Dionysius walked in

This is second hand information from an old friend of mine which I consider very reliable, as I was there in the neighborhood while the whole thing was happening. It involves a nervous breakdown, a recovery, and some evidence to support a common psycho therapeutic form.

In December of 1996 the subject appeared in perfect health. His weight was 180 pounds and there did not appear to be a single centimeter of fat on his body. He played tennis (the locus of my acquaintance with him) or worked out in the gym daily. In the middle of December 1996 he had a panic attack in connection with a business presentation. (Pan is the Roman pantheon equivalent of Dionysius.) Over the course of the subsequent three months he lost all physical strength, all endurance, all power to concentrate, and 45 pounds of body weight. He believed himself to be dying.

He went to the doctor. The doctor did a complete physical examination. Nothing wrong with the subject. Doctor asked, "would you like some prozac?" Subject declined the pills but did go see a sequence of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, clergymen, bartenders looking for a cure. About the only thing he had the concentration power to do was read books. So he went to the Tulane University Medical School library, psychiatry shelf and started reading one book after another after another.

Somewhere in that massive stack he came upon an old formula. If you have a stress related ailment, you are doing something your subconscious wants you to stop doing. Make a list of everything you habitually do, try stopping them one at a time, and see if one of the stops brings relief for your symptoms. The other thing that jumped out at him was the predominance of automobile driving related events in the psychiatric case studies.

He stopped driving his car. He got better very quickly. None of the professionals he saw seemed to be very interested in the story.

oops

It has been two weeks since I last posted on blogger. That has been the length of time it has taken me to figure out just how far I stuck my foot into my mouth on my last post. Where I said, as near as I can tell, "hypnosis = meditation = profound devotion = trance".

It turns out the information to correct this oversimplification was sitting on my library shelf, except it took a long time with many false starts and dead ends to zero in on it. The better presentation of this idea is in Charles Tart, States of Consciousness, pp 144-145 of the 2000 Author's Guild edition:

"use of the concept of discrete State of Consciousness must first be done on an individual basis. . . . The very existence of names like dreaming state or hypnotic state indicates that there appears to be a fair degree of commonality among a fair number of individuals . . . Several discrete Altered States of Consciousness may be hidden within common names like hypnosis or dreaming."

Tart's book is fantastic. He has a case study of this subject William, twenty pages long, and William is the most deeply hypnotized subject that Tart has ever studied. My equation above from my blog post of 11 May is a gross and crude approximation to the facts, which are only partially understood. Hypnosis and meditation are at least two different human states of consciousness.

Also there was a less serious error in my description of the meditating monk brain scans. The hot spot in the cortex is in the right parietal lobe, not the left. I actually found the image I was remembering. It is in this paper:

Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation: effects of meditative expertise. Lutz A, et al.

Link:

http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/web/pubs/2008/LutzRegulationPLoSONE.pdf

The hot spot is on the left side of their brain image which is looking at the brain slice from the bottom up and so right and left are reversed. Since I was a physics major this is merely a sign error and almost does not even count.

One of the books I spent a lot of time on is Doctor Daniel Amen (a neurologist and psychiatrist) Making a Good Brain Great. There was enough good information in Amen's book to keep me turning the pages but also some misinformation. Enough to get the man a quackwatch listing. Supplements for brain improvement which are not recommended treatments by his specialists review board, for example. Apparently the man is an incredible entrepreneur, irrespective of how great a neurologist he happens to be.

The most interesting thing in this book is he has an exhaustive bibliography of references, even to support his bizarre supplement recommendations. He does not take much stock in that famous paper from a couple years ago "Most published research results are wrong." I am pretty confident that, with sufficient time and energy, you can find many peer review research publications to support both sides of a very long list of physiology and anatomy and medical debates.

Erickson, Huxley, Bandler, Grinder

Today I read an incredible account of clinical hypnosis in Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D. by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. To be more precise, I re-read it as I had read it once before several years ago. For some reason it did not make the impression upon me then that it did today. The account is 57 pages long at the end of part one. It is mostly verbatim presentation of Erickson's report on his day long hypnosis session with Aldous Huxley. Huxley was eminent, eminently brilliant, and eminently hypnotically susceptible. When I read it before, I underlined all the parts that jumped out. Today something jumped out which I did not underline before.

