One of the actual models for the Hasboro action figure GI Joe was Marine Medal of Honor winner Mitchell Paige. Paige who passed away in 2003, held a hilltop on Guadalcanal against more than a company of Imperial Japanese soldiers by manning each of the four machine gun positions in turn after everyone else had been killed. Paige tells the story of that frenzied Medal of Honor night, as each position was overrun and he finally held the ring alone here. What is particularly interesting is that he held back part of the story as he remembered it for years, fearing that he would not be believed. Several Japanese were headed for one of the unattended machine guns as he raced for it. In the next few moments he would live and they would die. Yet he believes it was not totally due to his skill and bravery that he survived. The part of the story he held back was that something unseen on that hill helped him.
Galvanized by the threat, I ran for the gun. From the gully area, several Japanese guns spotted me and swiveled to rake me with enfilading fire. The snipers in the trees also tried to bring me down with grenades, and mortars burst all around me as I ran to that gun. One of the crawling enemy soldiers saw me coming and he jumped up to race me to the prize. I got there first and jumped into a hole behind the gun. The enemy soldier, less than 25 yards away, dropped to the ground and started to open up on me. I turned the gun on the enemy and immediately realized it was not loaded. I quickly scooped up a partially loaded belt lying on the ground and with fumbling fingers, started to load it. Suddenly a very strange feeling came over me. I tried desperately to reach forward to pull the bolt handle back to load the gun, but I felt as though I was in a vise. Even so, I was completely relaxed and felt as though I was sitting peacefully in a park. I could feel a warm sensation between my chin and my Adam’s apple. Then all of a sudden I fell forward over the gun, loaded the gun, and swung it at the enemy gunner, the precise moment he had fired his full thirty-round magazine at me and stopped firing. For days later I thought about the mystery and somehow I knew that the ‘Man Above’ also knew what had happened. I never wanted to relate this experience to anyone, as I did not want to ever have anyone question it.
Just this year Penguin Canada published a book by John Geiger called the Third Man Factor. Geiger, a Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Chairman of the Society’s Expeditions Committee was fascinated by references in survival literature to the sensation among men in extreme danger of an unseen presence, and decided to write a book about it. He cites, among others, the well known story of Shackleton and his companions, who having escaped in an open boat from the wreck of their ship in the Antarctic, attempted to cross the South Georgia Mountains in extremis to reach the whaling station at Stromness. Shackleton and his companions were at the end of their tether when they felt they were joined by an unseen presence. Shackleton’s story is apparently not uncommon among survivors.
His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward. In recent years well-known adventurers like clmber Reinhold Messner and polar explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft have reported the experience. One study of cases involving adventurers reported that the largest group involved climbers, with solo sailors and shipwreck survivors being the second most common group, followed by polar explorers. Proponents relate this to be the source of the Guardian angel belief. Various theories have been presented as possible explanations for the phenomenon, including psychological and neurological explanations, although religious observers suggest the reported cases are manifestations of a guardian angel. The concept was popularized by a book by John Geiger, The Third Man Factor, that documents scores of examples.
Shackleton’s story recalls TS Eliot’s verses in the Wasteland
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
A physiological explanation for Third Man experience has been offered by Michael Persinger, who attributes the experience of a Third Man to an awareness of the left hemisphere of the brain of the receipt of signals from the right side. Julian Jaynes who wrote The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argues that it is an awareness modern man has long learned to suppress; that in the past people often heard voices, saw visions and were inspired by the muses.
Jaynes asserts that until roughly the times written about in Homer’s Iliad, humans did not generally have the self-awareness characteristic of consciousness as most people experience it today. Rather, Jaynes argued that the bicameral individual was guided by mental commands believed to be issued by external “gods”—the commands which were so often recorded in ancient myths, legends and historical accounts; these commands were however emanating from individuals’ own minds. This is exemplified not only in the commands given to characters in ancient epics but also the very muses of Greek mythology which “sang” the poems: Jaynes argues that while later interpretations see the muses as a simple personification of creative inspiration, the ancients literally heard muses as the direct source of their music and poetry.
But something forgotten may be remembered, especially when the organism is fighting for survival. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner argued in 1983 that humans had “multiple intelligences” — ways of knowing that were poorly studied. One of these he called “naturalistic” intelligence, which might best be described as the ability to apprehend the communication conveyed by subtle changes in the environment in ways still known, perhaps, to primitive people. Who can say whether men in extreme danger might not suddenly experience a sudden revival of “knowing” in a way they had long forgotten. What did Mitchell Paige experience that night on Guadalcanal? Since we can reach no conclusion, we’d best let Paige finish his story, from the point when reinforcements arrived and they drove the Japanese back.
The jungle was once again so still, that if it weren’t for the evidence of dead bodies, the agony and torment of the previous hours, the bursting terror of the artillery and mortars rounds and the many thousands of rounds of ammunition fired, it might only have been a bad dream of awful death. It was a really strange sort of quietness. As I sat down soaked with perspiration and steam still rising from my hot gun, Captain Louis Ditta, another wonderful officer who had joined the riflemen in the skirmish line and had earlier been firing his 60mm mortars to help me, slapped me on the back and as he handed me his canteen of water he kept saying, ‘tremendous, tremendous!’ He then looked down at his legs. We could see blood coming through his dungarees. He had a neat bullet hole in his right leg. There were hundreds of enemy dead in the grass, on the ridge, in the draw, and in the edge of the jungle. We dragged as many as we could into the jungle, out of the sun. We buried many and even blasted some of the ridge over them to prevent the smell that only a dead body can expel in heat. A corpsman sent by Capt. Ditta smeared my whole left arm with a tube of salve of some kind. He cleaned off the bayonet gash, since filled with dirt, and the bullet nicks on my hands also filled with dirt and coagulated blood. He stuck a patch on my back just below the shoulder blade. (In 1955, I felt something irritating in my back, and then had a piece of metal about 3/4 of an inch long removed from my back; right where the corpsman had placed that patch.) As the corpsman left he said, ‘You know, you have some pretty neat creases in your steel helmet.’ I replied: “Yes, thank God — Made in America.”
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People hear inner voices. We communicate with different intelligences than just other humans by formal speech and logic. It flatters me to think that I know what my four footed friend is thinking and he undoubtedly knows what I am thinking before I do myself. Old couples really do complete each others sentences. Could spirits and gods once walked the earth with us? Have they withdrawn under the light of new forces but are still out there in some refuge? Personally I doubt it but functional human beings not only can believe but more to the point may need to believe to believe in more then what is mechanically verifiable. I have a friend who is a Homeopath. She believes that her pills and solutions have an effect. Millions agree with her and the claim that there is an aura that instruments fail to measure.
Broadly I subscribe to both Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory and the Guardian Angel explanation. None of my thought experiments have ever involved using both to explain the same phenomenon at the same point in time. Thanks for pointing out that possibility.
As for the latter, I prefer the term “overshadowing” to describe the descent of angelic hosts in situations like the one our heroic Marine relates. I have no doubt that there are many more such stories that can and will be told. I’ll also venture that men in the service of evil can and do experience similar sensations and influences, but from demonic forces instead.
There is a similar story in the book ‘With the Old Breed’, in which E.B. Sledge hears a voice reassuring him that he will live.
Great story, Wrichard.
Poetic inspiration is an interesting area involving outside inspiration , too, and one sees it especially in the experience of poets and shamans. Most poets don’t quite know where the words come from, but they often seem to have an external source. Christian scripture is depicted as narrated by the Spirit. Mohammed’s message is spoken by an angel, and Arabic speakers swear by its beauty (which obviously doesn’t come through in a translation). Maybe the poetic gift is just a natural ‘intelligence,’ a la Gardner. But where does that intelligence come from? That’s the old question.
My favorite account of poetic inspiration is Bede’s story of the shepherd Caedmon (via Wiki):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A6dmon
Now we must honour
heaven-kingdom’s guardian,
the might of the architect,
and his mind-work,
the work of the wonder-father
— as he, the eternal lord,
established
the beginning of wonders . . . .
