Time to Time: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (Ashton Ford Series) (4 page)

Chapter Seven:
 
Time, Place, and Circumstance

I long ago came to the
conclusion that there are no absolutes. That makes "reality" a bit
easier to handle. It seems that truth is always entirely relative to the moment
in which it is perceived, and "phenomena" is phenomenal only from a
particular point of view—which is to say that something is true only in its own
time and place, and something is phenomenal only if it is extremely unusual,
extraordinary, or highly remarkable in our time and place.

So
just how phenomenal are flying saucers?

But
let's tackle "truth" first because it is easier to grab.

If
I say, "It is hot today," and I am seated beside you on the burning
sands of a great desert at high noon in summertime, then you recognize my
statement as truth. Of course you could reply: "Not as hot as
yesterday," but that is just another angle on relativity. If you are
seated atop an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean and I am communicating with you
telepathically from the desert, you'll have to wonder where I'm communicating
from before you can

decide if I am telling
the truth
for me
. You already know it
is not the truth for you.

Or
if you have been inside a climate-controlled building for a week and I come
inside with my hot-day idea, you'll either have to check with the weatherman or
step outside yourself to get at the truth.

Some
philosophers and even some scientists are going to want to argue with me too,
when I say that truth is always relative. They will insist that some truths are
absolute. Yet all their yardsticks are temporal. As much as I respect Albeit
Einstein and the other brilliant minds that have defined our present reality
for us, none have been entirely truthful with us because none have ever possessed
the entire truth, and those who know the most are the least inclined to declare
absolutes.

Einstein's
entire approach was to say that every event occurring within time and space is
always
relative to the
time
of the occurrence and also always
relative to the observer. So what does that mean? It means that total
scientific objectivity
in the
human reality
is impossible. That may
sound like an absolute in itself. If it is, then it still could be a relative
absolute—relative only to the human reality in time and space.

So
we can never know the absolute truth about anything. Not even about ourselves.
We observe ourselves (if we do) as a continual process in space and time, an
organism undergoing constant change under the stimuli of unseen and largely
unimagined forces, struggling feebly to adapt and persevere in the face of
continual adversity. Isn't that what life is? Does a rock struggle to exist?
Does it even care whether it does or not?

Descartes,
widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy, proved himself to himself
by the simple statement: "I think, therefore I am." (Even more
succinct in its original Latin: "
Cogito,
ergo sum
")

Even
that is a relative truth. It is relative, first of all, to the definition of
I
.
 
It is relative to the meaning of
think
and
am
. To what depths do we think? To
what effect? From what cause? What
is
thought? What is it to be
am
?

Descartes
died in the year
a.d
. 1650. What
does that mean? That he is no longer thinking, therefore he no longer is? But
even his "death" is relative to our perception in time and space as
to what life and death are. We could now say, could we not: Descartes died,
therefore we know he lived. Could we not also say: We know Descartes lived
more than three hundred years ago; therefore we know that now he must be dead?

See
how it all plays to the tune of
time
?

Cogito, ergo sum
,
from our present perspective in space and time, would no longer appear to be a
valid truth for René Descartes, would it? But how can we know for sure? Maybe
Descartes is still thinking, somewhere outside space and time.

Cogito, ergo sum
does not even stand up to modern science. Were Descartes alive today, our
brain-research people would want him to rephrase that a bit to say: "My
neurons are firing, therefore..."

The
quantum physics people would rather see
am
as a process that converts energy to matter in a standing wave of
electromagnetic fields. Rocks and men are made of the same basic stuff, you
see, and it all converts down (or up) to "processes in time and
space" (Einstein). Both rocks and men are processes. We presume that the rock
does not think but still it
is
—in our
perception of
is
, anyway.

      
What it is, in its most obvious
difference from us, is energy congealed (for awhile) in a particular packet at
a vibrational density so much lower than our own that we cannot directly
observe the processes occurring within that packet.

Uranium
ore is, of course, a rock of sorts. And we have devised instruments that
can
observe the
is
processes within that particular rock.

The
usual scenario for the natural destruction of our planet is tied to the natural
processes within the sun, our star. As all stars do, ours is evolving, we are
told, toward a moment in time when it will dramatically increase its burn rate
for a while (during which phase its corona will engulf our planet) and then
gradually subside into a cold, dense, dead body. But it will still be
processing its own reality, and in time it will tick feebly away until all the
chemical components have broken down into atoms and the atoms into basic particles
and those presumably into whatever basic particles come from, though now with
no guiding wave to give meaning (process) to their existence until another
process captures them and converts them to its own design.

