[for Jacques Vallée, Grant Morrison & David Bowie]

Robert makes this observation: "The Copenhagen interpretation, which seems to be the most commonly accepted, is that the act of measurement causes the collapse of the wave function into individual particles. The result depends on the observation; it is not a property of the electron itself. But in this interaction, if I understand it correctly, a mechanical device will do the trick just the same as a human observer."

And this was my response:

Actually Robert à la Schrödinger's cat it's only when someone gets round to directing enough of their ATTENTION at the mechanical device's results and becomes CONSCIOUS of those results the cat or the wave's fate finally becomes actualised.

This's the hidden 'flaw' in the cat experiment Schrödinger himself was probably fully aware of - namely the consciousness of the cat's probably already long ago effected its fate long before anyone finally opens the box.

The way I sometimes put it to myself though is to ask if there was indeed an inconceivable SOMETHING which might be called God then which'd be more precise and elegant not to mention economic: to dream up/manufacture an infinitude of wildly differing types of worlds/existences or to create a universal 'material' or 'substance' which had the sole property of taking on the characteristics of the type of consciousness perceiving it?

So if a group of creatures (interlinked by a series of weak to strong telepathic gradients) were 'rigged' to have a type of consciousness which always collapsed everything down in terms of solidness then every time they directed their attention at this aforementioned universal 'substance' they'd all perceive everything - including themselves - in terms of solidness.

Similarly if a group of creatures were 'rigged' to have a type of consciousness which collapsed everything down in terms of energy waves then everything they perceived - including themselves - would have the characteristic of energy waves.

Ditto if those consciousnesses were rigged to perceive things in terms of waves or/and particles on the atomic or subatomic scale then for them waves or/and particles - and indeed themselves - 're what everything'd seem to be.

Ditto if those consciousnesses were rigged to perceive things in terms of waves or/and particles on the atomic or subatomic scale then for them waves or/and particles - and indeed themselves - 're what everything'd appear to be.

The implication of this of course's if you alter someone's consciousness - ie the way they filter what they perceive to be 'reality' - (say by evolving them into a totally new form of life or less drastically by use of narcotics) then depending on how much you alter their consciousness they'd perceive less and less of what everyone else was perceiving and more new hitherto inconceivable possibilities.

Another implication of this model of course's narcotics'd no longer be recognised as causing weird perceptions but rather'd be seen as interfering with and cutting us off from the various telepathic gradients which allow us to continue seeing the world the way everyone else does with the result our consciousness'd now be forced to attempt to hook up with telepathic gradients often strikingly unlike our own (or indeed enable other types of consciousness to make a grab for our consciousness as in cases of possession).

And yet another implication's if you sufficiently hook up with a telepathic gradient related to perceiving the world as pure energy then you yourself begin to become pure energy too etc etc etc.

Or more collequially: if you hook up with the Godnet you become godlike; the Hellnet - demonic; the bowieNet - Bowie like.

I was fairly certain James Cameron wouldn't miss the trick of using publicity from his ocean descent to promote his next movie.

It was just I thought it'd be another science fiction extravaganza - not the Liberace Story!

I'm over at Archaeology News Network reading TANN's posting: 42,000 Year Old Neanderthal Art Found

The image shown's a design involving three 'seals' clearly arranged atop each other so as to achieve the same visual effect created by entwining serpents round Hermes caduceus effectively turning the stalactite itself into a caduceus (or indeed a totem pole).

Some people think the caduceus and totem pole're stylised representations of the same Axis Mundi represented by the World Tree.

Others have it they're depictions of the chakra system.

I see no reason why both can't apply but the moment I saw this ancient artist's work it instantly struck me the gal or guy who'd drawn this thing was alluding both to the helical structure of DNA and the experience whereby they acquired their knowledge of it.

During the Nineties I periodically underwent the distinctly peculiar experience of SEEMINGLY turning into a woman. I didn't suddenly magically acquire a vagina or even breasts but SOMEHOW I knew and felt I'd become internally female.

Each bout'd only last about half an hour but it gave me an insight into what drives people to have gender reassignment surgery because if that effect'd persisted in me I'm pretty certain I'd've done exactly the same thing because quite frankly the sheer ecstatic physical and mental blissfulness of the experience made turning back into a man feel like a paltry inadequate fractured affair.

The crucial detail here though's whenever I was experiencing whatever it was I'd undergo I'd become aware of myself as this sort of region of vast quivering plangent space filled with rank upon rank of this seemingly infinite number of scrolling spiralling chains of vibrating energy endlessly plunging into the void (a bit like those chains of green coloured numbers in The Matrix) which whenever I started changing back into a man became these sort of painfully jagged irritatingly angular lightning bolts endlessly chaotically and crotchily ricocheting off each other.

