject to their rules I guess that could seem pretty obvious), but I very much doubt that anger was anything to do with the reason why they did it. A few times I asked them why they did something and a few times I got the same response – ‘There are always loads of reasons why we do ANYTHING…And by ‘loads’ we mean millions…And by ‘millions’ we actually mean six billion!’ (NB that was the population of the earth to the nearest billion at the time of the chats). The object of the game for them is to get AS MANY people through to the next level so they aren’t going to kill people off out of spite (not that the people who passed away from Katrina were actually ‘killed off’ from the game). I guess it’s hard to imagine how anyone could start a massive and deadly storm like Katrina with good intentions, but I understand how they think (to some extent) and how they always think globally and in the long term and tragic as it was for me to sit by and watch the suffering caused by Katrina I can imagine how even something like that could be better for us all ‘in the long term’, for example (and I am just speculating here and definitely not quoting anything they said), maybe people should learn from Katrina that if you cut back on the maintenance and improvement of your infrastructure (such as the levees) in order to minimise spending and taxation then the place is eventually gonna start falling apart, or maybe people in lots of other vulnerable places in hurricane zones throughout the world will see what happened to New Orleans and decide to take pre-emtive action just in case which could ultimately save 100 times more people than were ‘lost’ in Katrina, or maybe people will look at the unprecedented number of storms there were that year and think ‘maybe our behaviour really is having some effect on global weather so maybe it’s time to change’ (and if global warming sceptics feel that they should take issue with that I am happy to change that speculation to ‘regardless of whether it is our behaviour that is causing global warming or not, something weird seems to be happening to the climate so maybe we should do everything we possibly can to reduce any additional impact our behaviour may have on it), and without wanting to get into any kind of political debate about the benefits or otherwise, you could ask yourself whether Barack Obama would have become president if GW Bush’s administration had not done so badly in the aftermath of Katrina (I am not saying the Republicans would have won another term if not for that, but I do have serious doubts whether Obama would be president now if things hadn’t been so badly run then). I am not saying that all or any of them were reasons for Katrina, just trying to show they kind of consequences that can arise from ‘natural disasters’ which may actually be to our long term benefit.

Re: They mentioned that they have avatars to come in. Couldn't we get avatars to go out? No we couldn’t – we don’t have access to the controls so we couldn’t decide to ‘go out’ any more than Sonic The Hedgehog or Supermario could decide to leave their games.

Re: They seem to focus solely on earth. Have they ever talked with you about aliens? I have no idea if they focus solely on Earth, or whether they have a thousand games like this going on simultaneously with completely different digital words and civilisations or even whether this is only a game they play occasionally to pass the time while getting on with their own lives the other 99% of the time. I did ask them about ‘aliens’ a couple of times – On one occasion I asked them whether extra-terrestrials and they replied,

‘Doesn’t the fact that we are chatting with you hear already answer that question?’

‘Ah! I see what you mean because you are not exactly ‘of this Earth’ are you? But that wasn’t really what I meant. I mean are there other civilisations like us out there living on other planets…Well I don’t necessarily mean ‘like us’ but you know what I mean…Are there any other civilisations out there that we might contact or that might contact us?’

‘You’re people aren’t ready for any of that just now. You can consider it like being in quarantine or you can consider it like protective custody but for the time being you will only be dealing with us but if your people ever reach the stage where you are ready for it then you will get to meet other civilisations.’

‘Yeah but will that just be some civilisation that you just ‘magic’ed up’ into the game for that purpose or do they already exist out there just now?’

‘Does that really matter?’

‘Mmmm! I think I does….Although I guess we wouldn’t know the difference either way so does it matter?...But really I think it does matter but don’t ask me how or why!’

‘Well let’s not worry about that now because it’s not going to be happening anytime soon!’

‘Is that ‘any time soon’ in your terms or ours?...Well don’t even bother answering that because neither would really tell me anything unless you actually told me a date and I know you aren’t going to tell me a date so just forget I asked it!’

At another point in the chat (which may actually have been almost immediately after that bit) I asked them if a spaceship had crashed at Roswell in the forties.

‘If anything happened at Roswell then it certainly wasn’t a crash because we don’t have accidents.’

‘OK, I don’t mean you accidentally let it crash but did you put something there to make it look like a spaceship crashed…like maybe you put a crashed spaceship there or something?’

‘We can’t answer that question for you just now but we can tell you how you can find out the answers for yourself.’

‘How???’

‘Take the job offer!’

(LOL! At one point very early in the chats they asked me if I wanted to be President of The USA :-p I pointed out that it couldn’t happen because it was a foreigner but they assured me that they could make it happen if I would take the job…I told them to stuff it! )

OK I think that’s all the questions answered so I’m off for a coffee

[Dodir_Svile]

Hi, scots_nomad, it was interesting reading more of your posts.

Your "friends" seem to me not much more different than Christian non-interventionist god. Actually, they seem like a combination of what a Buddhist would believe in and what a Christian would believe in. And since I don't really like the concept of such sadistic god (or any other for that matter), I can't really say that I like the concept of your "friends" (although, of course, what would they care about what I think of them ).

The problem I'm having is they're not really ethical. And since they want us to improve and get better (globally) so that we could go on to the next level, I don't like them not having to be good and ethical too. I understand the concept of us not really existing and being just a game for them, so they might not think they're hurting anyone, but humans, as well as animals, feel the real pain and suffering here. And some people have done nothing wrong in their lives that they should deserve such punishment. I mean, a starving 5yo somewhere in Ethiopia dieing painfully of hunger does not really tell me "Oh, they're such nice teachers." It tells me the same it tells me about a hypothetical Christian god: "What a sadistic b******!"

And I don't like them being so anthropocentric. Creating animals just for humans? Billions of animals are suffering each year because of humans, and they say it's just how it's supposed to be? Sorry, I don't think so. Or maybe some of us humans "that need to evolve and earn a new level" have higher moral standards then they do.

Anyway, I've got two more questions (if they're not offended by what I've written above ):

1. When we die and we're waiting to get reincarnated, are we conscious and aware of that or do we just stop existing and then are put into another body?

2. What happened in Dyatlov pass?

[scots_nomad]

Hi again Dodir.

I am very surprised if I have given you the impression that my friends are either sadistic or unethical as you really couldn’t be further from the truth. You refer to the suffering of a starving 5 year old in Ethiopia as evidence of their sadism and lack of ethics however the fact is that they created more than enough resources for everyone on the planet to be fed, clothed and housed in comfort. It is human greed, selfishness, laziness, neglect, war, lack of foresight etc which causes the type of suffering to which you refer and it is behaviour such as that that the game is designed to ‘educate us’ against. Maybe you think they should always act to eliminate any such suffering like that…or any suffering at all for that matter – To create a ‘Garden of Eden’ type environment where humans can laze in perfect comfort free of any risk, danger or challenges, but what would that ever achieve? How could you make any progress in that kind of environment? How could you ever get satisfaction from achieving anything for yourself if everything you could ever want wasn’t just handed to you on a plate but actually spoon fed to you? Or maybe you think that they should instantly punish the humans whose greed and selfishness led to the suffering of that innocent 5 year old child by maybe striking them down with lightning as soon as they did something ‘bad’, but what would that achieve? It wouldn’t make us a more advanced, intelligent and developed civilisation but rather it would make us a bunch of well trained, well behaved Pavlovian dogs! The people responsible for the suffering of that child will get their comeuppance in due course (and similarly the others who may try to relieve the suffering of that child will get their rewards) but I think it’s unfair to call my friends sadists because they do not instantly act to prevent us from harming ourselves or other members of our species.

Maybe you think they are sadistic because I said they were ‘the big fan of Katrina and the Waves’ but the fact is that the people killed in New Orleans back in August 2005 weren’t killed by a hurricane they were (in the most part) killed because the levees that were meant to protect the city failed due to inadequate design and/or maintenance compounded by a shockingly bad post-disaster rescue effort by the authorities! People have known for hundreds of years that that area of the USA is prone to hurricanes periodically yet knowing that risk we still choose to live there because the benefits outweigh the risks. I am not saying that people should not live in areas which are susceptible to hurricane strikes, as we are already more than capable of building hurricane-proof buildings and hurricane-proof levees, but if we start cutting corners by erecting inadequate buildings of by failing to maintain and upgrade the levees just so people can save some money and pay less taxes then we shouldn’t be surprised when the consequences of those actions catch up with us – As far as I am concerned it is humans who are responsible for the deaths during Hurricane Katrina not my friends.

I also seem to have given you a very wrong impression of my friends attitude to animals. Sure the game is anthropocentric because it has been designed for and around us and the animals are in the game to help us get to the end of it but I am certainly not saying that the animals (and their suffering) don’t matter and that we are free to do whatever we want to them (I thought my last post would have made that abundantly clear). We will be judged on everything we do during our life and that includes how we treat the animals (and the environment). I also don’t want to give you the impression that I don’t care about animals or think of them as merely props in our game because again that is FAR from the truth and that has been the case all my life, but if I have given wrong impressions on both my friends’ and my attitude to animals maybe this wee bit of our conversation will help to clear that up:

Prior to this bit of the conversation my friends and I had been talking about ‘saying sorry’ – It had started with them asking me who, if anyone, I felt I should say sorry to if I could, and then when I had finished they had said that they had a few ‘sorry’s for me too. This extract of the conversation started soon after (NB, my friends are speaking first)…

…”Never mind, let’s press on with the wolves, because we both know that we both know that even the daftest and friendliest wolf that ever pawed the surface of your planet could lash out and bite the closest thing to him if it’s is scared enough…And we both know who we are talking about here, so let’s not mess around with each other this time. OK?”

”You better not!”

We both knew that we were talking about Tara, my second dog.

Her dog collar had snapped while I was taking her for a walk one day, and she had run straight out in front of a taxi. As soon as her collar snapped I could see exactly what was going to happen next….She was a big dog with a lot of momentum and once her collar snapped that taxi was never gonna be able to stop in time, no matter how much it tried. Tara was gonna get ‘T-boned’ - any genius could have seen that coming! Even a ten year old one…if I was even that old at the time!

Her last significant act on this Earth, just before her last ‘movement’ in fact, was to bite me on the hand and send me off to hospital for my first ever tetanus jag! That was just like adding injury to insult as far as I was concerned because Tara was a good clean healthy dog that wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“ Tara doesn’t have to say sorry to me, if that is the sort of thing you are saying here.”

