More than meets the mind's eye

There is an old quip that “there is more going on than meets the eye,” which long ago seemed to me to only point out that one is not seeing all that is going on in the background of some events. Yet I now ponder the thought a bit more broadly.

“Meets the eye” could refer to more than just what scenes are being seen by the eyes. The visible light-waves that enter the eye’s lens to form an image on the retina, are what is meeting the eye, more specifically. Those light-waves flowing through into the eye and triggering chemical processes in the eye’s retina, and those chemical changes trigger electrical signals that head over to talk with lots of other signals from elsewhere in the retina and get compared by the brain and mind to have them trigger meaningful impressions.

However, there are lots of light waves that head towards the eye that are not detectable by the retina’s chemistry, and thus presumably do not end up as meaningfulness in the mind. For example, radio, WiFi and television waves flow into the eye yet are ignored by the eye. In fact, the vast majority of electromagnetic waves that “meet the eye” are not presented by the eye to the brain as being there. The waves “meet the eye” but do not meet the mind’s eye.

Of course, the phrase was more likely to refer to such things as the mischief that the bad boys are doing on the other side of the wall out of sight; or even the complex inner workings of a clock that all one sees is the time indication on the face of the clock.

The mind’s eye, the imagination, is usually tuned up to best-possible represent the real world out there. For example, as one drives down the road, one’s mental image of the road out there with all its implications, needs to be a close similarity with the real-physical-world out there so as to be adequately useful to help guide one’s driving of the car.
Yet, as in watching a video or reading an adventure novel, the mind’s eye can also “see” that which has little if any relationship with what is physically out there right now.

And, one can imagine doing something without actually doing it. For example, I can imagine typing “mind’s eye” here before actually typing it. By doing so I can evaluate the difficulty level involved as well as probable results of the imagined action. Athletes can improve their performance by repeatedly imagining themselves performing some physical action perfectly, before actually doing it physically, I have read.

Yet also much more is received by the eye than reaches conscious awareness. One can cope with only a small fraction of the million bits of visual data coming in from the eyes each second; thus some part of the brain (or mind) has to pre-filter out nearly all that is actually meeting the eye via light waves, before passing on the selected goodies being offered up for some attention by the conscious mind.

So where this trail of thought is leading me right now, might be something like that there is more being received by the eye than am aware of, that actually could be quite interesting or informative. Did “I” set up all the pre-filter parameters that controls what reaches my consciousness? What even if something out there meeting my eye is telling my pre-filters to not “see” certain things? Such a thing could be very useful to those who seek to deceive or manipulate people.

And I have the “feeling” that even right now close to me, there is more going on than meets my conscious eye, that would be important for me to know was going on.

The tipping-point in a free-enterprise system turning gold into lead

There is a tipping point in a “free enterprise” system, that is a bit like alchemy’s turning lead into gold, except in this case it is like turning gold into lead.

It is the point where a business makes a subtle change in its guiding principle. It is when the dominant business motive changes from making a fine product or service and expect to receive appropriate reward for the value added by the business, into the primary goal being to make the most profit, and the provided goods or services is mere leverage to get that money.

It is when the R&D department comes up with a variety of potential new products, and management decides which to pursue. There is a choice between a product that is better for the customer and a better value for the money, VS a product that will maximize the company’s profit but provides the customer with a lesser value product. When management has to choose the inferior product that makes the company more profit, that was the tipping point.

More broadly, when you have a nation peppered with such businesses, all choosing the inferior product so as to make more money, and they have business territory control so competition cannot do anything, then you have a nation of customers stuck with the inferior products and services, and less money in the bank. That means the people of that nation have to cope and accomplish life stuck with the poorer resources of what the nation built and services provided. It is a weaker nation, due to lesser capability of resources provided by their goods and services.

It is possible that sometimes this tipping point happens when the company’s investors make demands for more dividends, applying pressure on the management. Or it might happen when a company is making good money and products and is bought at a price that cannot be refused; then new management comes in, trained only to maximize profit and invest in business territory control rather than base sales on better products for the customer.