I strongly suggest in the past there was much more awareness of such experiences and they may even've been ardently sought or at least deliberately induced because ancient mythology's stuffed with sex-changing characters like Tiresias and even such manly heroic types as Heracles Odysseus and Achilles have to spend time as women though the way Odin and Loki rip the piss out o' each other for such shennanigans implies not everyone was keen on the idea.

The thing is though such experiences may not be purely subjective. I don't necessarily mean Tiresias really DID change sexes - though for all I know he DID!

I mean they may also be conduits of authentic scientific insight.

If that ancient Neanderthal artist really DID undergo a similar experience to mine then they may've had an insight into DNA 42,000 years before we did.

And before you poo-poo that idea remember according to Genesis Eve came into existence as a result of Adam losing one of his ribs: maybe in the technical language of the day this was a way of referring to the limb missing from the male Y chromosome.

The well known Irish comedian (and little known student of Idries Shah Sufism) Frank Carson used to say "It's the way you tell 'em!"

Since he won't be saying it anymore maybe we could revive it in the paraphrase "It's the way you see it!"

Over at the MailOnline I'm reading Julian Gavaghan's Why humans Are Not Naturally Nasty and More Likely to be Kind Than Cruel - Study 'debunks myth' that morality is modern idea

Apparently biologist Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta showed an audience at the American Association of the Advancement of Science evidence of empathy in other animals such as video of a rat sacrificing chocolate to help another rat escape its trap.

This only strengthens my own conviction from childhood (and remember I'm in my early fifties) whenever a wildlife documentary supposedly showed film of a lion terrorising a herd of wildebeest I wasn't seeing any such thing.

Even when it was David Attenborough assuring me this was the case that's still wasn't what I saw.

What I saw in fact was the lion petitioning the herd ie alerting it it was hungry before going off for a little snooze and then petitioning it a second time.

After a second snooze it'd stand there while the herd began whirling in a very tight circle before from somewhere near the centre one of the bigger animals (not some "stray weak straggler such as a sick calf")'d start scrambling over the backs of the other animals making a mad dash for it taking the lion as far away from the herd as possible.

In other words like a sort of wildebeestian Butters (from South Park) it'd consciously "take one for the team".

Now I'm sure most people can accept the idea of wildebeestian Cartmans but a lot of them'd probably view Butters as just a loser.

Yet even at the cellular level nothing could proceed unless we had cell equivalents of Butters willing to "take one for the team" ie effectively committing suicide so undifferentuated lumps of vegetable or human matter can separate out and become leaves or human fingers.

In other words I'm suggesting Doctor de Waals observations about empathy apply far further back than the emergence of complex animals - far further.

According to some we live in what Jesus called The End Times - what the Hindus call the Kali Yuga or Age of Lies.

But how can we ever live in an Age of Lies when we have the wonderful world of rockstars to save us from such a calamitous fate?

Over at the BBC I'm reading Viagogo Defends Sale of Promoters' Tickets which's all about how we once used to scan the ads section of our local papers hoping to find someone who'd experienced a terrible disaster forcing them to sell their tickets to some forthcoming gig.

At a certain stage people started turning this into a cottage industry buying tickets purely to resell at over the top prices to desperate fans until the advent of the resale agencies pushed this activity to industrial levels.

But now we learn almost right from the beginning rockstars and their promoters've been doing secret deals with these reselller agencies giving them upto half the available tickets explaining how within seconds of tickets being sold out so many suddenly appear on sale with the resellers.

But fear not! Don't think the worst of the Bonos and Madonnas of the world for being economically astute. They haven't been doing this out of naked greed. They've been doing it - FOR YOU!

The Concert Promoters Association (CPA) tell us promoters put tickets into the secondary market at astronomically hyped up prices TO BRING PRICES DOWN.

See?

"whilst also ensuring that some of the tickets available in the secondary are actually genuine ones”.

One could argue the fact rockstars and promoters're guaranteeing "SOME of the tickets available in the secondary are actually GENUINE” will only boost the number of false ticket sales but that'd be nitpicking otherwise unspeakable generosity. Then again the CPA tell us fans're happier knowing premium prices paid for tickets go "to the artist...rather than...to a tout" so maybe the more economically astute rockstars'll latch on this and start selling fakes tickets too!