”It’s not Tara that’s talking to you now Wee Man….That day was a bad day for us all…but all we can say to you now is that there was even a reason for that…And… ‘We’re sorry!’”

”….OK Big Yin….I’m a big boy now….These things happen!”

”You’re a wee ****ing beauty Wee Man, but we have got some more to tell you. You see, when we said she bit the closest thing to her, we meant that in every way. The big daft softie wasn’t lashing out at all. She knew she was ‘going a place’ by then, and she was even OK with that, but she wanted to give you one last hug before she went….Even if she could only manage a squeeze on the hand! She didn’t lash out, and she didn’t bite you…She just wanted to say ‘Cheers, mate!’,…It’s just that she was a bit scared and confused at the time, and at times like that real big wolves can forget just how much strength they have….So are we all OK with that for now?”

”Yeah….I guess we are pretty fine with that!”

“We both know that you never blamed either Tara or the taxi driver for what happened to Tara that day ….Do you remember what you said to the taxi driver?”

”Yeah…I remember it exactly…..He said ‘Sorry son!’, or ‘I am so sorry son’, and I said ‘It’s OK mister. Don’t worry. I know it wiznae your fault,….but I gotta get my dog home now!”

”Yer a wee ****ing beauty Wee Man…Always were!….Imagine a ten year old at a time like that in a situation like that, taking time out from caring about his dog to take a few seconds to try to comfort the grown up that just ran over his lovely big dog!”

”Aw **** Big Man, Stop!....(sniff) Yer killing me here!”

”So how do you ****ing think we feel? (sniff)…But if you can just bear with us for a wee bit more we can get all of these loose ends tied up once and for all.”

“OK…I’ll try….but it’s just as hard!”

“The last thing that we really need to tell you Wee Man is that Tara got to give a big hug to the mate she loved the most, and that she felt lucky to have such a great mate with her at that time….Coz no matter how hard you will find this to believe,…She still felt lucky at that point in time. Sure, she was confused, but she wasn’t feeling any pain….Can you believe that?”

”Well, no, I can’t actually…coz she must have been in agony when I picked her up. I knew that at the time, but I didn’t know what else to do. She was a big dog, so they couldn’t leave her lying in the middle of the road for a half an hour,…or however long she had left,…and I didn’t want anybody pushing her to the side of the road to die…So I didn’t know what to do….I knew she was gonna die!...I knew that as soon as the collar snapped,…but I just didn’t want her to die at the side of the road….I knew it was gonna hurt her but I din’t know what else to do….so I couldn’t blame her for biting me when I picked her up.”

”Did she just bite you once then?”

”Yeah…Only once…Can you believe that?....She must have had so many broken bones inside her, but she only bit me once.”

“Is that really all she did?”

”Yeah!...Well,…in fact…she did bite only once, but she kept her teeth there…or I kept my thumb there,…and I suppose you are right….she just sort of squeezed on my thumb a bit now and again after that….Probably when I bumped her.”

”Oh ****ing stop it Wee Man!….Hankies are just no’ made big enough for this stuff!...(sniff)…So how big was Tara ?”

“She was big….She was young, but she was a big lump...She could stand with her front paws on my shoulders, so she was probably about the same size as me….Although she probably weighed more, coz I was a skinny ba***rd, even then!”

“So you let the big lump suck on your thumb while you carried her home to die.”

”Yeah….I suppose you could say that….but maybe I need to rethink what I just said because I am not even sure if it is possible to lift something heavier than yourself….Never mind running down the street with it.”

”Yeah….You have a wee think about that Wee Man…and while you are at it,…ask yourself how it could be possible for a wee boy to do all that and more….With just one hand!”

”Hey…You’re right!....It doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?....But I did have my thumb in her mouth all the way home….There’s no doubt about that, if you are suggesting that I think about that bit again!”

“We both know that you remember that bit perfectly….But just you have a wee think about the rest of it sometime…Maybe there was only one ten year old’s hand carrying your dog that day,….but we were all right there with you….And none of us were having any better a time than you were….And for **** sake Wee Man….We are ****ing Sorry…Will you let us say that without trying to tell us that ‘it’s OK’?”

”Yeah,…alright….Cheers!”

“And don’t you go looking for no ‘ifs or buts’ to spoil that now. Sure, all three of us know that it was your big brother Gerry that saved Tara’s life in the first place, and the three of us also know that your Dad was the one that did most of the real dirty work, taking Tara out when the weather was cold and miserable outside,…But you did your share of that dirty work too,….You just don’t remember those bits now, coz even at the time, you were still out playing with your mate…..Can you accept that?”

”Yeah…I suppose…b..”

”No ‘Buts’ Wee Man! We told you!....Tara loved all of your family but she loved you most coz you played with her most. All three of us know that everyone in your family did their fair share of the playing, but all three of us know that you played with her the most while she was there….And where Tara is now, ‘Playtime’ is all she can remember, coz playtime is all that dogs are ever allowed to remember…And thanks to you and your family….but especially thanks to you Wee Man…Tara has got more playtime to remember than any dog could ever dream of…..Or should we say…’more than any other dog could dream of’, coz we made a wee exception for Tara……We figured that that was the least we could do for you.”

”(Sniff, sniff)…OK Big Man….Cheers for that.”

“Don’t you worry about anything like that…Tara’s in playtime now, and playtime started for Tara just as her collar snapped…“Taxi? What taxi?” is what she would say if you asked her now,….So are we all settled on everything about all of that?”

”Yeah Big Man…Thanks….That was hard, but it was nice…..But if you have got any more ‘Sorry’s like that, then can we not just take the rest as read…Coz I don’t think I have it in me to go through another one of them…..And I have had loads of pets in my time.”

”OK Wee Man….It might be best for both of us, for now, to agree that even though some of your pets may have been more ‘Lucky’ than others, they were all the luckiest pets of their species to be part of your family….If you can leave it at that then we can move on.”

”That’s just fine with me too. Let’s move on...Weren’t you going to explain something about ‘The Rules’ or something?”

Note: ‘Lucky’ was the name of my pet rabbit,…But none of us want to get into that story right here and right now!...

Hope that’s clear some things up anyway, so now onto the questions at the end of your post:

Re: 1. When we die and we're waiting to get reincarnated, are we conscious and aware of that or do we just stop existing and then are put into another body?

At one point my friends did refer to those people ‘between lives’ as being ‘in cold storage’ which I took to mean they were unconscious and oblivious to everything while awaiting their next ‘posting’ however I also understood that there is a kind of ‘debriefing period’ at the end of each ‘existence on Earth’ where the individuals are confronted with their actions during that spell on Earth. The reason I say that is because there was one point when I wondered whether I may actually have died and that what was happening to me (i.e. the long chats with my friends) was what happened to people when they died, and at one point in our chats I came right out and asked if that was what was going on. My friends said ‘Well yes and no because this is similar to what happens to everyone when they pass on but there are also some big differences, for example there is never this much laughing going on during those other chats but the main difference is that the others don’t get to make a decision at the end of their chats with us’. Obviously my first question was ‘So what decision do I get to make at the end?’ – I was pretty surprised when they explained that it was entirely up to me if I was alive or dead! They said if I chose to be dead they would rewind things a couple of weeks and one of my friends would come over to my house and find that I had died of a heart attack – to quote my friends ‘Sure people would be sad but with your way of life and with your family’s history of heart problems no one would really be too shocked’. They then said that if I chose to be dead I could come over and watch how the rest of the game plays out with them. I suppose that to most people the decision as to whether to be dead or to be alive would be a ‘no-brainer’ but maybe it will be a surprise to know that my initial choice was the former. They then pointed out that I don’t get to make that choice until the end of the chat and that they intended to try and change my mind about what option I chose (and as you can see from the fact that I am here they did succeed in getting me to change my mind).

Re your second question: ‘What happened in Dyatlov pass?’ I had no idea what that was until I googled it after reading your question – Interesting stuff! I don’t have a clue what happened and wouldn’t expect my friends to tell me at this stage but for some reason (whether or not my friends have anything to do with my ‘intuition’ or not) I have a very strong feeling that there was nothing ‘paranormal’ about it – whatever happened was entirely by and because of humans and furthermore I believe that the answer to that ‘mystery’ is out there to be found – Someone knows what actually happened and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are classified files out there which could answer all your questions.

Anyway, hope this post clears up some of the wrong impressions I may have given you already and don’t worry about my friends being offended by your thoughts – Thinking and questioning is good, it is ‘blind faith’ and lack of thought that p***es them off!

[scots_nomad]

A while ago Dodir asked me whether time travel was possible and I said that my friends could do all sorts of strange things with and to time and that I would post some details of that kind of stuff later. Offhand I can think of about half a dozen completely different ways that they messed around with time and I could probably think of even more if I thought about it but here are a couple of examples.

One day they told me to draw my curtains because they were going to show me ‘a news broadcast from the future’ and they didn’t want any of my neighbours seeing it through my window (actually I think getting me to close my curtains was just for effect – they did that a few times before showing strange stuff on my TV – because there was a large wall around my garden and I didn’t have any neighbours facing my sitting room as the house on that side of the street was still under construction). The program they showed me was from BBC world news (which is broadcast on one of the cable channels in Vietnam) – they didn’t tell me how far into the future the broadcast came from and at first it seemed like it could have been from later that same day as the format, set and newsreaders were the same as any other BBC news show I watched out there. The first item on the news was about an earthquake in Indonesia however the report seemed more focused on the panic it had caused with people rushing to higher ground than about the actual effects of the quake. The report stated that although a tsunami alert had been raised after the quake happened it had subsequently been cancelled as the quake hadn’t triggered one however I knew right away that that was my third clue that there was going to be a major tsunami sometime soon (The first clue had been the way they focused on talking about tsunamis during our ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen the day after tomorrow’ conversation, the second clue came the night before they showed me that news broadcast which I haven’t mentioned yet but which was particularly harrowing for me at the time and I may do a post about that night later, and this was the third clue which I took as final confirmation). As I watched the news broadcast I said to my friends,

‘So there really is going to be a big tsunami then!’

‘Didn’t he just say that it hadn’t caused a tsunami?’

‘Yeah he said that THAT quake hadn’t caused one but obviously there must have been one between now and then which had caused a tsunami or those people wouldn’t have panicked like that.’

‘Don’t you think they would have panicked just from hearing the tsunami alert sirens?’