Huxley had his own introspective meditative technique which he called Deep Reflection. The thing that jumped out is in the middle of the 57 pages Huxley makes an offhand comment that hypnosis is not like Deep Reflection. I find this odd and suspect it may even be wrong. It is inconsistent with my own view which may be a course approximation but I have arrived at this view after years of investigation.

As near as I can tell:

hypnosis = meditation = profound devotion = trance

I have studied the various methods of Zen Buddhism, Ericksonian hypnosis, Gestalt trance, Gurdjieff self-remembering, Jung active imagination, the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, and others I have forgotten. I have been hypnotized watching Shakira shake her ass on a big screen video. To me the physical sensations associated with these various methods are all the same, which is the basis on which I make the above equation.

Huxley says no. He is dead now and there is probably no way to exhume much detail about his thought procedure here from the archives, but I do have an idea what might be going on. I think the difference was simply depth of trance. When he was in a room by himself he could attain a deeper trance state than he could with Erickson there in the room with him; this is hard to argue because the trance states described by Erickson are profoundly deep. I think there is a limit to how far you can go with a present hypnotist you do not utterly trust. I have known some very skilled hypnotists, but I have never allowed them to put me into anywhere near as deep a trance as I will go in my own living room by myself.

There was a positron emission tomography scan study done a few years ago on some experienced Tibetan Buddhist monk meditators and they found a hot spot in their left parietal lobe correlating with deep trance. It appears to me that the current scientific facts are that the best physical explanation of the trance state is it is a hot spot in the mind which is activated. And the same hot spot is activated by different methods and different trance depths or different method's results are simply an indication of the level of activation.

In addition to the Erickson Huxley material every thing in this book is first rate. I have an acquaintance who is a psychiatrist and neurologist. I asked him about hypnosis one time. He replied to me "I do not know anything about hypnosis." Sad, that. I really want to go to the Erickson Institute in Phoenix and take their one-week course one of these years.

The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal

The moaning and kvetching on some of the trader blogs after the 1000 point Dow drop glitch last week is very confusing. Apparently some people with stop loss sell orders took a huge bath. One guy wrote about a colleague who had a portfolio on Monday worth 250 000 who lost 400 000 dollars in one afternoon. Aye aye aye aye aye. There is value at risk us mortal humans deal with and then there is playing with fire the hubris filled allow themselves to go bonkers with.

There was a Themis Trading blog outraged at the High Frequency Trading firms. The powers that be and conspiratorial interpretations never cease to amaze me. Things look to me to be very rough before the regulators catch up with these guys who are betting as big as they can with other people's (yours and mine) money. I have a scheme to take down these hot shots which I have divulged to three people on earth. I have a letter in the mail to one of them right now and am eagerly anticipating her reply. The recipe is in Laura Nader's book The Life of the Law.

Another book I have gotten much out of lately is Amihai Mazar's Archaeology of the Land of the Bible 10 000 -- 586 B.C.E. He reports some astonishing findings if you are innocent of the subject of Archaeology which I clearly was because I was astonished. There is no historical record of King Solomon. But the land midway between Mesopotamia and Egypt was continuously occupied by satellite civilizations which were every bit as sophisticated as the great civilizations during good times. They did not live in huts. They lived in walled cities and the wealthier families had nice houses and consumer goods which would satisfy many of us moderns. They have found in the diggings (at places like Jericho) olives, grapes, garlic, onions, chickpeas, art and weaponry which were the equivalent of anything in Egypt or Mesopotamia. It appears perfectly plausible that there was once a wealthy King named Solomon who built a magnificent temple such as presented in scripture and legend and myth.

The most important finding is the writing. They had an alphabet which is contemporaneous to the other first known alphabet of the Phoenicians. If there was a real Solomon he did not write Hebrew. There was a proto-Hebrew proto-Aramaic script and Mazar has a photo of a relic which they interpret as the Priestly Benediction which found its way ultimately into Numbers 6:24-25. The last time I looked into this stuff I understood the conventional wisdom to be Ezra's scribes had compiled the Torah entirely from oral tradition when they got back from the Babylon exile.

There is also some real data which anybody can use. I purchased the book for 20.00 in 1992. It is still in print, although it is 45.00. The price has gone up 2.25X in 18 years. So if you calculate your own inflation consumer price index there is a data point for you! Also I suppose there is a message about my own impulse purchasing habit or procrastination level, because I bought the book, carried it home, and moved it four times before I got around to reading it.