If you add that to the activity of making punters effectively bid for tickets in advance only returning the money for failed bids a year or more after leaving it in high interest acoounts then the fans'll be even happier.

In fact if only our heroes could hold onto the fans money for even longer it'd be WIN! - WIN! for everyone!

And now we find out our beloved rockstars're even making moves to sort out the world of financial chicanery so we've got Bono's investment group investing something like $250 million in Facebook and likely to get something like $1.5 billion back.

And Bob Geldoff's even using all his African acclaim and knowhow from Band Aid to raise $100s of millions to take advantage of Africa's countless investment possibilities.

Now if they can only succeed where the record companies failed in the '70s (putting a stop to the cassette recording industry or at least making it pay through the nose for enabling the likes of skint teenagers Geldoff and Bono to make free copies of their mates Van Morrison or Donovan albums something they loved to make reference to in the music papers of the time) and finally put a stop all those horrible people infringing their ever lengthening copyrights via the internet then the world'll finally know the golden age Jesus couldn't deliver but they can.

God bless'em - God Bless'em all!

Over at Reuters I'm reading:

Exclusive: China, India plan Iran oil cuts of 10 percent or more

The article goes onto say Japan're on the verge of agreeing cuts of 11 percent to avoid US sanctions.

In fact as a *HOT EXCLUSIVE!* here's the forthcoming conversation Japan for instance'll be having with Iran:

Japan: "Iran we want 11% less oil - but we'll take a load of those $100 dog turds..."

Iran: "What you mean these $100 dog turds - the ones that each come with a free barrel of Iranian oil?"

I’ve been reading Dale Drinnon’s Troll Skull over at Frontiers of Zoology where he brings up the subject of berserker families with trolls (ie ‘giants’) for ancestors.

Quite reasonably he takes the stance this’s possible evidence of Neanderthals breeding with Cro-Magnons and having once been an avid reader of Stan Gooch I’ve absolutely no problem with the idea nor with Dale’s observation the activities of berserkers “really helped push along the legend of the werewolf.”

The thing that tends to be overlooked about werewolves though’s how utterly unwolf-like their behaviour actually is. As Nick Redfern’s recent werewolf origins piece over at Lair of the Beast clearly demonstrates it’s difficult to separate the antics of werewolves from those of serial killers (and of course if you can’t credit the possibility of werewolves then that’s all they are).

But rather than wolves werewolves resemble nothing so much as house cats which (unlike a community of feral cats I once had the opportunity of observing) kill out of boredom – not hunger.

And of course another thing they resemble’s the berserker.

The thing that tends to be overlooked about berserkers though (for all the indestructibly lethal advantages gained by such warriors undergoing their battle furies or warp spasms) is their complete loss of self-control means they’re just as likely to decimate their own side (including their own best mate in Alexander the Great’s case or own kids in Heracles’) as they are the enemy making one wonder why and how they arose and indeed why anyone would want one on their side.

Which brings me to something else werewolves and berserkers resemble: maenads ie female followers of Dionysus who as a result of their revels become not only supernaturally immune to all forms of wounding but strong enough to tear apart their own kids and eat them raw viz Pentheus and Orpheus.

In fact this’s the abiding image all through Dionysus the idea of humans as a result of supernatural stress behaving like stage hypnotists’ victims believing they’re eating apples only to discover it’s really handfuls of their kids’ brains.

And of course it’s also Dionysus’ own story: an all-powerful thunderbolt wielding baby placed on the throne of Heaven until his carers suddenly tear him apart munching up everything but his heart which’s then used to reconstitute him as a wildly unpredictable moodswinging androgynous teenager who must now use his time among the humans learning to understanding both the new form of godhood he exemplifies and how he can use it to help the humans understand and help themselves.

One of the things that particular baby Dionysus tableau’s alluding to I suggest’s that moment in a kid’s life when one night they go to sleep dreaming of spending the day running round unselfconsciously naked being feted like lords causing everyone to chuckle madly at their comic capers only to wake the next day and find themselves treated as if they’re now stubborn pack mules needing breaking in hence the new regime of all manner of strange new rules and regulations they’re suddenly required to almost instantaneously assimilate concerning potty training or not sleeping in mummy and daddy’s bed or attending nursery schools so complete strangers can ‘persuade’ them to do things no one explains the point of while all the time having their intermittent little ‘successes’ mistaken for inability to see through the ‘carrot’ of insincere praise or their gradual yielding to a superior force as ‘stick’ induced ‘understanding’.