‘No, not like that! Sure some of them may have panicked a bit but that whole town was scrambling to get up to higher ground and that would only happen if they had actually seen what a big tsunami could do before then!...So when’s this broadcast from?’

‘When do you think?’

‘It’s not long into the future – I can tell by their motor bikes, they’re the same models you see one the streets today’

‘Maybe they are old bikes.’

‘Nah, I looked at that too…most of them were pretty new.’

‘So are you sure there will be a tsunami?’

‘There wasn’t a question mark at the end of my first statement! I wasn’t asking you, I was telling you…So when will it be?’

‘Maybe you should keep watching the news and see if you can get any more clues’

I focused on the TV again just in time to hear him say something about the tsunami ‘last December’

…I knew where it would be (roughly), I knew what month it would be but I didn’t know what year – although it obviously wasn’t too far away.

I didn’t get any more clues during the rest of that report then the news switched to talking about the ‘ongoing’ Michael Jackson trial – Jackson had only just been charged shortly before my chats with my friends started but I didn’t know how long it would take to go to trial or how long the trial could have dragged on but I was sure we were only looking one or maximum two years in the future. At first I wasn’t really paying much attention to what they were saying about the trial as my mind was still fixed on the tsunami, but my friends started talking to me about Michael Jackson and we ended up having quite a long and in depth chat about what actually happened, and during that chat the next news item started which was about the Pope (John Paul II) being taken into hospital due to his failing health. The chat we were having about Michael Jackson actually flowed into a chat about the Pope and what he did or didn’t know about child abuse within the Catholic Church – Was quite interesting and revealing stuff and ironically we chatted about whether or not JPII should be made a saint (Ironic because this very week the Vatican announced that it is going to make him a saint as reported in the home page of this website!).

The final news item on that broadcast was about a woman in the States (In Florida if I remember right) called Terry Schievo who was in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery (following a car accident as far as I remember) and who had been the subject of a court battle between her partner – who wanted to turn off her life support machines and let her pass on as she had previously stated she would prefer to do if ever in that situation – and her parents who wanted to keep the machines going (The husband won the case and the machines were turned off but rather than allowing doctors to actually end her suffering the court ordered that she must be allowed to die ‘naturally’ and so she was left to starve until she eventually died of thirst which seemed like the most barbaric way to treat anyone!). Again my friends and I had a long chat about that – about whether I would have helped my father die if he had asked me to at any time during the last 4 years of his life when he was hospital bound after a massive stroke. We also spoke about what the Vatican would do if JPII ended up in a similar state (similar to either my Dad or Terry Schievo) i.e. whether the Vatican could function if the pope was kept alive but completely incapacitated for years or whether they would find some way to make sure he died ‘clean and quick’…Which my friends seemed to suggest they would!

That was one example of how my friends could ‘mess with time’ but I think I can squeeze one other short example into this post:

Around the third or fourth day of my conversations with my friends my landlord came to my house along with one of his friends to find out whether I was extending my lease or not. At that point I still hadn’t decided, but looking at the amount of packing I still had to do (and having had little success in getting any packing done in the days since the conversations had begun) I made a decision right there and then and I told him I would be extending my lease and staying on. He was happy to hear it and then he shook my hand and left however one minute later my doorbell rang and when I answered it was my landlord with his friend again. I assumed that they had either forgotten something or had remembered something else he wanted to talk about but I was a bit confused when he said ‘Hi John, I just came round to see if you had decided whether or not you were going to extend your lease’, which was EXACTLY what he had said the first time they arrived a few minutes earlier.

.Assuming that it must just be some language problem (he was Vietnamese but spoke fairly good English by Viet standards) I said ‘I just told you that I want to extend it’. He seemed a bit confused but also happy to know I was staying so after running through all the general pleasantries again (have a good time in the UK, hope your brother is good, hope you can come back soon, etc) he once again left quite happily with his friend.

One minute later he was back at my door again – ‘Hi John, I just came round to see if you had decided whether or not you were going to extend your lease’!!!

By that point it became clear to me that he obviously completely unaware that we were re-running the same time loop over and over again so I just played along, ran through the same chat, confirmed I was extending my lease and then waved them off.

After the fourth visit I realised that my friends were up to something and I figured that if I was ever going to get out of this loop I was going to have to try changing something, so instead of telling him I wanted to extend my lease I told him that I would be moving out and finding a new place when I returned from my holiday in the UK. He wished me luck and left, and only then did time start moving on again as normal – that was weird!

When my landlord had finally gone (and stayed gone) I shouted to/at my friends “What the **** was that about?” and they replied,

“Oh don’t worry about that, that kind of thing goes on all the time it’s just that we usually edit out the trial runs so your people don’t remember them – That’s another one of our jobs – but now that you know about it we could let you remember them all in future if you want to.”

I thought about it for a second, trying to imagine whether it would be fun to have that kind of ‘advantage’ over everyone else, but quickly decided it would be far more annoying and frustrating than it would be fun so I declined their offer but then I added,

“Wait a minute! Doesn’t that just make me a puppet who is always going to end up doing what you want me to do?”

“No, not at all! We told you before that 99.9% of your decisions are yours, but even in that other 0.1% all we are really trying to do is ask ‘Are you really sure about that?’. Just like what just happened there, there will come a point when you realise that that is what’s happening, and we will recognise that. If you then decide to stick with the same decision we will let things go ahead.”

“So if I had stuck with my original decision I could have stayed here?”

“Yeah, for the time being anyway, but we would have just had to find another way to get you where we need you to be when we need you to be there.”

[scots_nomad]

Oh I forgot to mention one last bit about the 'newscast from the future': I first watched that broadcast in early July 2004 but I got to watch that very same broadcast again 'live' on Easter Monday 2005 (was in April as far as I remember but all I remember for sure was that it was Easter Monday)

[MySummerJob]

I know you probably already addressed the topic of reincarnation before, but I am not sure if you tackled the topic of "past life memories" (Youtube for some odd reason recommended me a video which led to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFHWb7IuPno]this[/url] video being in suggestions, and it made me think of this thread (Video is 47 minutes long if you feel like watching it)).

Also a bit off topic, but I think you might like to check this out:

http://kotaku.com/if-real-life-was-an-mmo-806521696

[scots_nomad]

Past life memories were never something that interested me much - During my chats there was one point where my friends asked me if I wanted to know who I had been before but I said 'No thanks, it's bad enough taking responsibility for all my actions in this life without worrying about what I may have done in any others'. They said 'Are you sure you don't want to know? We think you might be pleasantly surprised' but I still said no thanks. What's done is done - It's more important to look forward than backward.

[MySummerJob]

Past life memories were never something that interested me much - During my chats there was one point where my friends asked me if I wanted to know who I had been before but I said 'No thanks, it's bad enough taking responsibility for all my actions in this life without worrying about what I may have done in any others'. They said 'Are you sure you don't want to know? We think you might be pleasantly surprised' but I still said no thanks. What's done is done - It's more important to look forward than backward.

I would have said yes if I was in your position. I know the past is the past, but I think it would be better to know what possibly went wrong back then so you know what to do better now.

Edit: Although, they could possibly lie, and say you were someone else when you weren't...

Edited July 17, 2013 by MySummerJob

[theSOURCE]

An interesting bit of fiction you've composed there, scots_nomad. It's a tad cliche heavy and the dialogue could use some punching up, but overall it's not bad.

Of course, that's simply my opinion, and for all I know your "friends" could be looking over my shoulder as I type this.

[scots_nomad]

Been through that discussion already on the thread Source, and like I said before it's up to you whether you believe it or choose to think of it as a work of fiction but either way I'm glad you find it interesting

I’ve dug out another bit of the story to share with you today however I think I will need to break this down into a couple of posts:

On one occasion I returned from one of my ‘sorties’ into Saigon (at my friends request/insistence) to find ‘hundreds’ of the things in my living-room had been turned ‘half inside out’. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean at the time (and won’t go into it any further here), but a whole range of things were turned half inside out – some of them were things that I was well aware could be turned inside out (such as tee shirts, trousers, bags CD cases, etc.), but there were also a few things that I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to turn inside out without damaging them, such as a couple of pairs of my casual shoes and sports shoes and a fairly fragile ornamental Vietnamese straw hat (obviously the pointy bit of the hat would flip inside out fairly easily but it also has a much narrower ‘rim’ turned in around the perimeter which I would have thought would have split if you tried turning it inside out. Anyway, that’s all just background info for now, but basically they said that they were ‘preparing me’ because they wanted me to come and visit them ‘at their place’ – Which they ‘described’ as being like a parallel universe, albeit that a description like that doesn’t tell you much if you have ABSOLUTELY no idea what to expect in a parallel universe!

Their first preparatory step was to ‘loosen me up’. Literally! That started off very simply when they got me to relax and roll my neck to loosen up, which just involved me sitting on my sofa listening to MTV and letting my head roll from side to side in a kind of a figure of eight motion, although the figure of eight shape kind of ‘rotated’ a bit at the same time. When I started my neck was really stiff (after my ‘tumbles’ in the garden a few nights earlier), so after about fifteen minutes or so their ‘treatment’ did seem to be making me feel good, like a self-performed neck massage, but even when I felt I was loosened up and ready to stop they kept telling me to stick with it and keep doing what I was doing. I continued even though my neck was beginning to get sore and I was getting really tired (I hadn’t slept for days at the time), but all the time they kept urging me to keep going.

After maybe another half an hour or maybe even an hour I actually began to feel dizzy and sick because of the motion, but when I pointed that out to them they just said “Go with it.”, so I kept on going, and kept feeling more and more sick. Another ten minutes later I told them that I was feeling even sicker, and once again they just said “Go with it!”. Another ten minutes and I really felt that I was gonna puke – I told them so, and they said, “Well for **** sake go with it, coz we don’t want you throwing up in here!”. I started to say something like “What? So you KNEW that this was actually gonna make me throw up?”, but before I could finish the sentence I had to break off and make a run for the toilet!

I got as far as the door to the toilet before I could hold it in no longer. The toilet bowl was still at least six feet away and I was actually looking (longingly) towards it, wishing that I had set off a few seconds earlier, when I just had to ‘let rip’. I was both surprised and amazed to see that my puke came out as ‘projectile vomit’ – I had heard of the phenomenon before but had never actually seen it – and was even more surprised and amazed as I watched the entire stream of vomit arc through the air and hit the toilet bowl dead centre without a single drop of it dropping on the toilet floor! (Quite an impressive party trick if I could do it ‘on demand’! <!;->). The first burst of vomit came to an end but I could feel there was more to come so I continued towards the toilet bowl, collapsed to my knees and then spent the next ten to fifteen minutes ‘spewing my stomach inside out’ to the point where it really began to hurt.