Our
astrophysicists tell us that this sort of process will continue until all the
stars have burned out and the entire universe is a drifting, cold, diffusing
body. But that comes to me with just too much absolute vision. The universe did
not begin with stars, I am told—not anything, anyway, that we would recognize
today as a star. So the stars are just part of the process—and the process is
taking you and me, pal, right along with it, and who knows from where and to
where.

Descartes
did not know. Einstein did not know. No man alive today knows.

So
how phenomenal are flying saucers?

For
the world of mankind at large, we should have reached the end of phenomenal
things in the skies a very long time ago. Not that the things should not be
there, but that they should no longer be regarded as phenomenal. They have been
with us throughout the recorded history of the planet, and undoubtedly
throughout the oral history as well.

An
American Airlines DC-10 whistling across the sky above an American city in the
year 1987 is not a phenomenon. It's just another routine event.

That
same plane in the sky above New Mexico or Oklahoma a thousand years ago would
have been a mind-blowing phenomenon signaling the coming of the gods or some
such.

That
is perfectly understandable and appropriate for the time frame. The
inexplicable has always fueled the developing imagination of humankind—and it
would appear that phenomena in our skies have forever been there to do just
that. Granite carvings dated at 45,000
b.c.,
discovered in China's Hunan Province, depict robotlike figures
and cylindrical objects in the sky. The Cro-Magnon caves in France and Spain
preserve paintings from 15,000 years ago that reproduce virtually every UFO
description now being recorded in our modern age, and all the ancient religious
writings from Vedic and Babylonian texts to the Holy Bible describe the
phenomena in the language appropriate to the time.

Virtually
every civilization, every culture in the annals of humankind, have their
traditions and "myths" recording the drama, from the "flying canoes"
of the California Indians to the Greek Olympians and the hovering (sometimes
thundering) "Lord" of Moses, throughout the world on every continent
and even upon the islands at sea, each in their own way and according to their
own perceptions but recognizably the same phenomena.

The
modern UFO era did not begin in 1947, as commonly reported, but as early as the
nineteenth century when "airships" hovered over the great population
centers of the world, producing "flaps" limited only by the communications
technology of the time—even earlier, being reported by Columbus, Paracelsus,
and Goethe.

An
entire British regiment was swallowed up by the phenomenon during World War I
(and never seen again, alive or dead). I'm sure you've heard of the
"Fooballs" over Europe during World War II and the phenomena
associated with the Bermuda Triangle, all of which was mere prelude to the
truly modern era with literally thousands of irrefutable sightings worldwide on
a continuing basis for the past thirty-five years.

So
it's nothing new. It has become routine. Still, each new experience is quickly
dismissed by our governmental authorities and scathingly ridiculed by the
academies of science. Why? Maybe someone should be asking those ladies and
gentlemen why.

Aircraft
are not phenomenal in our time and place.

What
is phenomenal is the reaction of modern, intelligent men and women to the
presence of aircraft in our skies.

After
all is said and done, after all the comparisons of flight characteristics,
wherever they come from and why

they are here, the
flying saucers are aircraft. They are therefore disqualified as valid
phenomena.

Not
that we should not be impressed by their presence. We should be. But the
phenomenal aspects of the existence are produced by the feeling that the
impressive presence of such aircraft in our skies gives us the same message it
gave early man: we do not know as much as we think we know about ourselves and
our world; it is more phenomenal than we think; we are not as special as we
think; the world and all its systems of stars were not built for us alone.

The
danger, I think, is that we then tend to see the presence in our skies with
either too much reverence or too much fear. Some of us, as from time out of
mind, will want to fall down and worship them. Others will want to destroy or
exploit them. I cannot feel that our visitors desire either reaction, or that
they deserve either reaction.

So
what do they want?

That
is the question I had to consider at the very outset of this case—because what
they want may not necessarily be the same thing that we want. All truths,
after all, arc relative to their own time and place. And I was feeling very
uncomfortable about this time.

Chapter Eight:
 
Question of Time

I couldn't get that
weird conversation with Julie Marsini out of my head. The words just kept
repeating, the way the symbols had done earlier. But had she been speaking from
some specific knowledge or from mere speculation? And those eyes. They kept
looking at me, as from very far away.

Even
more weird had been that exchange between the two women. Strange enough were
the words, stranger yet the context of those words. They'd behaved as though I
were not even present. And when Penny departed, Julie acted as though she had
no memory of it whatsoever.