Most people don’t remember the moment when it first dawned on them they were being straitjacketed into society’s latest arbitrary idea on ‘shaping’ children rather than receiving encouragement to spontaneously become what they sense they are – that moment when they first started dreading the word “No!” and learned to tense every muscle in their tiny bodies in anticipation of a gigantic hand walloping the back of their legs by way of ‘encouraging’ them to perform or submit on cue even as they watched in stunned confusion how the giants those hands belonged to’d immediately become outraged if another such giant dared do the same to one of them.

If you have forgotten all this let me tell you it felt like a nightmare which everytime you thought you’d woken from it started over again transforming your beloved ‘carers’ and ‘protectors’ into Them, the Other Ones, gigantic rule obsessed extremely aggressive very unkind self-obsessed strangers seemingly pulling rules and diktats out their arses all day long to ensure endless opportunities to tear you off another strip making you feel less and less You and more and more Them.

You felt in fact as if you were being eaten alive.

But just in case you think I’m going all Jungy and Freudy on your arse let me take you back to the dawn of history and the unself-reflectively powerful Enkidu [a possible early Neanderthal or even ‘Bigfoot’ sighting] living in perfect harmony with nature until a certain hunter (and at least one of Dionysus’ ritual titles styles him Hunter) witnesses his traps being destroyed and unleashes the plot to make Enkidu ‘grow up’ by sicking a temple prostitute on him for 6 days and 7 nights until the stink of his new civilized ways means his gazelle mates and other animally chums no longer recognize him as one of them leaving him no choice but to become another forlorn denizen of cities.

And this I suggest to you’s what both Dionysus and Gilgamesh’re going on about: that to the ancients it seemed human beings’re naturally creatures of culture endlessly creating or recreating the latest cultural manifestations but whereas culture and cultures spontaneously emerge and evolve or dissolve to assimilate or yield to newer/older cultural manifestations civilization and civilizations quite unnaturally create and perpetuate privileged hierarchies to ‘persuade’/demand/compel by way of guaranteeing their citizens’ll ‘compromise’/conform thus ensuring the civilizations’ own longevity at the expense of citizen individuality - a situation only exaggerated when populations settle in one place and become cities because as cities’ populations approach critical mass all those wonderful ‘refining’ qualities Aristotle so adores start exponentially increasing their distorting effect on human nature something Aristotle actually warned about even as he observed individuals who start acting independently of their city’s collective polity’re likely to be less than men or more than men eg Aristotle’s own teacher Plato and Plato’s hemlock guzzling mentor Socrates (an idea I suggest’s similarly alluded to by the Old Testament’s obsession with whether or not certain cities have sufficient numbers of ‘righteous men’ to prevent their destruction).

I also suggest the definitively human activity of perpetually culturally reinventing ourselves’s one of the things Jesus’s going on about when he observes "The foxes have their foxholes and the birds have their nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" aware as he surely was of the Genesis Flood and Tower of Babel interpretations which go the Flood was caused by humanity allowing its authentic cultural nature to be ‘flooded’ by a more technically impressive transhumanly degenerative one (symbolised by mankind allowing the Sons of God to ‘marry’ their daughters) while post-Flood attempts to counteract pre-Flood degenerative tendencies with the sort of ‘controls’ provided by city based civilization produced cultural sterility instead of diversity (symbolised by the single language) counteracted by an obsession with technical mastery (building the Tower) and propaganda (the idea we’ll become ‘gods’ entering the Kingdom of Heaven violently) as a way of maintaining monocultural cohesion and hierarchical privileges.

But ultimately Babel fell for exactly the same reasons the Gods created Enkidu to distract Gilgamesh from his boredom with city life to the point he’d become “noisy” (in the technical language of the day devoid of inner silence and therefore peace) his head brimming with all manner of low brow tabloid style conceptuality about him being a superstar and therefore needing to be seen on the town hitting the happening places getting rat-arsed knobbing endless skanks between duking-it-out-to-the-death sessions with any poor ‘lesser light’ who happened to cross his path blinking the wrong way.

Even the way Enkidu gets trapped in the Netherworld’s symptomatic of the deforming effect civilization has on Gilgamesh because as a result of attending what sounds like a pro-am benefit tournament for all the orphans he’s been creating he becomes unnaturally obsessed with a game involving striking an object (puck, ball or drum?) with a ‘stick’ until both objects fall into the Netherworld rendering him so inconsolable Enkidu has to volunteer retrieving them only to get down there and immediately disregard Gilgamesh’s advice not to give himself away with such civilized behaviour as being “noisy”, wearing clean nickers or footwear, ponging himself up with Enkidu For Men or knocking about his wife and kids!).