When I regained my composure sufficiently I washed my mouth and brushed my teeth and then marched back into the livingroom to demand an explanation (i.e. “WHAT THE ****?????” <!;->). My friends said

‘Sorry Wee man, but we had to do that coz you’ve got bacteria and viruses and **** in your stomach that we no longer have in ‘our place’ so we had to make sure that we got all of them out before we could bring you here’.

(Although I believed that that was the reason at the time, with hindsight I wouldn’t take that too literally, as I know they have nothing to fear from bacteria or viruses – Maybe there was a reason they wanted to get me to spew my guts or maybe it was just an excuse so they could show me some more of their tricks, but I don’t buy the germs and viruses bit anymore)

I argued that they should have at least have had the decency of warning me about that in advance, but they just said

‘Think about it Wee man! Even if you would still have agreed to go through with it, would it have made anything any better or easier if you actually knew that that kind of thing was coming?’

I couldn’t really argue with them on that point, but I still wasn’t too happy about ‘everything’!

As another part of my ‘travel preparations’ they said they had to sweat all of the ‘****’ out of my skin/pores. Again that was NOT a pleasant experience for me – I won’t go into many details here, but at one point they had me in my bedroom (where the air conditioner had mysteriously stopped working and where all of my windows had mysteriously sealed themselves ‘tight shut’) doing what felt like some strange kind of yoga. I was lying on my bed and twisting my body into all kinds of strange contortions, half expecting to be ‘pulled through’ to a parallel universe at any second! (Ha! They actually had me trying to copy the movements on Kylie Minogue’s video for a song called ‘Like Chocolate’ which was on MTV at the time, except they were slowing it down and stopping the video to make sure that I was following every move! It was nuts! ).

At one point I was absolutely drenched in sweat and it was running down into my eyes and stinging them, so I said “Enough! I need a drink of water or something and I need to go wash my face!”. They said “No! Keep going, we’re getting there”, but I just said “**** you! I’m going to wash my face!”. I got up and staggered into my en-suite bathroom squinting through my stinging sweat-filled eyes. I leant over the wash hand basin and turned on the cold water tap…..but all that came out was a gush of deep red BLOOD!!!!!

That made me jump back from the basin and as I did I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror for the first time – All the ‘sweat’ that I could feel running down my face was just as blood red as the stuff that was pouring out of the tap! I had blood streaming from my nose, from my gums, from below my hairline as well as from almost every pore on my face - and most strikingly of all I had it streaming from my eyes!! It was HORRIFIC looking, but I was so p***ed off with everything at the time that the only emotion that I really felt was anger – LOTS OF IT!!! I looked up to the ceiling and shouted out at the top of my voice,

“Will you c**ts stop ****ing around with me here!!!”.

I heard them say

“OK, sorry! Maybe that was a bit much at just the wrong time.”.

I looked at the mirror again and my face was how I should have expected it to be, i.e. drenched in sweat. When I looked down at the basin there was only cool, clear water flowing from the tap, so I spent the next five minutes or so washing my face with it and using my cupped hands to pour it over my hair.

When I had cooled down enough (emotionally and thermo-dynamically) I grabbed a towel and dried myself off as I left the bathroom. I said to my friends (who were certainly not too high up on my Christmas card list at that point!),

“So what the **** was that **** about?”,

“We were just showing you that we could do ‘that sort of thing’ if we wanted to.”

”Big ****ing deal!”

(Pause)

“So….Weren’t you scared?”

”Scared? No, I was way too angry to be scared!”

(Longer pause)

“It’s nice to have a clear conscience, eh Wee Man?”

”Eh?”

”Well, just think how absolutely terrified ANY of your people would have been to have seen something like that in a mirror.”

”So what’s that got to do with a clear conscience?”

”Well, think about it! Do you think that you could possibly have looked at that without feeling scared unless you were ABSOLUTELY sure that we had no possible reason to be holding any kind of grudge against you?”

I thought for a while,

“Mmmmm. Maybe you’re right…..Why the **** was I not even a wee bit concerned when I saw that?”

[scots_nomad]

This is a continuation of the part of the story I began to explain in my previous post. It is a pretty complex bit to explain and even summarising it very severely I won't get the rest into this post but at least I can tell you what happened next:

After the episode with the blood coming out of my taps (and my eye) we both decided that I had sweated quite enough by that point so we moved onto the next stage of my preparations. They told me to go downstairs and watch TV for a while so they could get everything else ready then about 5 minutes later they said:

‘OK, we’re ready! We’re sending a couple of our people over to get you, but there are a couple of rules you’ll need to know.’

I asked what they were they just said something like

“No rings, no chains, no buckles and no zips”

“How do you expect me to hold my trousers up with no belts and no zips?”

“Belts are fine as long as they are like that one”

(they were referring to something on the TV at that time – Someone was wearing one of those belts that feeds over a roller and then doubles back on itself to stay tight),

“…We can handle friction but we can’t take you with a buckle that looks like the thing that went through your foot the other night.” (That is a reference to a long and pretty gruesome bit of the story I haven’t mentioned yet)

”Ya b*****ds! Don’t keep reminding me of that! But anyway, I don’t think I’ve got a belt like that and as far as the ‘no zips’ bit is concerned - Do you expect me to wander round your place all day with my fly open???”

”Answer one question for us – What’s your favourite jeans?”

”Oh aye!!! My five-oh-ones! So buttons are OK then?”

”Did we say anything about buttons?”

”Actually I meant ‘metal buttons’ – It’s just that I assumed that your rules were something to do with metal objects.”

”Naw, metal is fine. Take coins in your pocket if you need to, all we are concerned about are things that bind you - Things that could cut right through you if we have to turn you inside out.”

”What???? What do you mean ‘If we need to turn you inside out’???”

”Well actually what we mean is ‘WHEN we flip you inside out’.”

”What??? ‘When you flip me inside out’???? What the **** are you gonna do to me???”

”Don’t worry Wee Man, we know that it sounds bad when we put it like that – That’s why we didn’t actually want to say it at all – but you’ll be fine! You’ll hardly feel a thing as long as you don’t have anything on that binds you. We can handle buttons, we can handle friction belts but chains and rings and buckles and zips are a no-no.”

“Phhheww. Don’t know if I fancy the sound of this….In fact I do know that I don’t fancy it! What the **** are you gonna do to me to turn me inside out, stick my head up my ass and then pull my tongue or something like that?”

”Well, we could try it that way if you want, but we prefer to do things our way.”

”Of course I don’t! So what’s your way then?”

”You don’t have any words that can describe it and you don’t have any experiences that we can compare it to, so you will either have to just trust us or we will have to just forget the whole thing and move on to the next bit….Although we really would like you to come to our place, and we really can achieve more if you can bring yourself to do that.”

(Pause)

“Oh ****! Maybe I’ll regret this, but let’s keep going for now…But about the ‘ring thing’, we could have a problem here Houston!”

I held my hands out in front of me, bent downwards with my fingers pointing towards the floor to show my friends that there was ‘no way on Earth’ I could get my rings off. I wore two gold rings but I hadn’t taken either of them off for about a decade and in that time my knuckles had grown much wider than the rings….My gesture was followed by the ‘Tink, tink’ of my rings sliding off my fingers and on to the floor!

I thought that maybe my recent weight loss (I hadn’t had a decent meal for days because of everything that was going on) together with the ‘sweating my **** off’ bit during my yoga-type exercises had allowed the rings to come off so easily so I checked to see if I could put the rings back on again but the knuckles were still much bigger than the rings and I couldn’t even get close to getting them on.

I put the rings on the living-room table, got changed into a pair of my Levi 501’s (with button fly) and waited for ‘them’ to come and get me – Real curious about what ‘they’ would look like and both keen and worried about finding out what a parallel universe looked like. A short time later the Big Yin said,

“OK, that’s us now!”

I looked around but saw nothing so I said

“What is?”

….Just then my door bell rang!

I opened my door and was very surprised to see Minh, my regular taxi driver, together with my landlord (I knew that Minh knew who my landlord was but I had never actually seen them together.). I said

“Hi Minh. What can I do for you”

(I chose to speak to Minh coz I neither liked nor trusted my landlord!).

Minh didn’t reply at all, he just gestured toward my house and then led me back into it – I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but there was something strange about both of them. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say next so I just played along and let them lead the way.

When we got into the house my landlord led me by the arm up to my bedroom and them said “You rest!” and pointed at my bed – neither his voice or his language sounded like him – It was more like the monotonic voice that my friends had used at the start of the chats. I said something like “No, I’m OK. I don’t need rest.”, But he just led me by the arm to my bed and said “You rest” again.

I sat down on the bed and he left the room but I didn’t fancy the idea of my landlord just wandering around freely in my house so I got up again and followed him out of the room. Minh met me just outside the door and said “It’s OK John. You rest” (again, neither his voice nor his language sounded like Minh, and furthermore I had already noticed that both his eyes and the landlords eyes were ‘not right’…In fact, their eyes were COMPLETELY black! No iris, no pupil, no whites – ALL BLACK!).

I was a bit uncomfortable with ‘all of that’, but decided to play along up to a point. I walked back into my bedroom and shut the door, but as soon as I heard both of them walk down the stairs I spoke out to ‘my friends’ and said,

“What the **** is going on here, and why did you send THAT b*****d (i.e. my untrusted landlord) to my house?”.

“Don’t worry Wee Man, they’re not really who they seem to be…Didn’t you notice the eyes?”

”Of course I noticed the ****ing eyes, but why them? Especially when you know that I wouldn’t trust my landlord as far as I could throw him?”

”We just needed to look like people who could come and go from your house without getting a second glance from anyone else in the area. It’s us Wee Man, not who it looks like.”

”I’m not sure I should trust you any more than I trust my landlord, but ‘OK’, I’ll play along for a while, but why can’t they just speak to me like you do?”

”Just play along Wee Man, this is the way we’ve got to do it and for reasons that we can’t explain to you right now the less we make them say the better, so just play along as best you can.”

I heard ‘them’ doing something in my kitchen – it actually sounded like they were cooking something, however I couldn’t think of anything ‘cookable’ in there – I hadn’t had a meal for ‘**** knows how long’ and I was starving, – especially after the contents of my stomach had been ‘taken’ from me – so if I had known there was food down there I would already have eaten it!