When the larger business system collaborates to prevent customers any options other than what provides the aggregate business system with the highest profits, the tipping point has locked itself into place.

The why affects the what and how and who of it all

Just mildly pondering the thought that the “why” people do a something, affects how they do it and also the kind of results obtained, especially the lateral effects of what was done.
And also figuring out the “why” someone does something, is a bit of guessing game. It all gets quite into the “people stuff is complicated” zone. Yet it all may not be useless to contemplate all the time.

This trend of thought seems to have been triggered by the news articles about the expected launch of a lunar rover by the Chinese. Connecting human civilization with lunar resources has long been more than a casual interest in me, and I have written a lot about it during the past forty years or so. However, the responses I have gotten range from apathy to “we don’t know you” to outright hostility and undercutting. So the thought now is that it is the “why” of doing something that makes the difference.

And the “why” can be quite complex, including being variable with the situation and even self-contradictory at times.

The current articles on the Chinese launch to the Moon, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25178299 , point out that the Moon is a potential source for elements needed by industry and in short supply here on Earth, and the lunar environment be a site for man’s works including gathering solar energy to help supply civilization’s enormous need for energy.

Now, these things have been known for at least the forty years I have been making suggestions as to how to efficiently access and utilize lunar resources. Yet we here in the US, whom I have addressed over these decades, have ignored my efforts, or worse. Now the article says the Chinese are going after lunar resources, with their fledgling industrial skills. Yet America still is doing the ignoring thing re lunar resources, despite our early efforts half a century ago. It is the “why” of it that is perhaps the difference.

This blog post could get to be really long and maybe even lose the original path by doing so. I will just point to a couple of my online-avaiable writings:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32802637/1972MooncableDocumentRev2C.pdf and in a different mode
http://www.amazon.com/Torus-City-Shields-Returning-Home/dp/144212489X/ and the
http://www.facebook.com/groups/185118771625919/ “Moon Space Escalator” group. All of these writings describe not only why the need but also offer efficient new ways to achieve them. Results: the big silent treatment. Consistently. I point out my efforts as an example of the “why” of doing something, strongly can affect the “what” that is done, which can even include giving the “big silent treatment” as what is done.

There is no change: the Moon is still there not that far away, the resources are known to be there, the resource needs of civilization’s thriving, continue as before. Yet the Chinese head for the Moon while America … does not head for the Moon.

So I now suggest that exploring the differences will provide a lot of answers to the differences in the “why” of doing it. I could get long is my conjectures about it right now, but there is only so much effort needed just to maybe get a little info into a responsible brain out there, somehow surviving amongst the suffocating “big silent treatment” blanket here in America.

Repeating, this is to urge exploration of the thought that the “why” of doing something can have major effects on the “how ” and “what” of doing it – and maybe there is a lot of the “who’ involved, too.

Jim Cline

When are you leaving

As an Asperger I spend some time trying to understand interactions with other people. Other people tend to use verbal conversation in important ways. I do my best to participate as well as possible. Yet sometimes the verbal stuff possibly is laced into a situation in ways I don’t see at the time.

It is not that I don’t have ability to utilize words, but in writing instead of in talking. It is different. For example, I do this blog and have written technical papers of my concepts, and have written novels, eight of which are in self-published print, which several people have told me they enjoy the novels, sometimes even unable to put them down until finished reading them. So I seem to write words OK. It is the out-loud, in your face, verbal conversation that can have even magical aspects, I think, an example of which is the focus of this blog post.

About 1958 my parents bought a nice house in Albuquerque, NM. I visited there at times, and at times I sought work in the area, as my parents had a bedroom there for me to stay economically. My dad made special effort to show me the maintenance of the property, particularly how to get up on the roof and service the swamp cooler, an annual routine. He clearly intended for me to live in the house after they had passed away; I, however, was not really able to comprehend them as ever passing away. But I was assured I would have this nice house some day; I had no siblings so it would all be mine, no question.