And then, of course, there are the frauds and liars who claim inspiration. Religion has always been full of them, including in the New Age. My favorite fraud was Laurens Van der Post, especially in “Lost World of the Kalihari.”
The real heroes and seers such as Mitchell Paige usually keep their secrets to themselves. But it’s good that they share them eventually, even at the risk of not being believed.
William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” is the mother lode of examples of influence of the divine on the human, especially involving religious conversion.
Sledge’s account describes glimpses into revealed aspects of the human psyche. On Peleliu and later, at Okinawa, the experience of combat transported men into another dimension, with its extremes of brutality, fear and exaltation, that he could not communicate even with other Marines who had seen no or light combat. Sledge saw Japanese atrocities and American atrocities and describes how one Marine removed the gold teeth from some still living Japanese soldier, even as they passed Marine whose genitals had been stuffed in their mouths courtesy of the IJA. In this other world, standing amid a group of men none of whom were talking Sledge hears a loud and distinct voice. “You will survive this war.” He looks around and asks, but no one has said a word. He can’t believe it when he survives Peleliu. And later, his company is made to fight from one end of Okinawa to the other and almost nobody is left alive when they reach the end of that accursed island. But when he is told that they will invade Japan itself then he knows the voice lied: that he’s going to die. No one could survive that. But one day he wakes up to hear that an Atomic Bomb has been dropped on the enemy and that the war is over. He will live after all and leaves the battlefield convinced he’s been spared by God and that its up to him to make something of his life. And he does.
It could have been a story from Iliad. Achilles heard the gods. And we alas, or happily — as you wish — would be glad if only we could hear the alarm clock each morning.
“There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”
What I think is fascinating about this is that the answer could be any one of these, or a mixture of them.
Is it angels or God guiding the hand/mind of mortals, and if so, does some sort of special state need to be reached in our subconscious or conscious minds to hear it? Do we, in times of extremis, when the everyday static of life little toils and distractions are flushed from our minds, become tuned into those voices we normally drown out?
Even if you do not accept the idea of a supernatural entity, is it the sudden opening of a doorway into our primordial past, the collective unconscious of Jung, that kicks the brain into survival mode?
Is it a message from our biological bios declaring “your ancestors managed to survive worst than this, and you’re the proof, so buckle down, dammit!”
What I find most intriguing about Paige’s experience is that he did not hear a voice or see a vision, but simply had the sensation of being in a situation completely antithetical to the one he was in; in a park relaxing instead of atop a hill facing murderous enemies. Suddenly, he falls forward, as if something has let him go or left him, and he completes his task in what seems to be machine-like efficiency.
Possession, intervention or hyper-charged evolution? All of it leaves one with a sense of awe.
A friend of mine sent me a story a while back. A young woman, a divinity school student, had stayed late visiting friends and was walking home alone. She decided to take a short cut through an alley and was startled to see a man standing there in the shadows. She prayed to be protected, walked past the man and arrived home safely.
The next day she heard that a woman had been raped the night before in that same alley. She went to the police and described the man she had seen. They found and arrested him and secured proof that he indeed had been the rapist.
She confronted him in the police station. “You raped that other girl. Why did you let me go?”
The man looked at her, bewildered. “Attack you? With those two huge guys you had walking on each side of you? You think I am crazy?”
Though functional MRI, SPECT imaging and the like, brain scientists can actually view in real-time what parts of the brain are active when patients/volunteers are experiencing various sensations or emotions. Temporal lobes are strongly implicated for those who see religious visions and the like.
But does this mean that this is where those visions truly emanate? Or is the brain merely the “hardware of the soul”? [phrase borrowed from Dr. Daniel Amen] If you believe that our bodies are merely “earthsuits” for our supernatural selves (spirits), then perhaps the brain is simply the interface where we sometimes get a momentary glimpse into what’s happening in a world beyond what we can see or empirically observe.
With regards to the “third man” experience – oh yeah, that’s happened to me. Something I really won’t talk about in public. I should have died – thanks to the “voice”, I walked away without a scratch.
Was it real? The fact that I lived when I shouldn’t have is real enough.
And Lifeofthemind mentions homeopathy – I’ve had a similar experience. I don’t believe in it, I can prove to myself scientifically that it’s nonsense – but I have personally witnessed it’s ability to cure people who believe in it. And not garden variety illnesses that would have cured themselves, but things which the medical establishment had given up as incurable.
I can’t explain it, I can’t bring myself to completely accept it – but I also won’t deny what I’ve seen. Generally I just don’t talk about it very much.
W.
I have had the honor of meeting several recipients of the MOH. Their preferred construction is “recipient” rather than “winner”. To a man they believe they hold the Medal in trust for the others who are not recognized.
I love this blog.
I think there is a sort of generational memory or knowledge, allowing you to do things, especially when caught unprepared, that you never did or didn’t know about. This has happened to me.
Years ago I knew an anthropologist who, when he was young, went trekking in a sort of camper Land Rover, with one of the last traditional bands of Australian aborigines. He told a lot of stories about this, of course, including their powers of observation in tracking, finding water, etc. When I expressed amazement he reminded me that, when there are no modern gadgets or diversions, one of the only things left to do is observe your environment.
He said that much of this knowledge was passed on by elders but often he was told that ‘my ancestors told me’ when he would ask how one of them knew something.
I think there is a sort of generational memory or knowledge, allowing you to do things, especially when caught unprepared, that you never did or didn’t know about. This has happened to me.
Years ago I knew an anthropologist who, when he was young, went trekking in a sort of camper Land Rover with one of the last traditional bands of Australian aborigines. He told a lot of stories about this of course including their powers of observation in tracking, finding water, etc. When I expressed amazement he reminded me that, when there are no modern gadgets or diversions, one of the only things left to do is observe your environment.
He said that much of this knowledge was passed on by elders but often he was told that ‘my ancestors told me’ when he would ask how one of them knew something.
(sorry for the duplication–couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it)
Robert Fitzgerald translates very nicely the Odissey’s opening verse as:
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story…”
God.
I was walking along a bluff above the beach in California with my golden retriever as we passed a couple of men eating their lunches of half chickens, which were spread before them on blankets. The dog, as they are wont to do, lunged at one of the chickens lying on the blanket, and wolfed it down hungrily in moments. I was stunned by her audacity, and offered the poor man a $20 bill for loss of his lunch, and we (the dog and I) walked on. After about ten yards, my dog simply collapsed in a heap; no warning, no outcry, nothing—she just dropped as if dead.
I don’t know how I knew that the answer was to clear her airway; there was no sign of gasping for breath, nothing. But that’s what I did: I reached down her throat and removed a chicken bone that had lodged crosswise in her throat, restricting the flow of air to her lungs. To this day, I feel that something external led me to surmise that clearing her throat was the key to her survival; the whole incident cannot have taken more than 10 seconds at most. Afterward, she hopped up as if nothing had happened, but I can tell you, she was as lifeless as can be before I was able to remove the bone. There are indeed “more things in heaven and earth” than we understand.
Like “buckets” above, I too love this blog and the people who comment here.
Thanks for posting this, W. It finally inspired me to do something I’ve intended to do for some years: order my own copy of “With the Old Breed.” Just to balance the eras out, I got Bing West’s book on Fallujah as well.
We have what is probably the best military in history, and certainly the most moral. Would that the civilian leadership that has the privilege of commanding them had a tithe of the honor and integrity the average American fighting man possesses.
Traditionally, when we launch a rocket the cameras switch to high speed, 240 frames a second. Viewing the film later, everything seems to be in slow motion.
I have been astonished how, in moments of violent crisis, the same thing happens to the human mind. In the worse wreck I have ever been in it was amazing how my perception of the situation proceeded from surprise to annoyance to No!-this-is-not-a-small-thing in the couple of seconds it all took to transpire. Rather than a “Duhhhh… what happened” reaction so often used in fiction, I recalled every microsecond. But at the same time a briefcase I had on the seat next to me had passed my head and went out the driver’s side window so fast I never saw it go by.
A friend of mine, a military veteran of Vietnam and other conflicts, said that mastering something very new and challenging, like flying an airplane, is a case of learning to be someone else. Your normal reactions won’t work any more. You have to be someone else. And sometimes that someone else is operating at 240 frames a second.