And
what about that dolphin bit! Some kind of code? —a way of talking around my
presence? Or did Penny Laker really want a pair of dolphins in her backyard?

I
was shaken a bit, sure, but not to the extent that I was ready to leap at
shadows. But what the hell did it all mean, taken in context with the events of
the night? What about Grover Dalton? He seemed to me like a no-non-sense guy. I
had to believe his story, not just because I could partially verify it from my
own experience but because the guy would not have told such a story if he had
not thought it true. I mean, a career cop is not going to invent a story like
that to alibi cracking up a police car. There were too many safer lies to tell,
if that was the intent.

No...the
guy believed what he said.

So
what was the significance of his experience?

The
woman he saw in the road must have been Penny Laker. A second woman is just too
much coincidence. He saw Penny. But what was she doing when he saw her?
Fleeing? From aliens? Or had she been doing something with them?

Why
else would the aliens "lure" him away on a futile chase through the
canyon?

Evidently
I'd stumbled onto Penny while the saucer was playing games with the cop. But
then she'd run from me. Because she was disoriented and panicky and mistook me
for them? Or for some other reason?

Had
I really merely stumbled onto her—or had I somehow been directed to the scene
myself?

If
I could believe Julie, the experience possibly was not entirely unusual for
Penny. "It has become almost routine," Julie had told me.

What
had become routine?

"Visitations,"
said Julie. "This is their time to come."

"Weird
stuff," complained Penny's husband.

"That's
what happened," declared a grim-lipped young cop.

I
could settle for nothing less than the sum of all that. And maybe I was
allowing for a whole lot more.

I
cranked up my computer and worked for several hours with the graphics that had
been deposited in my head, reproducing them in silicon logic and playing with
random sequences and groupings, but it got me nowhere.

The
only two that had any significance for me outside the encounter that gave them
to me were the triangle and a pyramid, which two are nearly the same since a
pyramid is really a three-dimensional triangle. This had no particular meaning
for me at the moment, though, nor did any of it stimulate any intuitive
perceptions, so I ran off hard copies of the designs and arranged them on the
wall behind the computer, then went for a walk along the beach.

I
walked about a mile and back again, my eyes on the sky much of the time though
I did not really expect to see anything unusual up there. I guess it's sort of
a reflex. I had noted the same "eye on the sky" tendency in others
following encounters. Only unusual thing I saw the whole time was a collection
of starfish washed onto the beach opposite my house, maybe a dozen of them. I
don't know just how unusual that is on California beaches, but I could not
recall seeing one outside my house before.

It
was about five o'clock when I returned from my walk. I should have been tired
and I should have been hungry but I was neither, nor had I lost any of the mental
focus which I had hoped would subside. So I went back into my study and settled
onto an old leather recliner which I favor for meditation. I lay there for several
minutes trying to encourage strong alpha rhythms, which is very difficult for a
brain under the kind of internal stimulation I was experiencing; the alphas are
strongest when the brain is awake but totally idle, weakest during focused
problem solving. Actually I was trying to fake-out my left cerebral cortex and
bring the right side dominant. This is sort of like self-hypnosis but with a
tighter control.

The
left brain of right-handed people dominates linear thinking—that is,
step-at-a-time logic sequences—but it does not function well with imagery or
spatial logic, the ability to see things out of sequence. However, the left
brain tends to want to dominate all thinking and will suppress the right side
to a greater or lesser extent depending on the learning experience, sometimes
to the point of severe imbalance even in highly intelligent people. Since our
culture has traditionally encouraged and rewarded left-brain development, we
have unconsciously become a left-brained culture and sometimes it is very
difficult to give equal time to the right brain, even when we consciously wish
to do so. I have been working with mine for years, and I know that it is the
seat of my intuitive abilities, but I still usually have to work to bring it up
to a dominant position.

Anyway,
that is what I was doing. And I wanted to study those computer graphics on my
wall with a right- brain focus.

I
had no sooner done so than I was jolted to realize that the wall arrangement
was not the same way I had left it. I recognized this immediately, because I
had led with the triangle and pyramidal shapes and now they were at the exact
center of the display.

I
saw something else significant in that brief look also, but the jolt woke up my
left side and it took over the

problem before I could
get a right-brain fix on it. I wish it wouldn't do that. It knows that the
other side is superior for this kind of work, but still it does not trust the
right in matters of grave importance.

It
wanted to work with words.