Yet I ended up without the home, and the family heirlooms, most of the furniture and most of my large collection of things I had cherished and saved from childhood. The home all gone. And in my dim Asperger’s way I now puzzle, how did I lose all that, and instead stay in small rathole apartments, never thinking of going to stay with my parents and live in the room they had for me there? And then the house was sold after Dad passed away, gone,
In my profession as an electronics engineering technician, the average duration of employment on any job was said to be two years before a RIF. So especially in the last two decades of my employed years, I would sometimes go visit my parents for a couple days, as well as I would come there sometimes on holidays or vacations. There even were several times I was in between jobs desperate for work and almost homeless, yet I did not even think of coming to stay at my parents home, while I looked for a job. I did not even think of it. Why?

Clearly there was a strong mental block that brought it about. I still struggle sometimes with these out-of-sight mental-blocks that interfere with me getting things done, very troublesome and very hard to get past. Strange stuff. Yet I need to comprehend the lessons of the past, or as it is said, one has to learn the lesson all over again until it finally gets learned. So, what happened re the loss of what there had been no question of, that I would live in and own the nice family home there in Albuquerque?

Clearly it was something in my thinking that cost me the family home and most of the collected family belongings in it (after Dad passed away Mother managed to get some things moved and into my possession, such as the furniture that Dad had built and is now in my home here.) So, what messed up my thinking? Thinking back to the home, there on the street in Albuquerque, it seems that oddly there is like a bubble of invisibility enveloping the lot and house inside it. Kind of like imagining a rounded big silver-colored bubble. Never saw anything like that before, best I remember.

As my Asperger’s mind puzzles over complex things – that has enabled me to create very nice technological concepts in the past, but it also works on trying to assemble somewhat meaningful patterns of my life experiences too. And as I was awakening this morning, another piece of the puzzle came back to me – I had remembered it several times in the past only to forget it again – and it is a strange but consistent thing that oddly fits much too well. I got up this morning with intent to get it written down as a blog post, before once again it goes pffft gone out of consciousness again.

In the over half dozen times in later years I visited at my parents home, long after my wife divorced me, and I endlessly hoped to find a woman to love, I was a young man who was instinctively attracted to nice looking women, although few were ever to be seen. I had a favorite TV show, the Dinah Shore Show I think it was called, and Dinah was so very nice, tall, thin and straight, vibrant smiling and kind. I mention that as pattern background in my mind, normally unconscious.

Anyway, my Asperger’s puzzling seeking meaningful patterning re the loss of my family home long ago, has found a match. It surely has multiple lessons for me, too, if I can understand them correctly.

It involves the woman who lived next door to my parents home there. I rarely saw her over the decades my parents lived in Albuquerque, but I knew she was attractive, ever perfectly looking and was a high socialite in the community, and she had two attractive daughters that I could never seem to meet, in my lonely life.

There was a repeating pattern, most exactly repeating each time, as I think about it, although spanning many years between repeats.

I would be visiting at my parent’s home there, out in the yard doing something, and I would suddenly see the neighbor woman – lets call her Mrs Maureen, since supposedly one is not supposed to use real names in writings about others – “Dinah Shore Image” AKA Mrs Maureen would be standing there relaxed looking at me with a small smile on her face, she perfectly attired and hair perfectly done. Clearly she wanted to talk with me. I would quickly stop what I was doing and go over to stand in front of her, I said hello.

She would each time be standing in the same place, on the edge of where their lawn ended and ours began, next to the pine tree that I had planted long ago. The small smile never left her face as she seemed to look past me at the window of my bedroom, and without a hello back, would nicely say “When are you leaving?”

Sometimes expecting a hello back, I would just say “Huh?” and she would exactly repeat the standing there looking so nice and with the small smile on her face looking in the direction of me and the window to my room in the house, and pleasantly repeat exactly “When are you leaving?” still wearing the pleasant smile. I would have to reset my thoughts and figure out when I was to end my visit there, usually in a couple of days, and I would struggle to verbalize the day I was to leave there, as she stood there with the small smile on her face sort of looking in my direction but at the house too. I expected her to continue the conversation, but each time she would then simply turn her back to me without even a goodbye and walk away back toward her house.