The upper middle class standard dwelling is all over the place in the diggings. The professionals refer to it as "the four room house" and it is about the same square feet as the apartment I am living in right now. I am confused when I ponder the question of whether I would have enjoyed this book nearly so much if I had read it in 1992 when I bought it. A human can undergo a lot of change in 18 years.

Remember how many people voted for Ross Perot? I was thinking about doing so as late as July or whenever it was the press coverage really started getting kooky. I ended up voting for Clinton. I decided I hated Bush the moment he got on television and explained the new world order was going to undo Saddam Hussein's invasion and restore "freedom in Kuwait". Who would ever think we would live to look on that as the good old days?

keep your hands off of my stash

I am undergoing a phase transition. My income has temporarily dropped to zero and I am wrestling with the possibilities of this being permanent. It is daunting to look at my savings and expenditures and the statistical endpoint on the life expectancy tables. For the first time in my life I am constructing a budget using grocery store receipts and calculating out to the nearest .01 of a dollar. I never paid much attention to this before because I was born with no money at all and never had any money to speak of until I graduated from college and then suddenly I had more money than I knew what to do with. I just made a gross approximation to spend about half my take home pay, stash the rest, and if I had to worry about it some day then I would do so.

Some day is here now. I read the Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin Your Money or Your Life and it has a small amount of good information. There was one part which I found absolutely maddening. They say there are deep psychological issues for many of us saturating the acquiring and spending of money. That is certainly true for me. They go on to say there is a vast literature and proven techniques we may use to resolve these. I have found this completely false. I have a library of psychological books which includes just about everything beginning with Sigmund Freud and ending with Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis. Also it includes a host of non-mainstream which samples a great deal: Erickson hypnosis and Guerdjieff and Transactional Analysis and Gestalt and a small New Harbinger publishing collection. There is very little explicitly about money.

When I googled for money and therapy the number one hit was Bourne's Anxiety and Phobia Workbook. I own this book and I cannot find the word money in it. I have the New Harbinger Couple Skills book and in spite of the folk wisdom that most marriage arguments refer to money, there is almost nothing about money in this book. The most detail which I have seen to date is in Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, which is a beautiful and fascinating book, except for two things:

1.) Norman O. Brown was a literature teacher, not a clinical psychologist.

2.) His presentation on money is from the narrow perspective of Freud anal stage as a total explanatory mechanism. I have no faith in this.

It seems to me there is a huge hole here. I feel like I am walking on a high wire and there is no net, although Dominguez and Robin tell us otherwise. I have a friend who is a physician and when he was in medical school he told me several times about patients that had five or six major medical problems and it was mysterious how they clung to life and on the rounds there was one comment repeatedly heard: "what a fascinating case!" I think that might be the way to look at my money psycho issues.

I met a woman in 1991 or so who was a devotee of Saint Jude, the patron saint of hope. When her husband was drafted to fight the Germans in Europe in 1943 she went to the Church of Saint Jude in New Orleans on Rampart Street, bought a candle, and prayed in front of the saint's statue. She prayed that she would return daily, and that if her husband returned from the war she would be so thankful that she would return daily to express her gratitude to God every day for the remainder of her life. He did return from Europe and she did return to the Church of Saint Jude daily up through to the day I met her in 1991. And beyond. I lost track of her and her life expectancy has probably been used up by now but I have never forgotten her or the story she told me. It is almost incomprehensible that a person's faith could move them so far as to make a daily trek for a prayer for forty-eight years.

I never met the man. I wonder what he thought about that. The closest thing I have ever seen was in a work of fiction. In Mario Puzo's The Godfather, he writes that Vito Corleone's wife went to mass daily and prayed for the salvation of the godfather. That always seemed a little bit sick to me, but the woman going to the Church of Saint Jude fills me with awe.

sub inter mutandis

Edmund Leach writes a ghastly description of religious practices of the Kachins. "The supreme manifestation of this is when a woman dies in childbirth; such a woman is deemed to be a witch of the most noxious kind and in former days all the possessions of her husband's household, including the house itself, had to be burnt so as to disinfect the community". His work is challenging, as in you have to look something up about once a page. He is fond of using Latin such as sub specie aeternitatis, mutatis mutandis, inter alia. You could make yourself an excellent vocabulary building word list by going through Leach and listing the words you do not know. I may do just that.

I have a recipe for sigil construction which has garnered much praise, and one person even used the method to design a tatoo for themself. It is based on a method that was probably invented the week after they invented letters back in the Levant in the beginnings of the Iron Age. First you begin with your spell. (I have never used this spell, but it will serve to illustrate the method.)