So
it fired up the computer and loaded in the word-processing program and started
asking questions about the symbols. We've been through the routine before, so
both sides of me knew how to play the game. The left side would do all the
talking. The right side would have to channel through the labyrinthine
connections to the verbal centers on the left side via imagery and feelings.
The result is sort of like playing a hunch or going with a flow without knowing
where the flow is coming from, running with imagination, playing mental games
with yourself. Even so, it can sometimes be nearly a hundred percent valid. I
have learned to trust those results, but not unquestioningly.

Here's
the way it went. Bear in mind that this is "keyboard talk" and that
my left brain is controlling though under strong right-brain influence. The Q
is a question from the left; A is hopefully a right-brain response with minimal
resistance from the left.

Q—Was
the graphics display really changed or are we just imagining?

A—The
triangle led.

Q—Then
who changed it?

A—Someone
came in while we were gone. Might still be here. Better check.

I
got up and looked through the house at this point. We were alone.

Q—Why
was it changed?

A—To
give two-dimensional sequence. These are obviously thought-forms from a being
who does not reason in two dimensions.

Q—Oh
great, that's wonderful. You could be my alien, couldn't you.

A—Better
than you. But I don't fly saucers.

Q—Why
does the pyramid follow the triangle in this two-dimensional sequence?

A—This
signifies step-up. Dimensional step-up.

Q—Dimensional
change?

A—Maybe.
Also note the four faces of the pyramid.

Q—Are
you suggesting four dimensions?

A—Or
the fourth dimension.

Q—Where
would that be?

A—We
now have four dimensions of reality.

Q—You're
figuring time, though, as the fourth. How else could we express dimensional
concepts?

A—Space,
time, and motion would be the basics; of a matter universe. Encompassing the
usual three spatial dimensions into a single expression as space, we then confront
a three-dimensional reality where motion is the third dimension.

Q—So
what is the fourth, in this concept?

A—Logically
the fourth would then be will.

Q—Will
what? Finish it.

A—It
is finished. Will is the fourth dimension.

Q—Give
it to me another way.

A—Reverse
it with will as the first dimension. All else follows naturally.

Q—Let
me see if—reverse the whole order?

A—Try
it that way.

Q—Will,
motion, time, space. How's that?

A—Not
sure. Try.

Q—Will
produces motion. I think, therefore I am. Am is motion. All matter is motion.
Am is consciously directed motion. What do I have here?

A—Transpose
again.

Q—Let's
see I am, therefore I think. Thought produces things. Things occupy space,
define space, give meaning to space. Now.... What of time?

A—Motion
produces time.

Q—And
motion is the inevitable result of thing—no —try this: will is beingness.
Thought is the expression of will. Thing is the expression of thought. Time is
that which measures motion.

A—That
sounds close.

Q—So
will, motion, time, space. Will moves as thought and is expressed as motion to
produce matter that is defined by time in the matrices of space.

A—I
don't see stepped sequences as well as you do but I believe you have it.

Q—I
have nothing. Take these out of stepped logic, please, and scramble them for me
as a statement that is consistent with a four-dimensional reality.

A—Existence
is thus defined.

Q—Try
it again; less abstract, please.

A—Existence
is the sum of the pyramid.

Q—Don't
think I have that. Again, please.

A—The
pyramid is the symbol of return.

Q—Return
to what?

A—Trine
plus one.

Q—What?

A—
Trine plus one.

Q—I
don't get that. Try it again.

A—Trine
plus one. What do they want?

The
right brain was worried, too. When it starts asking the questions, I know we're
in trouble.

I
printed out the dialogue and turned off the computer, stared again at the
graphics display on the wall.

I
knew more than I understood.

I
was sure of that.

Which
is a hell of a lot better than understanding more than you know. Small comfort.
Because I did not understand a damned thing.

But
I suddenly knew that Julie Marsini was at my front door. I knew it about one
second before the door chimes sounded, and I knew it was she even before I
opened the door and let her in.

I
still knew a lot more than I understood.

As
though to prove that to myself, I greeted Julie at the door with this
surprising (to me) statement: "There is no time but that produced by
things in motion."

She
was looking at me oddly as she responded: "What?"

"Time
is the solution."

"I
see."

"Wish
I did. What does it mean?"

She
came inside and perched on the edge of a chair,

gazing
at me through those distant eyes.
 
"Is
it like a platitude? Like, 'time heals all wounds'?"

"Not
like that," I said. "More like..."

“Time
is mere vibration," she said dully.

"Right,"
I said, "thank you." I now understood just a tad more than I thought
I did.