Sometimes there is just nothing to say that can improve your blog. It just helps to read it. Thanks.
I hate to harsh the buzz here, but how would we know if the men who died on that hill also had the sense of a “third man” present but died anyway? How many heard a voice say “You will survive this war”, were reluctant to tell anyone, then died the next day?
For those interested in Sledge –in the book, his conversation with Doc Caswell had really stuck with me. So much in that encounter that as wretchard says above (and i’d never’ve realized it otherwise) IS Homeric. Why did Doc Caswell initiate that private conversation with EB Sledge and perhaps not the other Marines doing the same thing? Why did Homer concentrate on a very few of the warriors but on them probe so deep? Whatever it was Doc Caswell saw, ‘proved’ in Sledge’s life, and the book. But how did Doc Caswell know precisely what to say to the young ‘blood-up’ Sledge? And what excellent institutional character the Marine Corps ‘proved’ in having such people as Doc Caswell in a combat unit in the first place. I mean, really, “What would your mother say, Sledge?”
(the Doc Caswell part is around 4:20. There’s another high-lite (i think not related in the book) at around 6:00 –Sledge is just home after war, and a college registrar’s world collides with his –and then merges, because of Sledge’s mercy –which had been suspended before, when the youngster was trying to stay alive in that other universe.)
***
Robert/22; –reading the war stories, it sometimes does seem like close calls and nearly getting killed can’t have been much more than high adventure, because the authors came back to tell us about it. It takes a sort of forced-play to push your mind to the next thought –that if you die your story just doesn’t get told –by you anyway.
RWE @20:
There was an almost humorous experiment to verify if these kind of stories are indeed true. They dropped volunteers from a great height who landed in a huge net which gently cushioned their fall. But before they dropped them they put on a set of goggles with a digital counter display that was creating random numbers very fast, too fast to read with the human eye.
After the people were dropped (experiencing a very real sense of fear/danger), they were able to recall some of those numbers because part of their brain literally sped up, allowing them to take in and interpret the numbers they saw before their eyes. It reminds me of overclocking a computer.
The point was that once the brain recognizes a major threat, parts of it can speed up to allow for abnormally-fast reaction times, perception, etc. Hence the “my whole life flashed before my eyes” stories, or your car wreck story.
Robert #22:
I heard a joke about that:
A man goes into a casino and walks over to the roulette table. As he stands there he hears a small voice, seemingly from nowhere say “Place a bet on Black 22.”
He places the bet. He wins.
Then he hears the little voice say “Place a bet on Red 30”
He places a bet. He wins.
Then the little voice says “Now place all your winnings on Red 16.”
He does so. He loses.
The little voice says “Well, damn!”
Robert@22:
We of course don’t and can’t know. Maybe it really is a purely brain-based phenomenon that helps us survive. Or, perhaps it’s just one part of an instinct that comes from our spiritual nature.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote of a friend with whom he walked and had conversation. They said goodbye and each went their own way, not realizing he wouldn’t her again before he found out she had died unexpectedly. He wrote:
“To say goodbye to each other is to deny separation. It is like saying ‘today we play at separating, but we will see each other tomorrow.’ Man invented farewells because he somehow knows he is immortal, even though he may seem gratuitous and ephemeral.”
It is my belief that these instincts draw us to the Source of those instincts if we’ll give them ear.
From personal experiences of friends and family who have heard A Voice, the majority hear the phrase – Everything will be OK – or something similar. It seems to me that the expression OK is pretty universal, understood nearly the world over, and is utilized by guardian angel, or whatever, as reassurance. I get goosebumps whenever I have someone relate a supernatural story that includes this type of phrase.
The schizophrenias (along with all the modern stigmatic implications) are seen as being the price paid for the development of language in the left hemisphere of the brain vs. the once more dominant functioning of the right (did I get the left and right correct?). In time of stress, or when normal language and communication systems breakdown, are inapplicable or inappropriate, it has been suggested that the older primordial right brain systems provide the guidance to see us through the situation. Folks who are prone to the modern emanation of Schizophrenias either genetic or environmentally induced may not come out of these stressed inducing situations unscathed. It is a fascinating area of study, and dopamine is definitely in play.
I think the NRA put out a MOH video that described the third man, invisible hand story of Mitchelle Paige, along with other stories of super-human acts of bravery as they were associated with a particular weapon springfield rifle, the MG, 1911 pistol and the bayonette.
It is an incredible story that leaves me with goose bumps every time I hear it.
Numinosity has long been fading from our culture, and Eliot pronounced its withering in “The Wasteland,” which Wrichard so perfectly settles upon in his essay. What happens to people and a culture that have no understanding and no need of religion?
Our modern Tiresias? Michael Jackson, but now even he is gone. But the divine has its own ways. I think we’ll see nemesis still has a way of following upon hubris.
At the top of ‘strange visitations’ list could be the experience of Shong Lue Yang, an unlettered Hmong farmer-shaman who produced a written language for the then-scriptless Hmong language. It’s an example, one of two I think, of auto-genesis of an alphabet.
The account of the story is in a book by the late Yale linguist William Smalley, who relates that Hmong ancestors (in the form of tiny humans) visited the shaman in his dreams and told him that the people were facing perilous times and needed an alphabet, which they were going to give to him, in a series of visits.
The account is in Smalley’s book, “Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script.”
Unfortunately the shaman, a gentle man by all accounts, was not sufficiently with the anti-communist program of General Vang, who apparently ordered the assassination of Shong Lue Yang in 1971. The event still ripples through the Hmong community. I guess the ancestors didn’t promise the shaman he’d survive the war.
Hmong organizations tried to develop the script as a viable alphabet, but it lost out to a roman alphabet.
Those that propose dormant yet superhuman abilities in time of crisis do so because they want to believe in the power of the human mind. (More often than not.) Those the propose the intervention of the external force do so because they want to believe in the enduring power of the spirit. (More often than not.) Another post touched on the idea of the brain as the engine of the soul, or something to that effect. So perhaps the believers and non-believers are really talking about the same phenomenon?
Something stopped Mitchell Paige from leaning forward in that moment. If he had, I would guess he would have been cut down. Was it his instinct that paralyzed him? Or was it Gabriel?
As a person of faith, I would like to believe that what he experienced was the peace, warmth, and serenity that we so often hear will accompany the touch of God.
Regardless, I think we too often, because of such profound experiences as Paige’s, overestimate the voice of God. That alarm clock we hear in the morning might only be a machine programed to make a certain noise at a certain time, and it’s easy to say that’s all it is. On the other hand, God could be calling us to his day, missing the voice as we pat ourselves on the back for the marvel that is our cell phone.
I have heard the inexplicable voice. In prayer at a local cemetery, where I had gone to read the bible & pray in quiet one morning, I heard a voice. It asked: “Are you following Me because I made the rain stop? What will you do when I allow it to rain?” Said exactly that way. It had been threatening to rain, and my final prayer was to hold off the rain until i got home, because i forgot my umbrella. I have no explanation. I know i heard it. It was a clear response to my prayer, but so much more. It didn’t rain on me, by the way.
The chilling part, one month later, my youngest brother was diagnosed with the malignant melanoma, that killed him in a year. Coincidence? I don’t think so. A hard question from God. What will you do? Will you trust me in the storms of life?
My blog is named poems from God because at times, the words directly come from Him. When you sit in church, in the middle of communion, and hear “Turn aside and see me in the homeless man…” then write these words as the plate passes. Just hear, and take dictation. When you awake, with words on your mind, then write, all you do is take dictation. The wildest part is when reading something “I wrote” six months earlier, and realize how appropriate it now is.
One of the great paradoxes is that God is fully in charge, but uses us, feeble reeds, to do astonishing things we cannot do.
I know it isn’t my subconscious. When I write late at night, and fall asleep, sometimes it has kept typing, with a different story than what my conscious inspired mind is writing. I can tell exactly when I fell asleep because the break is exact, no random letters typed. In the midst of dialog, a hunk of text is inserted from another “mind”.