A few minutes later ‘my landlord’ came up the stairs with a bowl full of some strange looking ‘noodle soup’, although ‘God knows’ where he got the ingredients for it from, as there had certainly NEVER been any of ‘that stuff’ in my kitchen whilst I lived there, and neither of ‘my visitors’ had been carrying anything when they arrived as far as I could remember.

He brought the soup to my bedside and I had a look at it – The noodles looked ordinary enough (for Vietnamese food), wide noodles sort of like tagliatelli, but the grey ‘meat looking stuff’ floating in amongst it looked only vaguely like meat (Even by Vietnamese standards! ).

“No way! Look, I’m all for some kinds of experiments but food is something I just don’t experiment with and there is no way I could eat any of that!”

My landlord said “Eat”, but I just pushed the bowl away and said “No way!”. I turned my head away fro him and toward the ceiling to make it obious that I was addressing ‘my friends’ and said to ‘them’

“Look! There is NO WAY I am gonna eat that so if this is a necessary part of the process then you’ve just gotta find a better way of doing this!”.

My landlord just ‘stopped in his tracks’ and then walked out of the room without a further word or reaction. My friends voice then said,

“We need you to at least try a little of it.”

“OK, maybe I could try some of the liquid but I am not eating any of that solid stuff”

“We need you to take some of that too. Could you maybe even try one noodle for us?”.

I paused for a while and then said,

“OK. Some liquid and maybe one ****ing noodle as long as the liquid doesn’t taste as bad as the rest of it looks but I’m not touching any of that meat-looking stuff.”

”OK! Deal! Some liquid and maybe one noodle, we can go with that!....But Just don’t look too closely at the noodle before you eat it!”

I started to object, suspicious that they were up to something, but just at that moment my landlord walked in again (actually, he walked in EXACTLY as he had done the first time, giving no impression that he had any memory of the fact that we had been through this before just a few minutes ago!). He held the bowl out to me and said “Eat”. I took the spoon and carefully took a small spoonful (with no ‘floaty’ bits!). It tasted ‘OK’, or to be more exact, it didn’t taste of much at all so I then fished out a noodle – I didn’t scrutinize it as much as my instinct would have wanted me to, but I did look closely enough to make sure that there were no big lumps of ‘meaty stuff’ sticking to it.

I swallowed the noodle as quickly as I could, trying not to taste it at all (and trying successfully, as it happens, coz I have no idea what it actually tasted like), and then I said to my landlord,

“Oh YUM! That was delicious, but that’s enough for me coz I’m all full up now!”

I was expecting some kind of argument or resistance from him but he just took the bowl away and placed it on the set of drawers near to my bed. Then he turned around and moved toward the gold chain around my neck as if he was going to take it off. I pushed him back and said, “**** off!”

My landlord ‘froze like a statue’ and I heard the Big Yin’s voice,

“We told you Wee Man, you can’t take that with you. Let him take it for now but don’t worry, we’ll make sure that you get it back after the journey”

I said something like “Aye, you better, coz I don’t trust that b*****d.” and they just repeated that I wasn’t to worry coz they’d make sure that I got it back after the journey. My landlord ‘statue’ started moving again, and this time I let it remove my neck chain and the gold bracelet that I wore around my right wrist. I got a bit suspicious when he slipped both of them into his pocket before picking up the noodle soup bowl and heading out the door so I made a mental note to make sure that I asked him for them back ‘after the journey’ (A mental note that was to be completely erazed from my mind during the ‘weirdest taxi ride of all time’ that was to follow!).

I won’t go into the details of that journey, nor the totally bizarre day that followed, here. I can tell you that the ‘parallel universe’ that they took me too looked A LOT like some part of Saigon that I’d never been to before but all the people there acted weirdly all day (even by Saigon standards! )

[MySummerJob]

I won’t go into the details of that journey, nor the totally bizarre day that followed, here. I can tell you that the ‘parallel universe’ that they took me too looked A LOT like some part of Saigon that I’d never been to before but all the people there acted weirdly all day (even by Saigon standards! )

Not even a summary of events?

[scots_nomad]

Not even a summary of events?

Mmmm...It was a REALLY weird day - a bit scary at the beginning, then weird, then confusing and then I got annoyed about it being confusing but maybe the strangest thing of all about it is the fact that it is the only day of the whole experience (and I include both the intense one month crash course at the beginning as well as all the stuff that has come after that) that has never really made much sense to me coz I still don't know what it was all about or what I was supposed to learn from it. Don't get me wrong, during those first few weeks there were lots of bit that didn't make much sense at the time but in every other case subsequent events made things fall into place and I could understand the point of everything they did, but that day still has me stumped. Not sure how much a 'summary of events' would help because without a lot of the details it won't mean much at all but I'll see what I can do. I have the whole story of that day written down so I will see how much I can condense it down but will probably still take at least two separate posts...And like I said, the end seems a bit confusing/pointless/anti-climactic (If I was making this stuff up I would certainly have come up with a better ending to that day than the one I got! )

[scots_nomad]

OK I’ve had a look at the description I had previously written about that ‘weird day’ and it is LONGGG so I’ll have to do a bit of severe editing on it, however I think I need to describe the initial taxi ride in a fair bit of detail to make any sense of what I guess was what my friends meant by ‘flipping me inside out’ – may even have to split that description over two posts though:

Soon after my landlord left my bedroom with the remains of the noodle soup stuff I heard footsteps coming up the wooden spiral staircase and them Minh, my taxi driver (OK, he wasn’t strictly ‘my’ taxi driver, however I used his taxi so often that he was almost like a personal chauffeur and I have no doubt that I was by far his most regular customer) and said something like ‘OK, we’re ready. Let’s go!’. I got up from my bed still dressed only in a tee-shirt and a pair of 501s, pulled on a pair of light, slip on casual shoes and followed Minh downstairs. My landlord was standing by the open front door waiting for us. Without any further words being spoken my landlord exited the house, followed by Minh and then me, pausing only to pick my house keys up from the cupboard by the door.

Outside my heavy, steel plated double garden gates sat Minh’s taxi – I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, possibly something a bit grander or more exciting maybe, but it looked like wherever it was we were going we were going there in Minh’s little green Kia saloon taxi. Minh walked around the car and climbed into the driver’s seat, my landlord climbed into the front passenger seat and I took my usual place in the back, on the right hand side behind the front passenger seat. In normal circumstances, as soon as I climbed into Minh’s taxi I would tell him to get the sounds on – such was my familiarity with that little Kia taxi that I had even provided Minh with a selection of mixed tapes of ‘my kind of music’ which I am pretty sure saw little or no use when I wasn’t in the car – but circumstances that day were far from normal so we set off without the usual accompaniment of the Smashing Pumpkins or the Red Hot Chili Peppers or the like. I may well have asked something like ‘So where are we off to then?’, but if I did then I didn’t get an answer, as neither Minh nor my landlord said a word for the rest of the journey.

The first kilometer or so of the taxi ride seemed pretty normal – we drove to the end of my street, turned left on the street that would have taken us to the supermarket if we had turned right, and then turned right onto the main highway, a three lane duel carriageway which was about as close to a motorway as you will find in Vietnam (which is not actually that close considering you are pretty likely to come across the odd cart being pulled by a water buffalo and a liberal sprinkling of people on bicycles – many of who would inevitably be cycling in the opposite direction to the general traffic flow!). We headed along the duel carriageway toward the Saigon Bridge, a massive concrete arched structure that spanned the wide reddish clay waters of Saigon River. If we had turned right once we had crossed the bridge we would have been heading toward the familiar territory of the city centre however we carried on straight after the bridge and I had actually no idea where we were heading as I had never been that way before.

My friends spoke to me – they seemed to be speaking to me aloud rather than telepathically, so my first instinct was to look toward Minh and my landlord to see if they reacted, which they didn’t. Without paying any real attention to whatever it was that my friends were saying I asked them telepathically,

“Can they hear us?”

“Don’t worry about them, they’re with us.”

”Yeah, but can they hear what you are saying?”

“Would it be easier if they couldn’t?”

“Yeah maybe.”

”OK then, they can’t hear us.”

”But can they hear me – I mean if I speak out loud?”

“They can’t hear US, including you. Just forget they are here, they’re only here to drive – or in fact they are only here to look like they are driving because it would look pretty strange if the car had no one in the front.”

I decided to continue my conversation verbally, but before I did, I just had to test something.

“Minh!”

It wasn’t quite a shout but it wasn’t far off it. No reaction.

“OK, I just had to test.”

“Alright, can we get on with this now?”

“OK. So where are we going.”

“We told you already. We’ll be there quite soon, but right now we want you to feel all the surfaces around you. Touch them all, see what they feel like, see how soft or hard they are – just get familiar with them all.”

It seemed like a strange thing to ask, but compared to everything else that had been going on maybe it wasn’t really that strange.

I put my hands down by my side and felt the seat I was sitting on – it was just a bog standard cloth covered car bench seat of the type you would find in the back of any basic range saloon car. I pressed down on the seat and then slide my hands to the front edge of the seat and gave it a squeeze – it was just a typical cloth covered, vinyl fronted car seat. I turned my attention to the car door on my right hand side. The majority of the door was covered by a plastic coated door panel which was once again typical of any basic model saloon car. I pressed against the side panel – there was no padding but the panel did ‘give’ a little, moving back a couple of millimeters until it hit the steel framing which lay behind it. Above the door panel there was a narrow band of steel bodywork about three inches wide running just below the window. The narrow panel was smooth and covered with the same bottle-green paint as the exterior of the car – I pushed against the panel, and although it was no doubt just a millimeter or two thick there was no give in it at all, so I guessed that there must be a fairly heavy steel frame directly behind it. I slid my hand up onto the glass of the window – taking a quick look toward Minh to see if he was paying any attention to what was going on in his back seat, because I realised that if it was my car and I was going to have to clean it I wouldn’t be too happy to see someone pawing at my clean windows. Minh seemed completely oblivious (which is fairly typical for a Saigonese driver, boom-boom! J ). Unsurprisingly the window felt like glass. I pushed against the window and found there was possibly about a millimeter of give as I pushed the glass against the rubber seals that surrounded it. The only other surface around me was the back of the passenger seat in which my landlord was seated – it was the same vinyl that covered the lower, vertical part of the seat that I was on. I pressed lightly against the stretched vinyl and found that there was quite a lot of give before I felt the inner springs of the seat. I pressed a little harder and I could feel the springs compress under the pressure from my fingers. I looked up, half expecting my landlord to turn around to see what I was doing with his chair, but he seemed just as oblivious to my backseat goings on as Minh so I pushed a little bit harder but still fairly tentatively until my friends butted in,

“Don’t worry about him. Remember, he’s not really here.”