I would be left standing there, wondering what all that was about. The attractive very socially functional woman had clearly urged me over to greet her yet all she did was say “When are you leaving?” and then turn and walk away as soon as I had said when I was to leave. The attractive smiling woman with the two attractive daughters apparently only wanted to get me to think about when I was leaving, then she would walk away.

This kind of thing happened identically several times over the span of over a decade or two. Thinking back, she always was standing in the same spot when i suddenly noticed her there looking in my direction with an inviting smile; that the spot she stood was directly across from my room in my parents home, standing directly north of the window so I had to stand with my back to the window to talk with her, now seems part of the pattern.

So I now puzzle over this rather peculiar piece of the puzzle of what cost me my home that my parents had long prepared for me to live in, their only offspring. There surely is a lesson or two for me other than mentally grousing at myself as being a goof-up; the past is past and cannot be done better, but apparently something is in that long ago repeating scenario that I need to know for my present and near future life situations.

Clearly it is not a lesson taught in the school classes or in my reading about stuff over the ages. It seems to be a pattern even with a clearly “magical” aspect as part of it. The socialite neighbor woman clearly was an expert in manipulating people – much as was my former wife. What if when she arranged those quick face-to-face meetings with me there standing on the lawn across from my room in my parents’ home, looking so nice and yet she had only one interest and that was to know when I would no longer be there, planting that thought in my mind, and now I hypothesize that she was also mentally picturing that my house was in a bubble of invisibility to me, the house not existing there for me; that strange idea would explain the “silver bubble” imagined around the property as I think back to those times now. And yes over the years I have often read of a thing where people would mentally picture something happening strongly, and then it would happen; possibly it was used for more than having a perfect parking spot suddenly open up for them in a totally filled parking area.

Why would the neighbor woman, who would never introduce me to her daughters, want me to not live there next door? I was not a bad person; I tried desperately to be accepted by people, despite my Aspergers struggle to do so. That worked well on the job and often kept me working when others were laid off before I was. But in the wider world of people’s doings, it rapidly got really complicated striving to make everybody pleased since people often had opposite wants re me, for example.

Anyway, the puzzle pieces now sort of seen, part of the puzzle piece seems to involve me struggling to make the smiling attractive woman next door happy by me being gone from the place. The place that obviously would have been my inheritance, too, as they gave their all for me, their only offspring. Apparently my striving to please an attractive woman is not always a wise thing to do.

Well, I think I have now gotten it written down here, helped a bit by first sips of morning coffee. I think I saw some patterns: the attractive neighbor lady getting my attention while she always stood in exactly the same place in front of the window to my room in my family house, getting me over there to just ask “When are you leaving?” and stand there smiling while I shifted gears to answer the question, then she simply turned and walked away.

Well, there must be some lessons in all that, but they seem vague and right now I don’t see where it fits in with my present situation, although some neighbors around me seem to always have resented me living here, despite my not being a nuisance to them. Yet I must learn the lessons or else have to repeat them the hard way. I have my own home now, far from Albuquerque and a very tiny house of far poorer quality than my parents’ home was, but this is my house, although only as long as I keep up the mortgage payments; unlike the house I would have inherited from my parents, which probably was paid for by then.

Life’s lessons. OK so I know I now know am an Asperger’s also with attention problems that cancel out the Asperger’s strengths. That wheat damage to my physiology has contributed to the early mercury damage again getting loose as a young adult, and has had a crippling effect on all my life since, is part of explanations, ought to help comprehension. But in this case, apparently it was some other person’s intention that I lose my home, was a key part of it all, is thought-provoking right now.

I am long gone from there in place and time now. So why do I so clearly see in my mind, the attractive woman smiling at me and has only to ask of me “When are you leaving?” Is there something that my subconscious is warning me to deal with, and if so, what is it?
Aargh, people-stuff is complicated. And, maybe it is true that “you can’t get there from here.” But what is it now that I need to understand?