Saturday, March 12, 2022
5:50 a.m. Let’s see if I can recapture it. Snow coming. Last snow? Premonitions, often wrong. 1962-3-4 and the Phillies. When I get some coffee, I’ll ask about it. Something says my total self has it in mind to talk about.
6 a.m. All right, setting switches. Do I infer correctly that you want me to explore this?
It will be of interest to your friends and perhaps ultimately to you. As usual, it will explore an aspect of the human condition and, as your friend Thoreau said, any man’s sincere account of his life will be a report from a distant country.
I had thought to skip this morning’s consultation, perhaps, as I haven’t skipped in a couple of weeks. But I don’t mind being prodded. The cat woke me up a few minutes ago, always polite but desperate for food, as this was later than usual. So I got up, staggered downstairs, fed her, and sat in the recliner for a couple of minutes. My back hurt, as often when I first get up, and I could feel the effects of drinking some Irish cream last night. When you don’t drink much or often, the subtle things wrong the next morning are obvious. The slight, very slight headache, the dryness of the throat, an indefinable something in the sinuses. I suppose a hangover is merely an enlargement of the symptoms. Anyway, I was noticing the physical sensations and deducing the cause; not anything dramatic, just observing.
As I sat there quietly, there came a slow cascade of associations that I noted down 20 minutes ago so I wouldn’t forget them in the course of starting the coffee, taking my morning pills, etc.
- I could hear the rain. I remembered that midday snow was predicted.
- I thought, it will only be a light snow. My last snow, I wonder?
- That was a premonition. It came to me that I had been having such premonitions all my life, and most of them were wrong. But, not all of them, only (come to think of it now) the dramatic ones. And that made me think of the Philadelphia Phillies.
- As a very young boy, I became a baseball fan, and in South Jersey that meant either the Phillies or, less frequently, one of the New York teams. But Philadelphia was much closer culturally and geographically than New York, and one of the TV channels described itself as “The Philadelphia Phillies’ baseball network.” They showed lots of games, and the radio broadcast all of them. So we grew up listening, even if we didn’t actually know anything about the strategy of the game.
- Well, in 1961, the summer I turned 15, the Phillies had a dismal year, losing I think 107 games out of 154. If I remember correctly, they lost 23 games in a row, all that dismal August. We were used to them coming in eighth – last, in pre-expansion times. (They were about as bad as the Senators, of whom it was said: “Washington: First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.”) But for some reason I got it into my head that I knew what would happen: They would be 7th in 1962, 4th in 1963, and would win the pennant in 1964.
And that’s more or less what happened. When the 1962 season ended with them in 7th, I felt reinforced in my premonition. In 1963, sure enough, they finished fourth. The year 1964 was overshadowed by other emotions, but still I was interested to know that they were on track to win the pennant, as predicted, but then Gene Mauch, their manager, saved me from getting a premature case of Psychics’ Disease; he choked, tried to cinch it, overused his two starters, and managed to lose the last ten games of the season. I think it was the Cardinals who won the pennant, but it was the Phillies who lost it.
So – I thought – my premonition was wrong? But, for two years and all but 10 days of the third, it had been right? How could it be both right and wrong? As I say, Gene Mauch saved me from getting inflated with pride in an ability I didn’t have.
And as I write that, other associations arise. Trying to know the future. I was always trying to know the future. Why was that? It was important to me, and I wanted to be able to do it, but I can’t remember why.
Oh, sure you do.
Do I? I knew that if I experienced it, I’d know it was real and not something people had lied about and merely invented. Hell, that’s a thread I never laid down; I still feel that way. If it hasn’t happened to you, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but it does mean that to you, it’s still hearsay.
All right, now we will take over. A good summary, showing your emotional logic as one of the strong invisible connectors of events.
Resetting switches, as (probably) nudged.
It was always going to be an important thread of your life-story, that you would start from ground zero and learn your way into knowing, and leave a record of your explorations, as example and encouragement. But how to do that? It is a more intricate problem than may at first appear. You had to be able to move in a certain direction; you had to be sure-footedly following an invisible path; and you had to be doing it behind your own back.
What you may not realize – you, and anyone reading this later – is that this is so in effect for everybody, always. You are all sure-footedly proceeding, in your confusions, along a path that you were made to pursue.
Let’s be clear about this. This is not to say, “It is all predetermined, and you are only puppets, or recordings, tracing a path already laid out.” It is not to say, “Your free will is only an illusion.” It is not to say, “Do what you want, try as you may, you won’t get away from what something else wants you to do.” None of these conclusions would be accurate, nor would the corresponding opposite conclusion that your lives are all chance.
“There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may.”
[ A slight misquotation. The correct line is, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”]
He knew a thing of two, as you say.
But here’s the point. Your lives proceed according to your decisions. You truly do decide who and what you are going to be, deciding as you go along. But every so often, you may receive a nudge. You can recognize those moments by their disproportionate impact.
Rita wanted to know about the effects of childhood trauma, and the guys pointed out that its effect could set up a psychological pattern that would allow repeated investigation of a given state of mind.
That was looking at the useful effects of a trauma. This, by contrast, is examining the useful effects of what may be inexplicable, seemingly uncaused, but nonetheless momentous events like your knowing in advance the standings of three years of baseball seasons, and then – as a sort of teaser, leaving you open to doubt – a twist at the very end, the very last day of the third year.
And so I lived expecting more, not receiving more, casting about for any stray thought or feeling, trying to will myself into being able to know what was going to happen.
Ingenious, wasn’t it? It took the strong and weak points of your character and used them to keep an interest open. And, your brother, having been witness to your predictions, and having similar interests and unremembered resonances himself, gives you a book about Edgar Cayce.
And in the summer of 1968 I tried hypnotizing my roommate, and Dennis, to see if we could elicit stories of past lives – and then was unable to decide if I believed what we got. [It occurs to me, transcribing this, that if David had been there that summer, rather than home in Iowa, he surely would have entered into our experiments. If other lives of ours really had been connected in a teacher-pupil relationship, as I got much later, surely it would have come through.] And they tried hypnotizing me, and I seem to remember thinking they didn’t and thinking they did. I wonder if I have any record of what we got. We taped our sessions, I know, on an old reel-to-reel machine I had bought, and I think I made some notes. In any case, I hadn’t thought about that for years, and hadn’t thought about it in connection with my Phillies prediction, but the connection is obvious enough.
Predictions in 1961, hypnosis in 1968, astrology lessons in 1973, Shirley MacLaine in 1989, Kelly and Gateway in 1992, and you were fully launched. Not so many nudges.
And I was fully able to choose this rather than that, except that internal guidance said, “This way!”
Sometimes. Well, often enough, actually, only it can be seen another way. You might look at it that who you are, what the sum total of the associated threads comes to, all the flavor of everything in your known and unknown background, predetermine an inclination, a proclivity. But how that manifests in various versions of the present tense is up to you, and always was. That’s the point of free will, after all: free choice. But the point of predestination is not remote control, but free will only within certain limits. Gender, geography, time of entry into 3D, etc., – they are all limiting factors – delimiting factors, definitions.
I’m liking this letting the total self drive. What shall we call this?
Try, “Premonitions.”
Tempted to say, “Predictions are always hazardous, particularly when they involve the future,” but it’s too long.
Actually, “Premonitions and afterthoughts” might work, or “Foreknowledge and doubt.” In any case, you always have us on your side. Try not to doubt that.
I don’t.
We are not speaking only to you.
All right. Thanks for all this.