We have a long way to go before we have any idea of what is going on in our reptile/mammal/monkey brain.
Urban B @30
“perhaps the believers and non-believers are really talking about the same phenomenon?”
I think this is so. I always wonder if I should write extra-human opposed to super-human. As I recall Paige said he had the opportunity to check out the gun of the fellow who’d opened up on him and looked through the sights. No way the guy missed and if Mitchell had been allowed to lean forward he would no longer be. His instinct was to grab the handle, something “extra” got in the way.
Seems to me I have been on a thread like this some years ago hosted by Alamo_Girl one of the great posters at FreeRepublic. A friend of hers Snarks_When_Bored pointed out to me another human capability as represented by American Indian lore. That is, if you’re tracking someone in a forest and you come on their encampment at night. You should not look at them directly from the dark. But always avert your eyes.
Why?
Because even though you may be a great hunter tracker and your quarry has no knowledge of your presence ie they did not see hear smell or taste you….if you look directly at them from the dark–they will sense your presence.
This is not an unknown phenomenon. People will sometimes relate the experience of being in a strange place where they recognized nothing and yet the “hair stood up on the back of their neck”.
(Later they learned there was a great danger there.)
Somehow something was communicated. But exactly how did that communication work.
In Christian circles not since the late early 90′s have I seen the popular footsteps in the sand story. I did a quick search for it online. Here’s the first result.
(The tune is on continuous loop so you have shut it off after you’ve read the passage.)
Surely the Japanese soldiers that were frantically trying to dispatch Mitchell Paige believed he was being protected by a Third Man.
There are no atheists in a foxhole.
Here’s poet Gary Snyder on the same sort of thing in:
John Muir on Mt. Ritter
After scanning its face again and again,
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I MUST fall.
There would be a moment of
Bewilderment, and then,
A lifeless rumble down the cliff
To the glacier below.
My mind seemed to fill with a
Stifling smoke. This terrible eclipse
Lasted only a moment, when life blazed
Forth again with preternatural clearness.
I seemed suddenly to become possessed
Of a new sense. My trembling muscles
Became firm again, every rift and flaw in
The rock was seen as through a microscope,
My limbs moved with a positiveness and precision
With which I seemed to have
Nothing at all to do.
– Gary Snyder
35. Charles
I was such. As it turned out, I did not believe in Him, but He believed in me. I was protected on several occasions, even though I heard no voices nor saw any mysterious figures. But Michael and St. George were there nonetheless. Years later I had an otherwise inexplicable healing experience which convinced me. Again, no voices for me, but I no longer disbelieve accounts of others.
So many of my patients have had such experiences. A woman whose artist father died when she was 5 years old was facing dropping out of college when she felt her father’s presence reassuring her things would be OK. Two days later she was awarded a full scholarship.
Another had a dream of leading a fire drill the night before there was an actual fire in his office started by a spark from a coffee maker.
I had an experience not unlike RWE’s @20 in which my car did a 360 on the freeway. I experienced it in slow motion frame by frame.
What do these mean? Well, as we are all a bag of chemicals, there must be chemical (material) intermediaries for the phenomena. So the fact that SPECT scans can detect different parts of the brain lighting up merely tells us where the interface is and not what the origin is.
I personally prefer to believe that these phenomena are simultaneously neurochemical, psychological, part of archaic brain structure, and from some non-corporeal source. And I prefer to believe that the non-corporeal source is somehow connected to God.
I offer a variation of Descartes’ “proof” — why would we be equipped with receptor sites for something that did not exist?
But I am also a credulous skeptic (or skeptical believer, if you prefer) constantly finding that my right brain and my left brain are in their eternal wrestling match. Sometimes my scientific side overrules my believer and faith side, sometimes it is the other way around.
How wonderful to be able to exercise both on this site.
Last year I chanced on the broadcast of a video documentary on the life of WWII MOH recipient Desmond Doss, Jr. He was a conscientious objector who served with a combat unit on Okinawa, despite refusing to carry any weapon. His officers and the other men in the company had insulted, ridiculed, scorned him. Initially, the command refused to allow him to train as a medic, and tried to shame and force him to become a regular fighting infantryman, but finally relented after he persevered despite the abuse.
On Okinawa, his unit was tasked with taking “Hacksaw Ridge” and in the week-long firefight for the well-defended summit, Doss repeatedly exposed himself to enemy fire, calmly and deliberately tending to the wounded. Under continuous fusillades of Japanese sniper rounds, he carried his comrades to the cliff’s edge, gently lowered each one down on a rope, and returned to retrieve other casualties.
My eyes keep leaking.
Y’oughtta take a look at his story.
(Breaking lurk mode)
I’m a church musician – handbells and choir. A few years ago, I had a vocal solo planned. I worked hard on it and rehearsed with our accompanist several times, doing my best to make it a gift to God and to the congregation. When that Sunday came, I got up, walked to the mike, and had the feeling that I was gently placed to one side, while someone else sang the song. I had an unusual number of folks come up afterward with heartfelt compliments, and all I could do was thank them. But it wasn’t me. I was just the vessel.
It was an eerie experience, and very humbling.
In The Mystery of the Mind, famous Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield makes the following striking observation. When he probed the human brain with an electrical stimulus, the patient/subject (who remained conscious during the open-brain exploration/operation) told him what awareness the probe had provoked. Sometimes a childhood memory would come to the patient’s awareness, another time perhaps a sensation of being touched or an emotion was evoked. However, when Penfield touched a part of the brain that made the subject move a limb or recall a particular childhood experience (the so-called memory tapes that transactional analysis has used so extensively) the subject would respond, “You did that…I didn’t!” No matter where the stimulation was applied to the brain the subject always knew that the doctor had caused the resulting reaction. What was striking to Penfield was not only the memory tapes, but the “I”
Try as he would, Penfield could not find that “I” with his electrical probe. In other words, he could not find a place in the brain where, when stimulated, the subject actually believed “I did that”…that the subject himself/herself was the cause of the consequent reaction. Penfield concluded that this aspect of the mind, this “I”, dwells in a “separate essence,” distinct from all other aspects of the brain. It is, he claimed, this “independent essence” of the mind that enables it to be the controlling power over the brain itself.
Although Penfield was criticized by colleagues for promulgating this sort of hypothesis (a hypothesis which, by the way, is finding more confirmation today), this remarkable observation has far-reaching consequences. Mind and brain function as a unit…but what is this “mind” which so many of us use in our formulas, “body, mind and spirit?” What is this essence that knows apart from its material substance?
Draw Me Lord
I’d love to hear you dig deeper into the Jaynes thesis if so inclined, Richard. I read his book when it was first published, and have often felt that he was on to something, but I couldn’t really define what that something might be. He goes to a great deal of trouble to define his terms, but I struggle greatly with the trip to where his mind must have been to conceive such a thesis in the first place.
I don’t know where I read it, but I see some truth in one wag’s remark that said Jaynes’s thesis was “the most fascinating thing he’d ever read that couldn’t possibly be true…” Truly mind-expanding reading.
Frame by frame… I’d say that is just a techie overlay.
My experience differs somewhat. I was 9 and half, playing with peers a variant of Tag. We were at a wedge of two intersection streets. I ran off in to one of them, pretty fast.
From the time I noticed to the actual hit, it may have been about 600ms. Time dilated the moment I registered the image of the incoming motorbike. I did perceive the normal time, but also was aware of the dilated time, as it allowed me to do calculations. I gauged the motorbike’s speed and mass, calculated my momentum, trajectories and outcomes. Leasurely, I may add, it seemed I have all the time needed to finish calculations. I were not concerned that the math is something I would not encounter until the university level. I also lacked any fear. I reckon that the area that is supposed to produce fear as a defensive response/mechanism did not have time to engage.
I finished my calculations a mere few milliseconds before the hit and the result was that the collision was unavoidable and likely terminal. The signal to the muscles to change the trajectory would take longer than I had. The interval of the dilated time, if I try to translate it into normal time would probably be close to 30-40 seconds.