I intend to shag Angelina Jolie.

Rewrite this with all duplicate letters omitted:

Inteoshaglj

Capitalize:

INTEOSHAGLJ

Now strike all duplicate strokes; for example the T contains the I; the E and N contain the H:

NTEA OSGJ (Also I have separated the letters containing curvature from the ones that do not.)

Now fire up your word processor. Type the OSGJ in 70 or 80 point font, one letter per page, with a different pastel color for each letter--pink, light orange, yellow, light green, &c. Type the NTEA in 70 or 80 point font, one letter per page, the lightest gray you have got. Now print the letters all on top of each other. Print the first letter, put the printout back into the feeder tray; print the second letter, put the printout back into the feeder tray. And so on.

Now you have a sigil you can use as you please. I have four of these and I cycle through them to give me a different intention to be mindful of every fourth day. You can mount them on poster stock, or the way I have done is to use some styrofoam poster board cut up into four inch squares. Lastly do not tell anybody what your sigil is, what it signifies, not a word. Supposedly part of the magic is that this is a secret you take to your grave.

hypomnemata, hypnerotomachia, handycrafts

As the final item in my socioeconomics crash course I began in October 2008 I read the Foucault Reader which was compiled by the anthropologist Paul Rabinow. His work is a little too far beyond anything I can use, but it's good for defining that boundary. I have read him before but Rabinow's editing gave a different impression. He comes across as having been a sad man. I always knew he was comical, but I never realized he may have been so partly because he was so profoundly sad. He used a word I had to look up, hypomnemata; and if you google on hypomnemata the top hits are Foucault stuff. In other words this may be more his imagination than any fact.

The hypomnema or hypomnemata are similar to diaries (or weblogs even) except they are not written one time and maybe never looked at again. They are to be reread and rewritten over and over for the writer's education and work and progress. I have been doing a bunch of this for years and it is only since November of 2008 that I have established a system that I am confident of using daily and feel that the pages will continue to contain useful information for five or more years. Every page is dated and numbered. I now have close to 1500 pages with the numbering scheme. Foucault claims this is a great idea and I don't know about that but so far I like it OK.

For fun I have been reading The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance by Joscelyn Godwin and it is a trip. He looks at the arts culture in late 15th and 16th century Italy with a view that the ultimate work is the novel and woodcuts Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which apparently we are not even certain who wrote it or made the woodcuts. Godwin has a lot of amusing speculative history which is similar in spirit to the way that Foucault did it. For example he has magic spell interpretations of the court ritual musical pieces such as Le Pellegrina, music for the wedding of Ferdinado de Medici and Christine de Lorraine, Florence, 1589. He has magic spell interpretations of the architecture of the Palace at Versailles. He reports that Louis XIV was an initiate of a Pythagorean secret society.

It does not take much imagination to concoct a magic spell interpretation for the Sacro Bosco in Barmozo. That place looks Satanic even on the wikipedia or google image search pages.

An interesting character is the Venetian artist Andrea Mantegna. Godwin surmises that it was a member of Mantegna's shop, but absolutely not the great man himself, who did the Hypnerotomachia woodcuts. He also has a chapter almost entirely dedicated to the Mantegna tarochi, and again, concludes those cards were painted by a member of Mantegna's shop but not by the great one himself.

For my handicraft project this week I constructed a meditation device out of a set of Mantegna tarochi images. It is on an 11" by 17" piece of printer paper. Ten points in the shape of the Holy Kabbalah Tree of Life. The ten points connected by eight lines of black graphics tape in the lightning flash configuration. The ten points covered by half-size Mantegna tarochi images of: Grammatica, Artixan, Polimnia, Forteza, Theologia, Philosofia, Fede, Mercurio, Musicha, and Saturno. I have used it a couple times and it works pretty swell!

spring branch decision tree blog

The water moves into the roots of the tree up to the trunk of the tree out to the branches of the tree through the leaves of the tree. One of my internet pals asks me about the layoff and am I moving to Rochester as I had once planned? Short answer: maybe, not soon.

The long answer is too long to post here. I will try and hit the highlights. Since I have known about this for months, I had plenty of time to do as much soul searching and planning as I wanted to. It turns out I wanted to do quite a bit. I used two texts: What Color is your Parachute? and Sam Keen's Your Mythic Journey. The parachute book is obvious and it is the gold standard of career consulting handbooks for good reason. A large portion of the book is a self-examination of strengths, weaknesses, likes, and dislikes so you can make this important decision from an informed point of view. Bolles names this the flower exercise. I did not do Bolles' flower exercise. As a substitute for this I did the similar and more comprehensive writing exercise that is the bulk of Keen's book.