I pushed more firmly against the passenger seat. There was a lot of give in the seat itself, but there also seemed to be a bit of movement of the entire seat if I pushed hard enough. Although he was apparently ‘not really there’ I still felt very conscious of my landlord sitting in the front seat, and couldn’t help thinking back to the time when I wanted to strangle the kid in the seat behind me on a plane once who spent the entire flight either kicking against the back of my chair or slamming the folding table down, however no matter how hard I pushed against the back of my landlord’s seat there was no reaction from him at all so I finally got around to placing both of my hands on the back of the passenger seat and giving it a good firm push. The back of the passenger seat was certainly the surface with the most give – depending on which part of the chair I pushed on the vinyl cover would move anywhere from one to two inches before I felt any resistance from the seat springs, the springs themselves would give another half an inch or so, and on top of that there was also a few millimeters of movement in the seat itself.

Task completed, I addressed my friends again,

“OK, so what now?”

“Now we want you to finish what you are doing – we told you to feel ALL the surfaces around you.”

“Even the floor?...OK, dumb question I suppose.”

Space was a bit tight in the back of Minh’s wee Kia so it would have been a bit of a struggle to reach down and feel the carpet with my hand and besides I was still feeling pretty tired so instead of trying to reach down I decided to kick off my shoes, feel the floor with my feet, and see if my friends raised any objections. I slipped my bare feet out of my canvas shoes and shoved the shoes off to the side of the car. I expected to feel carpet but instead I felt something cold and quite hard instead. I looked down at the floor and saw that Minh had a put coupe of rubber car mats into the foot-well area which I had never noticed before. The mats were a fairly hard rubber and the surface was covered in stiff, rounded topped stubbly bristles. I pushed my feet down and slid them across the mat. The bristles were fairly thick and dense and didn’t give very much when I pushed down on them, but rather than being at all uncomfortable I actually found the sensation of my feet sliding across the stiff, unyielding bristles quite soothing – In all my forty years up until that point I think I had had maybe four or five corns in my life and yet in the weeks leading up to first contact I seemed (for reasons best known to only my friends) to have developed a rash of them, and had four or five of them on each foot which had made walking almost unbearable at times however that day in Minh’s taxi I was feeling so good as I massaged my aching feet on Minh’s car mat that I continued to slide my feet across the bobbly rubber bristles long after I had become well familiar with how that particular surface felt. I looked around me to see if I had missed anything else – I noticed that there were areas of exposed carpet to either side of the rubber mat below my feet so I briefly moved my feet apart and gave them a quick rub on the carpet before returning them to the far more comforting car mat and after that there was only the roof above me.

The roof was covered with a thin, stretchy, perforated, off-white coloured vinyl with a faux leather surface finish. The vinyl was stretched between a series of semi-rigid ribs which ran from one side of the car to the other at roughly eight inch centres. I poked at the vinyl, first with just one finger then with my right hand, and noted that between the lateral strengthening ribs there was quite a lot of give – I was reluctant to push too hard with my fingers in case I permanently stretched the vinyl but there seemed to be somewhere between one and two centimeters of ‘gap’ between the off-white vinyl and the thin steel plate of the bodywork which I knew must lie above it somewhere. Satisfied that I was sufficiently familiar with how the ceiling of the car felt I had one last look around to see if there were any other surfaces that I had missed and then I addressed my friends again,

“OK, I’ve felt all the surfaces now, so now what?”

“Now we want you to remember what all those surfaces felt like. Soon we are going to ask you to close your eyes and after that you are going to feel those surfaces pressing against you at various times – don’t worry about where the surfaces are when you feel them coz we are really just using them as a kind of metaphor to show you how hard we need you to push to get through. You don’t need to push against every surface as soon as you feel them, but the longer you leave it the harder you are going to have to push – soft surfaces mean you don’t have to push that hard but the stiffer the surface the harder you are going to have to push against it. Do you understand all that?”

“Phhhew, I understand all the words, and I think I understand what you want me to do but I’m not actually sure I understand any of it.”

“It’s OK you’ll understand what we mean once it starts. So, whenever you are ready we need you to close your eyes, and whatever happens after that it is really important that you keep your eyes tight shut until we tell you it’s OK to open them again because you really aren’t ready to see what you might see if you open them. No cheating now! Not even a wee peek!...So, are you ready to start?”

I was feeling a bit nervous after that build up and I had absolutely no idea what to expect next – Was I about to find out what it’s like to be turned inside out?...And if so, was it gonna hurt? I took one last deep breath…

“OK! I guess I am about as ready as I am ever going to be so let’s get it started.”

I shut my eyes tightly and waited for something to start…

[scots_nomad]

OK, following directly on from yesterday's post...

“OK! I guess I am about as ready as I am ever going to be so let’s get it started.”

I shut my eyes tightly and waited for something to start…

But nothing did.

Seconds passed and still nothing happened.

Outside the car the traffic noise sounded normal.

I felt myself relax a bit and even remembered to start breathing again, but still nothing much seemed to be happening so I went back to massaging my feet on Minh’s car mat.

More seconds passed, maybe thirty or so of them, and finally it felt like something strange may be beginning to happen. It was almost imperceptible at first but I began to feel that the car mat beneath my feet was actually pushing back against me. The sensation was so slight that I wasn’t sure whether or not it was just my imagination so I decided to stop sliding my feet across the car mat for a while just to check. I sat dead still for five seconds or so and managed to convince myself that the sensation was real – I could feel my legs bend slightly at the knees - the car mat was pushing against my feet as though the floor of the car was rising up toward me very slowly. Was this it? Was this what the big mysterious build up was all about?

It was beginning to feel like it was building up towards another big anti-climax, but I felt like I had little choice but to play along and do as my friends had asked so after allowing another five to ten seconds to pass during which the floor of the car rose by no more than half an inch I began to push back against the rising car mat. Actually what I did was little more than resume my previous foot massage all be it that I did push a little more vigourously than I had been doing before, but the additional downward force I was applying meant that instead of my feet just sliding forward across the surface of the car mat as they had been doing during the massage they dug into the mat more and caused the mat to slide forward on the car’s carpet. Feeling the gradual movement of the mat I continued to push and pretty soon my knees were straightened and I had pushed the mat as far away as my legs would reach. I was surprised and a little confused by the fact that I hadn’t felt my shins press against the back of the passenger chair in front of my as it seemed to me that from the angle my legs were at I must have pushed the car mat right under the front passenger seat, but other than that everything seemed pretty normal.

I kept my knees locked and my legs out in front of me at a downward angle of about forty-five degrees as I could feel that the car mat was continuing to push back against my feet. In that position I was unable to do any further ‘offensive pushing’ as my legs were already at the limit of their reach so I decided to step my feet back to their original starting position in order to get better purchase. I expected to be ‘stepping’ back onto carpeting, having pushed the rubber car mat so far in front of me, however when I pulled my feet back to their original position I found that it was still rubber car mat beneath them – that didn’t seem to make much sense to me unless the mat had been much larger than I originally realised and had been bent up the vertical face of my seat to begin with, but I didn’t have much time to dwell on that at the time as I could feel the car mat continue to push up against me. I put my arms down by my sides and gripped the edge of my seat to get better leverage before pushing down and forward with both of my feet as firmly as I could.

Once again I felt the car mat slide slowly across the surface of the underlying carpet and pretty soon I had my knees locked and my legs straight out below the passenger chair in front of my (which I still couldn’t feel any contact with). Still I could feel the car mat pushing back against me so once again I stepped my feet back to their original starting position to prepare myself for another push and once again I found my feet were still on rubber car mat rather than the exposed carpeting that I expected to find – How long was that ****ing car mat??? Once again I gripped the edge of my seat tightly with both hands and once again I pushed down with my feet until my legs were straight out in front of me and once again I stepped my feet back to their original starting position, but this time I did find the comparatively soft carpeting material beneath me. I stopped pushing and sat still a while to check whether the floor of the car was still pushing back against me through the carpet. It didn’t seem to be.

Using my hands for leverage I slide my bum backwards in my seat and sat back to try to relax for a bit – the anticipation and excitement which had kept me going as I prepared for this ‘adventure’ was wearing off and I could feel the tiredness that I seemed to have been living with for weeks now creep back into my bones and all I wanted to do was sit back in my seat, relax, and maybe even doze off for a while…but my friends weren’t going to let that happen!

I felt the car door to my right push against my side – with my eyes closed my logic was telling me that we must be going round a long, sharp left turn which was pitching me to my right however none of my other senses could detect any such turn, and as far as they were concerned I was sitting still and traveling forward and it was the door that was closing in against me. I tried to use my elbow to push the door away from me but that seemed to have no affect whatsoever and the door just kept pushing. I slide along my seat to the left slightly to give myself a bit of room and I put my left foot onto the raised hump in the floor where the drive shaft ran along underneath the centre of the car, put my right shoulder to the door and pushed against it as hard as I could. I felt as though I was trying to push start a small car on my own – it took a great deal of effort to overcome the car’s initial inertia, but once I got any kind of movement it seemed to begin to move a bit easier. I moved the invisible car a few inches, enough to regain the ground it had gained from me with its first pushes, and then I eased off and tried to rest, but rather than continuing to ‘roll away from me’ as I had hoped it would do it just started to push back at me again – if I was push starting a small car it was obviously sitting on a slight uphill slope! I quickly put my right foot onto the raised hump in the car floor beside my left foot to give me maximum leverage and I pushed against the car door with all the strength I could muster from such a cramped position. Again I felt the invisible car begin to edge away from me slowly and gradually but this time I didn’t ease off – the more I pushed it away the straighter I could get my legs which would in turn enable me to push even harder. I turned my body so I could literally ‘put my back into it’ and I pushed for all I was worth – the invisible car continued to roll away from me at a gradually increasing rate until I reached the point where my knees were locked and both my legs and my back were pretty much straight. The invisible car continued to roll away and I realised that I was in danger of falling on my bum if it rolled any further.