So, about 2 milliseconds I got out, leaving my body to its fate. I heard the thud when the motorbike hit the rag doll. But it was already as if a considerable distance stretched between me and the body. There was no perception of pain, pressure, compression and change of trajectory. For all practical purposes, I thought it is no longer of any concern.
The time when I were outside would probably cover another 30 seconds of normal time. But for me, it was almost as if I had all the time in the world. I described my NDE in some form earlier on BC. Then I realized I have to go back. The rag doll was apparently functional. Did not want to go, it was like going from a superreality back into a hazy half-dream, but somehow understood that it was not my time.
Yes, the pain hit me the moment I slipped back, but adrenaline and endorphins already were flushed into my system. But what kept me in high spirits was my NDE experience. People that gathered around (25-some on an entirely empty street mere moments ago–could never figure this out–and later my mother, after some good soul that recognized me called her, couldn’t quite figure out my serene and almost happy facial expression that lasted for hours, probably until I fell asleep in the hospital bed. My injuries were not life threatening, but by no means minor. The doc that operated on me with only local anesthesia that only flattened the pain envelope thought I am very brave. It was really not the case. My mind was preoccupied.
me myself and I
you’d think would see things eye to eye
but we won’t, unless we will
focus on beyond the hill
and thrill to all that stimuli
I became a biochemist because I was baffled by the brain’s ability to do amazing things. This curiosity was kindled in me from my experiences learning and practicing Tae Kwon Do. I have to say that after more than half my life of studying neuroscience, I am more amazed than when I started. There’s more to it than what we know. I marvel.
mezzrow/43
Jaynes’ observations and conclusions are apples and oranges. If you don’t intend to buy into his conclusions, it is a good reading. With a caveat that he tends to interpret some data with a strong bias to support his thesis.
His example of archaic Greek as an indication of the bicameral mind concept was really a stretch. He took the grammar conventions as indication of the type of awareness. It would be like stating that Germans are not quite right because they are incapable to recognize vocative “plural you” and use vocative “they” where it is illogical, instead.
I don’t think I could add anything to Jayne’s thesis without spending a great deal of time in secondary research. My own interest in trying to understand reality began when I began to read about intelligence, prediction and and the history of science. The key issue in most of those fields is really “what can you know?” This interest came on the heels of a young adulthood spent among people who thought the question was answered, via “dialectical materialism”. It soon became evident that “dialectical materialism” had almost no knowledge content. It had no predictive power. You couldn’t even perform elementary arithmetic with it. As a guide to complex systems it was a fraud and a sham.
But what about the scientific method? Here was surer ground which was achieved by making limited, provable claims that were in the end hypotheses always open to falsification. I came to believe that while at every stage we got the best expected value from trusting the best proven hypothesis, that there was no cause and perhaps never would be any cause to imagine we held the absolute truth.
It was the “otherness” of the truth, I think, the sense that it was “out there” waiting to be discovered that made me less inclined to dismiss Jaynes than if I could still use the magisterial “of course” as in “of course that is nonsense”. Once it was conventional wisdom that the earth was flat, and our great good fortune is that we are always moving forward to find out. Jaynes’ thesis is an open door. What a scene we glimpse through it, even though it is just painted! But is it? I can’t help but repeat an idea I heard at an Oxford mathematicians discourse on God: that life was more exciting if one believed there was something to discover; that there were real sights to see; real music to hear and perhaps, real voices to answer. If it all meant something, then the rational thing to do was to rush out after the lecture and live.
Dr. Sledge was as fine a professor as he was a Marine. I took his invertebrate zoology course at Alabama College. As a UF graduate student, he was the first nematologist to observe “loop” fungi capturing nematodes. That predatory activity is why heavy mulch, which supports fungi, reduces nematode damage to plant roots.
Dr. Sledge told the class that one’s view of existence may be permanently altered by being ordered to run across an opening to draw machine gun fire. Politicians are not in the same species as men like Gene Sledge.
Whatever kept him alive failed to save thousands of equally human men around him. If it were something other than luck and guts, then the intervention appears to have taken sides, which is disturbing.
Saving Mitchell was very kind and thoughtful, but much less right than magically teleporting the whole Marine Corps and Japanese army back to their cozy homes to forget the whole war.
Chiral, why? Equality of outcomes is a liberal idea and very remote from real life–it is something akin to platonic ideal–a conjured up concept. It would also mean there is no purpose and that there is no free will.
In some sense, it is you who is the intervention factor. It is somewhat a reductionist statement, but for the sake of not getting into complex definitions, this would suffice as it is a partial description of reality.
…and more’s the tragedy, ridgerunner –that we have the Dr. Sledges, but not in DC.
Buddy, in DC they have been replaced by sludges.
In the North African Campaign, Chivalry sufficed.
An entire field hospital was repatriated via Switzerland after being overrun by Rommel.
—
Live RPG impaled in his abdomen, Army medical team saves his life
A soldier in a Humvee convoy in Afghanistan is impaled by an RPG that fails to detonate. The unexploded RPG is stuck in his abdomen with the fins sticking out.
The medic and his brothers took care of him anyway to stop the bleeding during the heat of battle.
Others are wounded.
The medevac bird arrives and discovers the patient has live ordnance inside.
The rules say this patient cannot come aboard. Without hesitation, the medevac crew uploads him, calls in a critical patient with shrapnel wounds. The receiving surgeon at the FST cuts away the uniform and sees fins sticking out. He’s no ordnance expert, but knows ordnance when he sees it.
The rules say get the patient out of there and list him as expected to die. To hell with all that, the surgeon forms a volunteer team, gets an EOD expert over there pronto, and together they pull out the RPG and get it to a sandbagged area.
Channing Moss survives.
not sludges, twoby, but $ludge$.
Anyhoo, sludge agitated becomes a slurry –which is a ‘sludge in a hurry’.
Sludge agitated is activated sludge.
(a bit of imported O2 helps)
His near death experience left Moss temporarily closer to Michael Jackson:
““Moss is an African-American and he’s gone to white.
He’s in total shock from the loss of blood. But at the time, I really didn’t think about it.
I knew [the RPG] was there but I thought, if we didn’t do it, if we didn’t get him out of there, he was going to die,”
said flight medic Sgt. John Collier, 29, then a specialist
That’s a gut wrenching story Doug.
The one about the activated sludge?
Actually, the wrenched guts precede (and provide) the sludge.
A few years back I came across an accident. There were a hundred reasons why I should not have been at that street corner. But there I was.
There were many reasons why I should have continued driving on. Many had already gathered. A little girl was in the street with a few others standing over her.
But for some reason I got out and acted. Then another joined me and we began first aid. As we worked to keep her alive I noticed that in spite of her condition (she had been hit by a truck) she looked like an Angel with a halo around her head. She was beautiful to me in spite of what was in reality a gruesome scene.
Once the paramedics arrived I moved back to my vehicle knowing she wasn’t going to survive. Distraught I drove home and began to cry buckets. Then, as the tears streamed down my face, they disappeared. I didn’t just quit crying, the streams of tears were gone. A very warm, comforting calm came across me and I knew that she would be just fine.
Within a minute of that happening, I noticed a booklet of bible verses that had just been sent to my wife. There was no immediate reason for me to notice the booklet since it was with other items in the box. Yet I did. When I opened the booklet the first verse I saw was ISA 25:8, “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces.”
I’ve never been a particularly pious individual. Was I religious? Yes. Was I doubtful? Absolutely. All doubts vanished that morning.
This is a shortened version of those events. I think of them every day. Something triggers the memory. Today it was this random blog that I stumbled upon. This past weekend I walked by some people in a conversation about a buddy hitting two children. I wanted to stop and say something, but for some reason, did not.
There is no doubt in my mind that an Angel or the hand of God or both touched me that day. Later that morning I discovered the girl was a classmate of one of my children. She, her mother, and a sibling were walking the few blocks to school.
I’m certain that Mr. Paige felt the fear that soon comes due to the unanswered questions regarding why him? And, more importantly, why was the unexplained revealed to him? What is he to do with that knowledge in his daily life? I think about that everyday.
Though I’ve never been in battle, I know exactly what Mr. Paige went through that day.