I have a four main branch, (5, 3, 4, 1) small branch decision tree after all that, and one of the small branches is U. Rochester and moving and I may do that. A priori I would say the chances of that are around one in thirteen. The four main branches in the tree are:

I. get another seismic job
II. go back to school
III. start my own business
IV. chuck it all

(i.e. it looks like this but details omitted because absolutely nobody is going to want to see all the self absorbed narcissistic minutia:
I. A.B.C.D.E.
II. A.B.C.
III. A.B.C.D.
IV.)

Each branch has its pluses, minuses. The biggest plus for getting another seismic job is that the opportunity cost for not doing so appears very large. That is more of a double negative than a positive so obviously it is not the greatest idea. I may do it anyway, but first I am going to explore the rest of the tree deliberate.

What I am most drawn to is starting my own business. This has the advantages of liberty and control freaky freak on. Supposedly I have some issues with authority. No doubt there is some deep seated Freudian origin for this which might fascinate some, but it does not fascinate me. I consider it a possible environmental boundary condition. And if I work for myself it does not even exist. At least my childhood was not as miserable as Michel Foucault's apparently was:

"Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination."

-- Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History

The business I am working to create involves an unsolved physics problem. My first task is to refresh and reload my physics expertise with an intense course; first Feynman, next Landau and Lifshitz. If my business plan turns out to not fly, this effort is fully worthwhile for all eight of the minor branches in major branches I and II and mostly worthwhile for the other three minor branches in major branch III. In New Orleans they call this lagniappe and at West Point this is known as covering your flank.

The appeal of Rochester used to be stronger. The University of Rochester, due to Max Eastman's endowment and Emil Wolf's genius, is the center of the optical physics universe. When I was studying optics at the University of New Orleans, I might have been the only person in the program who could get an American military secrets security clearance, and my goal was the Navy laser lab at China Lake. This was before the war on terror and the rude reawakening that I still do not have the stomach to work on weapon systems. I love optical physics. Waging war on Arabs and Persians makes me want to puke.

When I visited Rochester in the spring of 2007 both the professors I spoke to said that there was a fellow at Rice University I need to meet. I can do all the optical physics that I want and stay in Texas. I may go to Rochester eventually. A sound strategic plan includes exclusions. For example I no longer plan on winning a grand slam tennis tournament or shagging a Hollywood movie star. Those items are now excluded from the decision tree. Rochester remains included for now and at least a little further.

running from medusa to a perpetual motion machine

My new project is a perpetual motion machine. Not exactly that, but close enough for all practical purposes. If I achieve even ten percent of my intention, I can afford to rent a private jet to fly a smoking hot babe across the country to see a total eclipse of the sun in 2017 and not even blink when I sign the bill. That is the most extravagant thing I would ever care to do--hence to me I am inventing a perpetual motion machine for all my practical purposes. My first full day at work was OK. Before I get to that (including a couple of wondrous tidbits if you hang in there dear Reader) I am going to back up and cover medusa.

I found out I was getting laid off pretty much for sure the second week December and Wednesday was my last day. This means for first three months 2010 my office has reeked of the carrion of my dead corporate career. The hazard in that is most succinctly described in Bronislaw Malinowski: Magic, Science and Religion. His Trobrianders describe a creature, which he calls mulukuausi, and is elsewhere described as the Melanesian Medusa. She hunts humans and is aroused by the aroma of carrion. Whenever Malinowski was walking through the forest on Trobriand Island and the natives smelled carrion, they immediately performed complex rituals for protection from the mulukuausi. The mulukuausi is described as female which is its main physical similarity to the medusa. Snakes for hair is not mentioned anywhere that I know of.

I have been daily performing protection rituals to diffuse the carrion taint, which is why I claim I am fleeing medusa. Yesterday I did a tarot spread. It was informative. I drew all fire and water cards--it was a good spread for ritual cleansing. The key message I took was from the seven cups in position seven. My interpretation of this card is beware worshiping false gods. Very similar to the first of the commandments in Exodus: Thou shalt have no other god before me. I don't have to worry about elevating tarot. And I certainly do not have to worry about elevating my upwardly mobile corporate career. Not any more. I suppose my main concern in this regard is excessive elevation of my magnificent intellect.