With my eyes still tightly closed as I had been instructed, nothing was making much sense to me in my mind – I could feel my feet on the raised hump in the centre of the floor of Minh’s car and I could feel the car’s right hand side door against my upper back and shoulders, but with my legs and back all but straight that would have put a distance of at least five feet between the centre of the car and the door which just didn’t make any kind of sense at all. Whether it made sense to my mind or not, I realised that if I didn’t move soon the increasing distance between the car door and the central hump in the floor would fall on my bum into the foot-well between the front passenger seat and the rear bench seat so I eased off with my pushing and scrambled back up onto my seat, swinging my feet back into the foot-well as I did so – where I was surprised to find that my feet were once again back on the rubber car mat rather than the soft fibre carpet.

At that point I didn’t really care how or why the car mat had managed to get back into its original position after I had pushed it so far away from me coz all I wanted to do was sit back in my seat and relax. I didn’t even care much when I realised that the car mat was pushing up against my feet once again, after all my friends had specifically told me that I didn’t need to push against a surface as soon as I felt it and the car mat was rising so slowly that it would take at least a few minutes until it would actually cause me any real discomfort, so I decided I would just sit back and try to ignore the rising car mat completely. It didn’t last!

Within seconds I felt the back of my seat pushing forward against me, closing down as though the seat was some kind of twill-covered giant clam that was trying to eat me. Unlike the rising floor-mat it was impossible to ignore the pushing seat-back for long as it was just too uncomfortable so I reached both hands out in front of me, looking for the back of the passenger seat so I could use it to push against, but there was nothing there whatsoever! Once again, denied my ability to see, nothing was making much sense to my mind – Minh’s car just wasn’t big enough for the passenger seat to be out of my reach with even the smallest of passengers sitting in it, and yet it just wasn’t there. By that point the back of my seat had forced me into a position where I was leaning forward which made it difficult for me to push back against it without having something to brace myself against so I had to take on both the rising floor mat and the crushing seat back at the same time, pushing down with my feet and using that force to help me push back against the car seat behind me – both the seat and the mat seemed to succumb in equal measure and pretty soon I was able to sit back in my chair in relative comfort with my feet on the unmoving carpet beneath me…for a few seconds at least.

Once again I felt the car door to my right hand side pushing in against me – that really was the last thing I needed because the energy I had had to use the last time I found myself up against the car door had been far greater than I had needed to overcome any of the other pushy surfaces. I wanted to just move to my left away from the door rather than trying to take it on again but as soon as I moved it moved with me, buying me no time for rest at all. I realised that if I tried moving to the left again I would be too close to the central floor hump to be able to use it for leverage against the door so I was just going to have to knuckle down and put my shoulder into it again. I leant against the door and slid my foot along the carpet to find the raised central hump but instead my foot found what felt like another car door – now that really didn’t make any sense whatsoever! Firstly, what the **** was the door doing down so low? Surely there should be some kind of raised carpet-covered sill below the door, and yet my foot felt as though even at floor level it was right in the middle of the stiff, plastic coated door panel! That anomaly was pretty disorienting, but there was another apparent anomaly that I found far more worrying and far more pressing (in every sense of the word) - Just a few seconds ago I had calculated that the distance between the central hump and the right hand side door was about five feet and yet now there seemed to be less than four feet between the right hand door and the left hand door, and even that distance seemed to be shrinking by the second!

I felt panicky as there seemed to be very little time for me to think about anything. I decided that the best thing I could do would be to slip down onto the floor of the foot-well so I could brace myself directly between the two doors that seemed to be closing in on me. I slid off my seat and into the foot-well, but rather than feeling the carpet, or even the rubber car mat beneath me it actually felt like another door! Now that really, really didn’t make sense but I had absolutely no time to worry about it as I could feel both the door below my feet and the door behind my shoulders edging ever closer to each other. I pushed against both with all the strength I could muster and I could feel a little bit of movement from one or other or both of them (in my position I couldn’t tell which and neither did I care, as long as it was getting me a bit more room it was a good thing, and that was all the mattered at the time), however I could also feel the door beneath my bum was gaining ground against me, and that was pretty worrying as there was nothing above me that I could use to push against it…Or at least I thought there wasn’t, and I knew that there shouldn’t have been because with me sitting/lying in the foot-well as I was there was no way I should have been able to reach the roof of the car above me, and yet there was ‘something’ there. I actually found it by accidentally brushing against it – ‘knowing’ my position on the floor of the car, I hadn’t even bother to try reaching up for something to push against, but at one point in my struggles against the side doors I had felt my head brush against some other surface – it actually felt more like the surface of the car seat I had just been sitting on rather than the stretched vinyl across the car roof but when I found it I didn’t really care much what it was as I was just grateful and relieved to have found something to push against. That feeling of relief didn’t last very long at all however – Was it really something for me to push against or was it in fact something for the car door below me to crush me up against? That really depended on who would win the pushing battle between me and the car door below me I figured, but before I could even think of taking on that battle I first had to win the battle between me and the two side doors which were threatening to crush me, and to be honest I was already having serious doubts as to how well that battle would turn out!

I decided to ignore the car door below me/car seat above me and focused all of my attention and strength on pushing against the doors below me feet and above my shoulders. I pushed and strained and sweated and swore and pushed and pushed and pushed until I finally managed to get my legs and back more or less straight – I might not yet have won the war but that particular battle seemed to have gone my way enough to allow me to focus my attention on resisting the car door beneath me which was pushing me up toward the weirdly positioned car seat above. I got my back into as comfortable a pushing position as I could find and then raised both my hands above me at about shoulder level to find the other surface to push against – the other surface was a lot closer than it had been before when I had brushed against me, and more worrying still, it seemed to have become yet another car door!!!

I felt all the strength, energy, enthusiasm and even the will to live drain from my body almost instantly. The car door surface above me was so close that I would have difficult in generating any real force against it from the position I was in and besides, I just felt like I had absolutely nothing else left to give.

Lying down in the car’s narrow foot-well with my eyes shut and with the car surfaces below me and just above me it stuck me that this is exactly what it would feel like to be in a coffin, and that seemed pretty appropriate as I felt like I was being buried alive!

For the first time since all this weird pushy stuff begun I called out to my friends,

“Help me!”

It wasn’t an instruction or even a demand, even to me it sounded more like a pathetic plea, but all I got back from my friends was a response,

“Push Wee Man, push!”

Their response neither galvanized nor encouraged me – it just p***ed me off!!!

“I am ****ing pushing! What the **** do you think I’m ****ing doing? I’m not ****ing stupid!”

Maybe they had actually helped me after all – indirectly at least – because my new found anger brought with it some degree of new found energy and I set about that door above me with all of it!

I pushed and squirmed and wriggled – if I went down I was going to go down struggling. I pushed with my hands, with my feet, with my knees and with my elbows and as soon as I felt I had managed to grab myself a couple of centimeters I shuffled myself around to get into the best pushing position and then began it all again. Centimeter by centimeter, inch by inch, I gradually stretched my coffin, and with every cubic inch I gained I found it a little easier to angle myself into a better pushing position which allowed me to use my strength and energy more efficiently. I was winning! I was winning very slowly, but I was definitely winning, and that was all I needed to know to keep on going!

Eventually I reached the point where I could straighten my arms out in front of me completely and realised that I was going to have to change my position completely in order to push any more or any further. I figured that I had created enough room for myself to shuffle around into a crouching position with one knee on the floor from which I would be able to thrust myself upwards like Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders. I quickly sat upright and scooted my bum back along the carpet a bit before raising myself up slightly with my hands to enable me to get my legs beneath me with my left knee on the floor to create an ideal pushing platform for myself, and that was when it struck me just how normal everything felt around me. Below me I could feel the rubber car mat under my left knee and right foot and what felt like the carpet under the bare toes of my left foot, I could feel my right shoulder against something that felt very much like the back of the passenger seat of Minh’s car whilst my left elbow seemed to be resting on something that felt like the rear seat where I had been sitting when my strange journey began, and when I raised my left hand above my head I couldn’t feel anything at all – in short, everything felt as if it was exactly where it should be, even the ‘nothing’ bit above my head – well everything except me that is, because unless all my senses were fooling me again I seemed to be squeezed down on one knee in the narrow gap between Minh’s rear seat and his front passenger seat.

I thought a message to my friends telepathically,

“Is that it finished?”

“That’s that bit of it finished.”

“So can I open my eyes now?”

“You can open them for a wee while but we are going to have to ask you to close them again soon.”

I opened my eyes and verified that, wherever the hell I had been a minute or so ago, I was indeed now crouched down and squashed into the narrow gap between the rear and passenger seats of Minh’s taxi. I slid myself up and onto the rear seat again rather sheepishly and immediately looked for any kind of reaction from either Minh or my landlord as I just couldn’t imagine what they must have made of whatever had been going on behind them, but just as before, they both seemed totally oblivious to everything.

Not knowing what kind of strange and/or wonderful landscape might lie outside now that I had gone through ‘all that’ I quickly looked out of the window – It was still Saigon!...Or if it wasn’t still Saigon it was some other place that looked and even sounded a hell of a lot like Saigon!

[scots_nomad]

OK to finish off the story of the rest of my visit to ‘their place’ as briefly as I can:

After the scary bit where I felt I was being crushed in the back of the taxi we drove on for another ten minutes or so – there was something weird going on inside the taxi at the time which I won’t get into but outside it still looked like we were driving through a part of Saigon that I wasn’t familiar with then my friends told me to close my eyes and keep them closed until they told me to open them.

‘Oh god I am not gonna start getting crushed again am I?’

‘No, we’ve finished with that bit and you won’t have to go through it again, this will be different. Close your eyes and keep them closed no matter what until we tell you it’s OK to open them.’

Reluctantly I closed my eyes and listened to the traffic as we drove along for another couple of minutes and then we pulled over and stopped. I almost opened my eyes instinctively to see why we had stopped but managed to stop myself. I heard Minh shut off the engine and then both front car doors opened and I and I felt the car move Minh and my landlord climbed out. A couple of seconds later I felt the car move again as someone got it – I say ‘someone’ because right from the start it didn’t feel like Minh…I don’t mean that in any ESP sense, it’s just that the car shifted much more as if someone a lot heavier than Minh got in (Minh was a short, thin Vietnamese guy who probably didn’t weigh much more than 7 stone). Whoever got in said ‘We aww right back there?’ in a VERY Glaswegian (i.e. from Glasgow) accent which took me so much by surprise I nearly opened my eyes again but once again I managed to stop myself and just replied ‘Yeah, I think so’. The new driver shut the door, but it didn’t sound like the door of Minh’s little green Kia tin-box, it sounded much heavier and more substantial and a LOT like the sound of a black hackney cab from back home (i.e. the thing generally known as a London Cab but also the standard taxi in Glasgow). He started the engine and again it had the very familiar sound of a diesel powered black cab from home rather than a small Kia and we pulled off again…I still had my eyes closed but I was sure that everything outside the cab had changed – it’s hard to explain exactly why, but outside the cab didn’t sound like Saigon anymore, and if I didn’t know any better I would have said we were in Glasgow!