“Today it was this random blog that I stumbled upon.”
Faith:
I don’t consider the Blog random.
Just the comments.
—
You had a much healthier reaction than Mr. Morrison:
In 1947, Morrison, then four years old, allegedly witnessed a car accident in the desert, where a family of Native Americans were injured and possibly killed.
He referred to this incident in a spoken word performance on the song
“Dawn’s Highway”
from the album An American Prayer, and again in the songs
“Peace Frog” and “Ghost Song”.
Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind
Morrison believed the incident to be the most formative event in his life and made repeated references to it in the imagery in his songs, poems, and interviews. Interestingly, his family does not recall this incident happening in the way he told it.
According to the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, Morrison’s family did drive past a car accident on an Indian reservation when he was a child, and he was very upset by it.
However, the book The Doors written by the remaining members of The Doors, explains how different Morrison’s account of the incident was from the account of his father. This book quotes his father as saying,
“We went by several Indians. It did make an impression on him [the young James]. He always thought about that crying Indian.”
This is contrasted sharply with Morrison’s tale of
“Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death“.
In the same book, his sister is quoted as saying,
“He enjoyed telling that story and exaggerating it. He said he saw a dead Indian by the side of the road, and I don’t even know if that’s true.”
Courson’s story of Morrison’s unintentional ingestion of heroin, followed by accidental overdose, is supported by the confession of Alain Ronay, who has written that Morrison died of a hemorrhage after snorting Courson’s heroin, and that Courson nodded off, leaving Morrison bleeding to death instead of phoning for medical help.[35]
Ronay confessed in an article in Paris-Match that he then helped cover up the circumstances of Morrison’s death.[36] In the epilogue of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins and Sugerman write that Ronay and Varda say Courson lied to police who responded to the death scene and later in her deposition, telling them Morrison never took drugs.
Jim’s Dad was an Admiral:
Who ya gonna believe?
Doug, I meant randomly reading this blog today…I rarely peruse it. Please excuse my lack of clarity.
You guys are making my stomach hurt.
Doug, Faith, call Doug Feith
Back in the 70′s The Inner Game of Tennis proposed a “two mind” approach to sports. A thinking mind (Self 1) and the acting mind (Self 2).
http://www.theinnergame.com/html/Inner_Tennis_home.html
In Inner Tennis, learning / practicing concentration quiets Self 1 and lets Self 2 act.
In Mr. Paige’s story, perhaps you see the result of a mind in a state of pure concentration (that or God).
Glad someone else has read Jaynes, an important book about the ongoing development of how we think, and can learn to think more clearly. It’s an acquired trait not acquired by everyone and not always practiced. And schools are more interested in teaching testable facts than encouraging students to learn to think better.
Why the notion of a bicameral mind and practice/learning leading to a state of higher concentration has merit. It seems to me that it breaks down as events become more random.
Planning for a tennis match is one thing, while combat is very different. One can mentally prepare for most outcomes, play the match in ones head, and practice within the rules of the game. Combat doesn’t fit that model because events evolve randomly and there may not be any rules.
.24 starko
“After the people were dropped (experiencing a very real sense of fear/danger), they were able to recall some of those numbers because part of their brain literally sped up, allowing them to take in and interpret the numbers they saw before their eyes.”
That’s not what happens, Starko, in my experiences in that state. You take everything in but interpret? Not hardly.
You directly experience and interact with whatever is happening on the fly and you discard the luxury of “interpretation” until you have the opportunity to be self indulgent later (if you survive).
We’re speaking pure awareness, situational awareness, not cognitive deliberation.
It is a transcendental (transcending ego/chatter mind) experience and in those situations, people who can’t put away their mental projections and be completely and powerfully in the moment have a high crash rate.
They are not really there essentially, to respond quickly and accurately to the threat and their response is delayed by deliberation. My paratrooper/ranger type training deliberately taught pure response. It’s the quick and the dead. You train yourself to ensure that in given situations your response is appropriate and then when it happens (parachute malfunction, ambush, whatever) the appropriate response is automatic.
Think cat. They’re always in the here and now.
My fleeting contacts with bobcats and mountain lions have been as with peers (primally). But we’re at the top of the food chain, not them, because we can also think strategically when it is appropriate or we have the time to do so.
From the link above
“I am proud to be a citizen of a nation whose objective is peace and goodwill for all mankind. A nation which has contributed so much for the benefit of peoples all over the world. A nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. I am proud to be an American. I can never believe it is old fashioned to love our Flag and Country nor can I ever believe it is being square to stand in readiness behind our flag to defend those ideals for which it stands against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Mitch Paige, MOH
From the link above.
Onesimus
Bob Murphy @66
Good point and poor word choice on my part. When I said “interpret”, I meant only in the most basic of ways. What I should of said is something like “recognize”. In other words the people falling saw the flashing digital readout before their eyes (which were forming numbers) and were able to recognize those numbers for what they were.
sbw/64
There is a much more important book than Jaynes’. It is the book of your life. As long as you know it is there and as long as you know that slipping into mental patterns is a little death every time you forget to think without preconceived constructs manufactured by others… you’d be surprised what you’d learn.
Belmont Club
MONDAY, APRIL 30, 2007
The Long Haul
“American foreign policy must remain concerned with the geopolitical dimension and must employ its influence in Eurasia in a manner that creates a stable continental equilibrium, with the United States as the political arbiter”
Updated…
The current US position is that it will not support Iran’s involvement in Nabucco until Tehran “changes its policies”
and if iran is excluded, there are pathways through Georgia and from Iraq…scroll to the map
Iraq makes ambitious Nabucco offer
Without those manufactured constructs, I fear for my fragile eggshell mind.
#39 Mad Fiddler,
A month ago I took my daughter-in-law to the Bremerton Navy Hospital for a follow-up appointment with her surgeon and while we were waiting I roamed the halls looking at pictures of Navy MOH recipients and their citations. Virtually all were medics and most recieved the honor postumously. I don’t know if they were concientious objectors or not, but they truly did give their all for their fellows. May they all rest in the peace that they did not have in their lives.
Ned
There’s another book about this kind of mental effect you might find interesting, Wretchard — “Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales. The author collected a number of survival stories that also feature a “voice” or a presence that made a difference in the person’s survival, but links it to the brain deliberately shutting down emotional feedback that could cause a fatal panic. It was a relief to me when I read that book, because I had been in a violent life-or-death situation and I heard “the voice” getting me out of it. And with all possible respect to the devout commenters, I am and remain agnostic in religion.
Doug/70
We all need crutches sometimes. You’re fine if you don’t forget to put them in the closed when done with them.
The TV Correspondent Bob Woodruff Returns to the War Zone
Mr. Woodruff, 47, who is perhaps the highest-profile member of the news media to be wounded in the six-year-long war, has sought to keep a spotlight on Iraq, and especially on the soldiers who experience traumatic brain injury and combat stress while on duty there.
Mr. Woodruff said in an ABCNews.com blog post that he would be interviewing front-line doctors and nurses and viewing new equipment that is said to reduce injuries among the military forces in that country.
Mr. Woodruff suffered severe brain trauma and spent more than a month in a medically induced coma. He returned to television work more than a year later with a prime-time documentary about his recovery and the struggles of soldiers with traumatic brain injury.
Mr. Woodruff and his wife also oversee a family foundation to aid wounded service members and raise awareness about the condition. Mr. Rieckhoff said it was sometimes called the “signature injury” of the Iraq war.
He was ‘in the zone.’ Tiger can do it. I can even do it on a good day.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_state.
Note the distorted sense of time, always common to the flow state.
See also
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=oliver+sacks+&as_epq=flow+state&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=100&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=off
GI Joe saved GI Joe.
I have to share this without first reading the comments. Then I’ll go back and read them.
At one point in life I had the need for help with personal issues. At the lowest and most crucial point, I asked for help. Just tossed it into the ether. That day was a spring day, no clouds in the sky. There was not a way for light to change inside the room. However, a golden glow entered the room right after my entreaty. The issue from that moment was much lighter and I have been successful since that time in dealing with the same issue.