God I swear I crack myself up. Maybe the card was referring to my inappropriate expressions of humor.

My big smarty ego may be quickly cured by step One in my new project which is working through the Feynman Lectures on Physics one by one at least to Volume III Lecture 21. That is the last lecture that I have on tape. I do not have them all on tape. There are around 150 and I have 60. Yesterday I read five lectures and listened to two. I have tried this sub-project a couple times before and not gotten far, but both of those times I was doing it the other way around. Attempts one and two were centered around working through the 60 recordings, anchored back on to the 60 corresponding printed lectures. Printed lecture four is recorded lecture 25 and I never got that far before.

He has, by odd coincidence, a discussion of perpetual motion machines in this lecture. He has a machine which may be more complex than necessary to demonstrate his point, and I thought the argument a bit Baroque, like one of those goofy picture frames that has angels blowing trumpets carved into the top corners. He says his argument (following from Carnot) is ingenious, but just because an argument is ingenious does not mean it is correct. If it does not agree with the experiments, the argument is wrong. This argument does happen to agree with the experiments, and it demonstrates that perpetual motion machine impossibility and energy conservation are two ways of saying the same thing. At the end of the lecture he points out how little watery Hydrogen is necessary for nuclear fusion energy amounting to all the coal, oil and gas, &c. we are currently burning and he challenges physicists to liberate humanity from energy limits.

My project is partly an unsolved physics problem so I appreciate the sentiment, but it does not yet involve nuclear fusion energy production.

The most interesting thing about the recordings is the man's audio presentation. He had a strong working class New York accent which he had not done much to modify at the point when the lectures were recorded in 1961. He sounded like a Looney Tunes character: Bugs or Foghorn Leghorn or Sylvester Cat or perhaps some hybrid of the three. There is no doubt in my mind that Mel Blanc could have done a splendid Richard Feynman rap. If I can continue at five lectures a day I can have a good time with this for the next thirty days. Maybe I will mix in some Looney Tunes videos to break it up.

That's all folks!

fairytale of turkey creek

Once upon a time a man, nearly my identical twin, had an office and a job at a great office park by Turkey Creek. Working late past sunset on the summer solstice he took a short break to walk among the trees. There appeared before him in the moonlight a ghost of a centuries dead Karankawa hunter, tall and broad and near naked. The ghost spoke to him of secrets, of a treasure, and of a curse. My near-twin respects curses, likes treasures, and can keep secrets, so he attended well to that Karnkawa's tales. They parted in peace and my near-twin returned to his office and to his computer. It might have freaked out a few people to see this ghost, or maybe more what the ghost said, but he it did not faze. He has seen stranger things even than that I have been told.

Time passed with no more sign of Karankawas, ghosts, curses, or treasures. And my near-twin kept the Karankawa's secrets. Early one Saturday morning near the end of the summer he was walking through the Addicks Reservoir across the fence from the Turkey Creek offices. A large hawk with a red tail called to him from the branch of a birch tree. And then it spoke in perfect English, "when you see or hear something you do not understand, then and there is where you dig for gold. That is how it has always been done. Never forget the predominance of poverty amongst gold prospectors."

That is a lot of English syllables for a hawk and so my near-twin decided it was not a hawk. Gold is a treasure and poverty a curse and pursuing what you do not understand sounded oddly parallel to the Karankawa ghost's secrets from months before. As he turned away to walk back to the car the hawk called to his back: "shepherd who goes, up by the sheepcotes, if you should happen to see, the one I most desire, tell him I sicken suffer and die".

That night he dreamt. He was a boy in a Shaolin monastary with a shaved head and an old blind monk said to him "when you can walk silent across the raised floor in your office at Turkey Creek, it will be time for you to leave". This was what Jung's Elgeyo medicine man described as a Big Dream, such as they no longer had since the white man had come to Africa. It also sounded quite a bit like the secret of the Karankawa ghost, except no it was not that exactly either.

There was one last natural wonder in my near-twin's mysterious year. There are two great poplar trees outside his office window, and in December the air became cold and all the leaves on the poplars turned bright red overnight. One day they were green and losing their hue. The next morning there were tens thousands bright crimson red poplar leaves. And three days later they all fell onto the ground. Need I add that this also was eerily reminiscent of one of the secrets of the Karankawa ghost, except of course it was not exactly that either.