We only drove about 30 yards before the cab stopped again but we hadn’t pulled over so I assumed we were either stopped in traffic or at traffic lights – I guessed the latter because I could hear the turn indicator clicking away. We moved off again turning a sharp left and drove on maybe 300 yards before stopping again – the sound of the indicator made me suspect we were at another set of traffic lights. We turned left again and almost immediately the sounds outside changed slightly like we were in a tunnel – Actually that didn’t surprise me because the picture of what was going on outside that I had built up in my mind since the ‘black cab’ journey began had reminded me of getting into a cab outside Glasgow Central train station at the taxi rank in Gordon St, turning left to head down Hope St, turning left again onto Argyle St (where we would go through a tunnel under the railway lines above). We left the short tunnel and stopped at another set of traffic lights and then turned left again – which would mean we were driving up Union St if my mental picture was right. I began to suspect that the taxi was taking me to my family home (that is on the east side of Glasgow whereas anywhere else ‘significant to me’ would be on the west side and we were going in totally the wrong direction for that). We stopped at a fourth set of lights and I was surprised to hear the indicator again because if we were going to my family home we should have gone straight on and besides if we were at the junction my mind’s mental picture thought we were at there is no right turn at that junction but if we were turning left again that would just bring us back where we started…We turned left and about 50 yards later I felt the taxi pull into the left again and stopped. The driver turned off the engine and I heard both car doors open again. One person got out and two people got in. The doors sounded like Minh’s little Kia again, as did the engine when it started. We pulled out from the kerb and drove straight on (If we were ‘still’ at Glasgow Central train station we would have driven straight into the wall of the building opposite the junction of Gordon St and Hope St, but as we didn’t crash I figured we weren’t in Glasgow after all 9or maybe that should be ‘anymore’!). Seconds later my friends said I could open my eyes so I IMMEDIATELY turned around and looked out the back window because wherever we ‘were’ should only have been about 50 yards behind us but when I looked back all I saw was a very long, straight, Saigon-like arterial road that stretched back for many hundred yards without any sign of Glasgow Central station (nor indeed of any of the junctions I had just turned down!

The whole taxi journey probably took about 30-45 minutes maybe even an hours (although it’s another thing that would be hard to estimate the duration of because of all the weirdness), then Minh and my landlord dropped me off at a waiting room with looked like it was in a large hospital but it wasn’t a building I recognised. They told me to wait inside, which I did. I sat down on one of the chairs in an empty row of seats in the waiting room (there were a few others sitting around and people walking by every now and again) then a young-ish girl (early twenties) sat down two seats away from me. She took out her handphone (actually with hindsight it looked like a smart phone, maybe even an iPhone but back in 2004 neither I nor anyone else on the planet knew what a smart phone was). She put it down on the centre of the empty chair between her and I then she picked it up again and placed it even closer to me. I had no idea whether I was supposed to take it or not so I jokingly said’

‘Is that a present for me?’

She laughed and said ‘No, this is my phone’ – I felt glad I hadn’t just picked it up as it seemed she was nothing to do with ‘this’ (whatever this was) and would probably have thought I was trying to steal her fancy phone, but then she said,

‘Do you recognise me?’

I looked at her. She was a very, very attractive girl and I’m sure I wouldn’t have forgotten her if I’d seen her before but I didn’t want to just say no so I said’

‘You’re eyes look familiar but I can’t say I remember you’

She said ‘It’s OK, it’s only the eyes you were meant to recognise. Come with me there is a taxi waiting outside’

When we left the waiting room there was a taxi sitting there so I went to get into it but she said ‘No, that’s not ours, ours is waiting outside’. We walked across a carpark and out of the main gate of the hospital or whatever it was and just outside there was a taxi parked on the roadside with its hood up as if it had broken down – apparently that was our taxi.

After a bit of messing around (getting in one door of the taxi, out the other side then back around and in the first door again and stuff like that - ?????) the driver put down the hood of the taxi (without having actually fixed anything) and we drove off. We pulled up outside a noodle shop and I realised that I had come out of the house without any money but that didn’t matter as the taxi driver just drove off without a mention of the fare. We walked into the noodleshop and everyone greeted me like an old friend or a special guest – they set a table for us right at the front of the shop like we were guests of honour and brought us two bowls of noodle soup. No one else 9apart from the girl) seemed to speak any English but whatever language they were talking didn’t sound like Vietnamese to me. I didn’t have a clue what was going on and was pretty uncomfortable about the fact that I had no money to pay the bill if/when it came – At one point I tried to explain to the person who seemed to be the owner that I had no money with me and I even turned my pockets inside out to show him but he just laughed and patted me on the back and pointed toward my bowl of soup as if telling me to eat it (despite having lived all round the world I am really not adventurous when it comes to eating food and normally I wouldn’t have touched that stuff but I felt obliged to at least try a little). The owner came back and kind of mopped at the table (which didn’t need mopped at all) – He had a REALLY thick bundle of folded banknotes in his hand and at one point he put the bundle on the table. When he finished wiping the table he went off and left the bundle of notes. I asked the girl if I was supposed to pick them up – she didn’t reply, she just smiled and nodded toward the bundle as if urging me to pick it up but I wasn’t touching it unless I understood what was going on (last thing I wanted was for these people to think I was trying to steal money).

The girl seemed to have forgotten that she could speak English because she never answered anything I asked she just smiled or nodded or gestured towards something (which invariably meant nothing to me) and I began to get a bit p***ed off about what was going on. I messed around with the food for a bit without actually eating anything and then the girl said ‘OK, let’s go’. She walked straight out of the shop but I still felt uneasy about having no cash with me and didn’t want anyone chasing after us to pay our bill to I went over to the owner again, told him once more that I had no cash with me then pointed to the bundle of money that he had left on the table. He smiled, patted me on the back, put the money in his pocket and then he, and everyone else in the shop waved us off (they actually all came out to the pavement to wave to us as we left.

I thought we were looking for another taxi but the girl walked over to a small motorbike/scooter parked outside the shop and gestured that I should get on and drive it! I hadn’t been on a motorbike for more than 20 years and I certainly wasn’t going to try re-learning that day so I insisted that if we were getting on the scooter she would have to drive – she did and I climbed on the back (I have no idea if it was her scooter or not but we headed off on it anyway). We ended up at another noodle shop! The greetings were just like in the first shop as was the food but this time they brought me chopsticks to eat it with (the first shop gave me a spoon, even though its quite normal for Vietnamese to eat soup-like noodle dishes with chopsticks). I am no expert with chopsticks but I gave it a go and managed to pick up a few noodles, but then the owner of the bar came over and pointed at the extra chopstick he had given me (he had brought me 3 rather than 2 but I thought it was just a mistake). He then picked up 3 chopsticks of his own and showed me how to pick things up using three chopsticks instead of two – It was weird and a bit over complicated to me but he seemed pretty comfy with them as if he was well used to eating like that. Then he encouraged me to try. At first I declined but he kept gesturing that I should try and everyone else in the shop gathered round to watch how I did. After a few attempted and a bit of coaching from the owner I managed to pick up and eat a noodle using 3 chopsticks – Everyone in the noodle shop cheered and a few patted me on the back. As soon as I had done that it seemed we had finished in that shop as the girl gestured that we should leave. Again the whole shop came outside to wave us off and once again we climbed onto a scooter (a different one from the one we had arrived on).

We went to a third noodle shop which was just as bizarre as the first 2 had been (wont bother going through the details) then we left there and climbed into a taxi that was waiting for us. It drove us through Saigon-like streets but I didn’t recognise anything, then at one point I heard the Big Yin’s voice telling me that I should close my eyes for a minute – quote: ‘as we have to break the continuity here’. I looked at the girl who was sitting beside me on the back seat to see if she had also heard the Big Yin’s voice – If she did she didn’t seem to react to it in any way. I closed my eyes then 10-20 seconds later I was told I could open them again – when I did I was almost right outside my house!!!

We pulled up at my gate and I said to the girl ‘Look, I still don’t have money to pay for this taxi – Do you have money or will I go into the house and bring some out for you?’ She suddenly remembered how to speak English and answered ‘It’s OK, we don’t need money but I’m coming into your house with you’. She really was a stunning looking girl and on any other occasion I’d have been happy for her to come in but I really had had enough of all the confusion for one day so I said to her,

“Will you be able to explain to me what all this is about?”

“No.”

“Well in that case I’m sorry but I really would prefer to be alone now”

She looked confused – I’m not surprised really, looking like she did I bet she hadn’t heard many guys tell her they wanted her to just go away!

I got out of the taxi and it drove off as I went through my gate. When I got back inside I shouted to/at my friends

‘What the **** was that about?’

‘Why didn’t you bring her in? You were supposed to bring her in and she would have explained things’

‘No she wouldn’t, I asked her if she could and she said no!’

‘No, you asked her is she could explain it ALL to you – She couldn’t have explained it ALL but she could have explained a lot…And after that…Well like you said before ‘whatever goes on behind closed doors between 2 consenting adults is no one’s business but theirs’

‘Damn! ****! S**t! can you get her to come back?’

‘No, not now, but maybe in future. Although we said you were ‘supposed to bring her in’, it is actually better in the long run that you did what you did, so let’s just leave everything at that for now.’

No doubt I pestered them for more of an explanation but I never got one and to date I am still pretty confused by that day as unlike almost every other part of my learning process (which was often filled with a lot of confusion on my part) there wasn’t some new piece of the jigsaw which came along later and suddenly made sense of it all…Or at least that piece of the jigsaw hasn’t come along yet!

Well that really is about as much of that story as I can tell here (I did warn you all at the beginning that it was probably gonna raise more questions than answers) – I just wish I could answer those questions but it really is the only bit of my whole experiences with my friends that has never really made any sense to me.