Here is what I know:
1. If you have never had an experience in kind then you will most likely dismiss this.
2. Believers will not have a problem understanding what I am saying.
3. Unbelievers will either try to explain it away out of fear or lack of knowledge or will scoff and dismiss.
That’s okay.
RWE @20
A great many years ago, when I was 20, walking through a subway station in Philly, I turned the corner to take the escalator up to track level, and saw a young man 3/4 of the way up holding up a fairly large older woman, with another fairly large older woman a few feet lower, spread out on her back on the escalator. It was clear the second woman was in danger of having her hands or hair caught in the comb plate. I stepped on the escalator and instantly entered super slow motion, perhaps your 240 frames per second. Whatever it was, my brain did some math calculations I was incapable of and I knew instantly just how fast I would have to walk up the escalator to arrive at the woman at the precise moment to lift her a few inches and let the rising escalator lift her to her feet. And that’s the way it worked out, all in slow motion. She came fully erect just as we hit the top, as I knew she would, and I lifted her onto the platform, all in one motion, at which point the world resumed its normal frames per second. A few years ago, while walking on the sidewalk near my home, a woman backed her car out of her driveway just as I passed, knocking me into the street, stumbling down the curb cut, trying to regain my balance, falling into the street, all the while in super slow motion, hitting the street and doing a somersault, emerging all unhurt, not a scratch or bruise, thanks to my brain taking over control of my motion through the air. Try throwing yourself over the curb and onto the street and coming away without a scratch. I believe in moments even of mini-crisis the brain takes over, whether to save you or save itself, I don’t know. I believe the brain tries valiantly to save us even in the face of a major crisis, but sometimes the crisis arrives too fast or too violently for even the brain to cope with.
bad cat robot/72
but links it to the brain deliberately shutting down emotional feedback that could cause a fatal panic.
There is a problem with that concept. The result of such a process would be a dissociative indifference and possible fracturing, depending on the severity of the situation. The “voice” would not have a chance in that environment. Its occurrence indicates actually the opposite, heightened emotional feedback, because that is how we gauge the depth of reality when we are at critical junctures. So, it may be in fact an override of primal instincts by going into overdrive of peak experience.
Re religions… not my dough either despite that I am a theist. Or maybe because of it. Most religions are interfaces designed to remove you from a direct access, through intermediaries.
One extra bit of trivia is that Mitchell Paige before his enlistment had completed all the requirements to become an Eagle Scout. but left for boot camp before a ceremony could be scheduled. In the year before he died a friend interceded and he finally got his award at the age of 84. To date the oldest person ever to acquire the Eagle Scout medal and badge.
http://www.troop139.com/home.html?public/eagles/1-mitchell_paige.html
a few months before my wife passed away from cancer, I awoke because she was having a conversation with someone in our bedroom which needless to say had me waking instantly with hair raising effect.
there were three entrances to our master bedroom and she told me when I asked who she was talking to that there were three hooded beings guarding each entrance keeping us safe and she was telling them we were perfectly fine and didnt need to be watched over.
Richard, I’m always amazed at the breadth of your interests and depth of your knowledge. How do you do all this stuff and hold down a job?
Walt @78:
About a decade ago I was driving through a pouring rain on the freeway when another vehicle, filled with family, crossed into my path in an attempt to take an exit ramp. I hit the brakes, fully committing to make a panic stop, but saw (“calculated”?) that a right flankside collision with the car could not be avoided this way, and instantly averted to avoidance mode, gunning the throttle and swerving to the right around the vehicle, exposing my own left flank to collision in the process, but safely making it around the lumbering exit vehicle.
All this took place, not exactly in slo-mo, but with a reaction speed and driving skill I did not possess. Thank you, Jesus!
Norm67/82; w is a Harvard man –automatic disability insurance
Here you can read the opening lines of a book nearby Sledge’s in epic, scorching honesty: William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness.
In the late 1970s Manchester has returned to his battlefields (Okinawa amd Peleliu) and is encountering someone unexpected, and is realizing that once again and thirty-off years hence on this ground his life is dramatically turning. The visitor, sectral and familiar, is himself, as the young Marine. Author seems to be talking about a real if only psychic presence –he doesn’t seem to be using a literary device.
Anyhoo, Manchester’s and Sledge’s are the two Pacific War memoirs that Victor Davis Hanson mentions in “A Ring” –which is itself unforgettable, even though but a short essay.
I could’ve done that comment better, as there was this longer excerpt.
Random thoughts on the thread….
As our nation is surrounded and the Vandals approach the gates, who saves us?
The Jews had both close calls with last minute miracles, and a few hard lessons of near destruction. We have not yet had the hard lesson.
When men are in group, is the effect additive or does it multiply to be greater than the sum of its part? (Belleau Wood, Thermoplae, Vally Forge)
michael@87:As our nation is surrounded and the Vandals approach the gates, who saves us?
We do. It is well and good to accept the gifts that God provides us. But they are just that; gifts. Each of us must plan and live our lives the best we can, depending not on divine intervention (although we must treasure God’s grace when it does occur), but depending on our own God given sense of right and justice. We are each provided with a limited amount of coinage that is life. How we spend the coins of our life and on what, determines the Quality of our life. Walk straight and strong towards the Light. When you can no longer walk, crawl, and when you can no longer crawl, keep your face turned to the Light.
We fly on two wings: discipline and faith.
that’s pretty good, charles –the more one thinks about it, the better it gets. the two bind one another, unlike in the therapy world, where ‘support’ is the act.
I was in the left lane of a 3-lane, divided Interstate near Sheboygan, driving a Dodge RAM pickup….bright, sunny day, 83 degrees, windows open. Saw that I was closing on a car ahead, also in the left lane. Moved one lane to the right to pass it. Recognized instantly that it was not going in my direction….it was coming toward me, coming the wrong way. It moved over so that it was once again in my lane. I move further….it tracked my movements. Mind you, I was at 55 mph, and it (later proved to be an Olds Firenza, half the weight of my truck). The moment of collision was on a bridge, the abutments restricting me from moving any further to my right, and the Olds had steered to meet me head-on. I was on the brakes hard, the Olds never braked at all. The final instants of that collision, which I recognized was inevitable, were in slow motion, digitally moving from frame to frame, in black and white and grays…..all sense of color ended. I cannot recall any noise, there was no apparent motion of my body, and I watched the air bag deploy. The Olds disappeared under my truck, ended up across the highway, still headed the wrong way, but reduced to half its original height, the driver dead and dismembered. But it is those instants of incremental, digital, soundless, slow motion, void of color that remain with me to this day.
Be interesting to know if jihadists pray for and receive protection from Allah. Or if they just expect Allah to hold the door open for their little hamburglered parts as they blast through into the afterlife. And Allah is happy to assist them in their exit from the mortal coil.
Thanks for your stories and links, folks.
The Victor Davis Hanson article is fine.
My Dad was in the Pacific theater, having joined the US Navy at 16 to support his mom and three older sisters. He received the Navy Cross for his efforts to put out fires raging below decks when his ship was bombed and torpedoed in 1942. Never talked about that, except a few times when I really pestered him. He preferred reminiscing about his buddies and their good times, building catamaran sailboats from old drop tanks, exploring recently liberated islands, swimming and fishing in sparkling lagoons.
He said most of the times when the ship was under attack, people were too busy doing their jobs to be scared. He reflected on this for a bit, and recalled that there was one sailor who’d discovered he could hide inside a stanchion in the hangar, which was folded into a sort of L-shaped space. He was found there after a battle, dead from a round that had pierced the steel and his body.
Charles,
The faith and discipline leads to joyful obedience. Knowing we are part of His plan. Stepping out in faith, having put on the armor. Not alone. No, never alone. All we must do is keep our eyes on Him. One benefit of being a Calvinist is the knowledge I share with Stonewall Jackson. One day, I will cross the river and meet him.
There is a major parallel of this kind of faith, and military discipline. I have saved some pages from John Ringo s stories that focus on training an army, because they offer a wonderful example of how a Christian soldier must be trained.
I am constantly amazed at the quality of comments and commenters on this site, and the towering presence of the cat who watches over us.
I’ve also heard “that voice”.
Late one night driving home to New Hampshire through Vermont on I 91 with my wife sleeping in the front passenger seat and the three kids sleeping in the back seat, I was driving in the right hand lane doing around 75mph and a “voice” said “Switch lanes”.
There was no other traffic on the road and there was no reason to move to the left lane but I listened to the voice and changed lanes.
As soon as I was in the left lane I flashed by two deer standing in the middle of the right lane.
I hadn’t seen the deer before I whipped by them and I thanked the voice as I slowed it down to about 65mph.
I thought I had just been lucky,until reading this post.
Thanks Wretchard.
Cry ‘Havoc’ (1943)
‘Cry Havoc’ is Richard Thorp’s 1943 film about the courageous women Army nurses and volunteers on Bataan during WWII.
Margaret Sullavan is wonderful as Lt. Smith, an Army nurse secretly married against the rules to an officer on Bataan. She is suffering from malignant malaria, but refuses to leave Bataan for treatment, wanting to be near her husband, but also unwilling to desert the overworked nurses and volunteers. Sullavan was always great at suffering nobly on film (as in ‘Three Comrades,’ 1938), and again gives a beautiful, moving performance as the dedicated nurse, keeping both her marriage and illness to herself.
Ann Sothern and Joan Blondell share top billing with Sullavan and give terrific support as two of the volunteers. Blondell is funny as the former Vaudeville performer who entertains the other women with a demonstration of her old striptease act. And Ann Sothern, who was sooooooo beautiful, is marvelous as the tough, straight-talking waitress with her sights set on an Army officer, unaware he’s Sullavan’s husband.
The supporting cast includes Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Ella Raines, Heather Angel and Connie Gilcrest, all excellent, and a bit by young Robert Mitchum as a dying soldier.
Bataan (1943)
Rather than try to show the entire evacuation and abandonment of the Phillipines, which would be perhaps overwhelmingly depressing, the film-makers decided to focus on one small, fictional incident that could, in effect, stand in for everything else. They chose wisely. What happens is that we watch a group of soldiers defend and then destroy a bridge, so as to slow down the Japanese army’s advance, if only by a few hours, to buy precious time for everyone else. None of these men wants to be a hero. They’re all stuck there, and would rather be someplace else. While some are more aggressive than others, no one is wholly brave; and though there is a good deal of nervousness and occasional cowardice, they all pull together admirably in the end.
Though filmed on the Culver City lot, the film cleverly and expressionistic ally suggests a tropical environment. As the story progresses the jungle gets foggier. It was never too inviting to begin with; by the movie’s end it is absolutely forbidding.
Miller had a guest whose mom was sent to one of the islands with the USO.
There was a severe shortage of mechanics – she was recruited to become one.
Continued to practice the trade when she returned home.
And Ann Sothern, who was sooooooo beautiful
something about those 40s women –healthy as horses –off the farm toned-up, natural food naturally, those drive ya crazy hairstyles and dresses, rangy movement and posture. really shows up to a TCM insomniac. by the shank of the 50s, something was different –the same basics, but more self-conscious, less open. styles more tamped down. i know, styles and fashions are just that –but ‘the medium is the message’ –
49. Chiral:
Whatever kept him alive failed to save thousands of equally human men around him. If it were something other than luck and guts, then the intervention appears to have taken sides, which is disturbing.
I’ll wager that there are among Japanese survivors those who hold similar stories in their hearts. Why one is chosen at this moment rather than another is not ours to ken. But in the end all die. For myself I can say that am surprised to be alive today. I can’t explain it except to say that I was protected to accomplish something unknowable to me. When that is done I will be released from my duty. In this I am in nowise unique, it is the common destiny of all men.
Scientific inquiry is a wonderful thing but, in line with mankind’s tendency to arrogance and hubris, it tries to claim everything for itself. Nature is all there is, it says. Everything has a natural explanation. When scientific evidence points to the universe as having a set beginning in time and space, a Big Bang, still there couldn’t have been a cause, it just caused itself. When scientists discover the mind-boggling complexity of a single cell and it becomes difficult to explain away the astronomical odds of this being so by random chance, then the odds are conveniently reduced to more reasonably manageable levels by positing the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes. If there are still many things that science is unable to explain, it’s only because science hasn’t progressed that far yet. But it will in the future, so, HAVE FAITH! Have faith in the physical; there is no metaphysical. There is only the natural; there is no supernatural. There is only the material; there is no immaterial. There are no miracles.
Except, there are experiences like Mitchell Paige’s.
“The part of the story he [Paige] held back was that something unseen on that hill helped him… ‘I never wanted to relate this experience to anyone, as I did not want to ever have anyone question it.’”
He didn’t want anyone to question it because it was sacred. Science can’t go there, even if it tries to go there for purposes of discrediting these accounts. Could Paige believe that, in his time of crisis, he suddenly “remembered” how to become superhuman? Could he believe his survival was due to some optimal interaction between his left brain and his right brain? Is he going to bend over backwards to accomodate his experience to some farfetched theory? No, he knew what he knew, and he kept it to himself all those years because of all those who, as Luke 16:31 puts it, “will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”
Hi Karen Yvonne.
I am convinced that what saved Mitchell Paige was in, but not of, this world.
Men in combat, and under other stressful conditions do do things without conciously thinking about them.
I myself have come fully awake while changing magazines. I had grabbed the weapon on bipod and fired two long low bursts traversing the area in front of me without knowing what I was doing except that I had to wake up and get on with the program. BUT: This was something I had planned on doing ahead of time.
I have heard other credible stories similar to my experience(s). Same thing though. Whatever was done was something folks had thought about doing and how to do it ahead of time.
The Paige story is different. His concious mind and his subconcious, his left brain and his right brain and his conditioned body all wanted him to do as planned: lean foward and load the machine gun. And he could not. COULD NOT. COULD NOT. He was frozen in an upright position until that Japanese took aim
and his head and face and touched his trigger. Then Paiges body went foward and thirty rounds went where he had been. Additionally, he inserted the belt, cranked the charging handle twice and got into firing position while falling foward. This latter
event might, or might not, be within the realm
of unaided human capabilities. CAn’t say for sure.
However, the subterfuge of making himself an irresitble and un-missable target and then moving out of the way at the last possible
millisecond was not of Mitchel Paige’s doing. Every fiber of his being was concentrating on and trying to do something else. What he did do was the result of a
non-human intervention.
Want to call it “Divine Intervention”. Sure suits my pistol. How about yours?
Yeah Buddy, I think it went beyond styles and fashion in a multitude of ways.
Progress has not always been our most important product wrt some eternal verities.
Your description evoked a recall of a lost wholesomeness.
Rangy, huh?
My mom was described as “Willowy” in High School.
And that she was.
Several of you, such as 22. Robert Speirs, have questioned whether those who did not survive might have also heard from reassuring “third men” who failed to protect them.
Fair enough and unprovable by definition. But perhaps those who perished were given not the “you will survive”, message, but an alternative message “You will not survive, your time is now; come with me, NOW.” The precise visage of such a messenger probably would vary from cullture to culture. Our culture is rife with images of a “Grim Reaper” who comes for the dead. The old Norse believed in Valkyries who escorted the dead from the battlefield. The ancient Achaeans also seem to have known of this guardian phenomenon, associating it with their many deities instead of angels. There are many mentions in the Illiad of heroes being protected by their patron god. It recounts how Achilles was able to challenge and wound Aphrodite, Hector’s patron and then kill Hector once she had been driven off. The important legends not only represent quaint stories, but last down the ages becaue they reflect the deepest of our human themes and experiences. Who can say otherwise. Perhaps everyone meets such a messenger at the moment of death? Those whose experiences were only near death, cannot say, since they were not actually taken. To paraphrase the Zen proverb, Those who can say do not know; those who know can no longer say.
Alternatively, there may be an aspect of predestinarianism at work. Though I am not personally a believer in predestination, or that only some people are Chosen and Beloved and others Of No Interest, I cannot refute such a belief, and it would explain why only some individuals might have special guardians and protectors. I do not know or understand because I ain’t dead yet.