But here’s Gilgamesh himself (from ETCSL) describing city life to justify why he needs Utu/Shamash’s help in guaranteeing he’ll be remembered by posterity “In my city people are dying and hearts are full of distress. People are lost -- that fills me with wretched dismay. I crane my neck over the city wall: corpses in the water make the river almost overflow. That is what I see. That will happen to me too -- that is the way things go.”

In other words even way back when Gilgamesh right at the top of the social tree experiences the glamorous city of Uruk as a soulless shithole.

And what I’m suggesting therefore’s right from the beginning the ancients observed how the distorting effects of civilization not only increases exponentially when added to the unrelentingly escalating stress and pressure resulting from the ‘convenience’ of packing ever greater amounts of people into ever smaller amounts of living and working space but it leads to BOTH rich AND poor developing the coping strategy of emotional numbing and general desensitization to external stimuli (symbolised by Midas’ “depraved” ears becoming those of a donkey) causing people to ineffectively address the problem of seemingly having less and less energy by overeating (symbolised by Midas’ food turning to inedible gold) until they not only don’t notice themselves stepping over the bodies of strangers in the street but they’re unmoved when those bodies’re finally their own family's (symbolised by Midas turning his daughter to gold).

Nor does this numbing/desensitization process mean people become immune to the consequences of all the stress they’re still unwittingly experiencing because eventually the cumulative effect starts resulting in periodic breakdowns’ of their bodies’ immune systems taking the form of vague recurring ‘conditions’ before the advent of catastrophic then finally fatal illnesses or mental ‘steam venting’ episodes involving chronic bouts of unwarranted escalating aggression eventually catastrophic explosions and finally deadly violence.

In which case why weren’t cities allowed or even encouraged to die the death?

Because one of the clear implications of Enkidu’s story’s that for all their recognised faults cities were viewed on an esoteric level as potential devices for accelerating human evolution – an idea found in Aristotle and even Samhat Enkidu’s sacred whore seductress tells him the reason his animal friends no longer recognise him’s because she’s made him ‘wise’.

But the same idea’s inherent in Adam and Eve Noah and even Moses that artificially isolating a particular group from Paradise Pre-Flood humanity or Egyptian civilization means you get to both cut off their current evolutionary possibilities and accelerate them in totally new evolutionary directions.

In fact all that’s good and bad about cities seems to’ve been anticipated (if not actually engineered) long before they emerged which’s probably why right from the beginning the old shamanic technique of therapeutic ‘theatre’ where shamans cure their client by acting out the actions of their spirits in the other world seems to’ve been adopted all round the world for public consumption by the likes of priesthoods and master narrators such as Homer or by the Lesser Mysteries and dramatists all of whose functions seems to’ve included exposing the unfeeling or emotionally explosive masses to comedy or tragedy to make them laugh or weep or tragicomedy to make them rollercoaster between the two.

It also seems to’ve been anticipated the stress of cities’d lead to an increase in the production of individuals who see and hear things “that simply aren’t there!” What we’d call today artistic religious and psychic types some of whom’d be so deeply affected by their experiences they’d be locked up as psychotic these days.

In the days of the Greater Mysteries though they were viewed as being connected to another realm in a way which either needed strengthening or adjusting to be effective and when this was achieved such an individual was said to be a righteous man – or woman.

The increasing of such sensitivity was induced by a number of techniques including building up the right type of energy by learning to see and hear reality directly without the intervention of any kind of conceptuality including spiritual ones - or in the technical language of the day eating meat raw.

In the case of some individuals the build-up of this energy was gradual as were the stages they went through in their attainment of righteousness but in the case of others it could be a much more haphazard and explosive affair resulting in possession by aggressive low level entities such as animal spirits (eg wolves) though it’s just as likely what was actually happening was unresolved emotional problems got loose in nervous systems being overdriven by unknown evolutionary energies.

One of the signs a city in particular and a civilization in general's reaching critical mass was said to be an exponential increase in reports of the strange and inexplicable aka omens.

If it’s true the entire Earth’s now virtually a global city and it’s certainly true to say it’s virtually a global civilization then the last thing we’d want to hear’s an increase in reports of the strange and inexplicable because that’d mean we were reaching some sort of critical mass and were either about to go up a level or be forced to start from scratch.

I'm reading Dale Drinnon's Troll Skulls over at Frontiers of Zoology and Nick Redfern's Origins of the Werewolf over at Lair of the Beast.

Nick provides a good deal of material which suggests much of the Werewolf Legend's merely medical (though he also points out in his usual open minded way "some reports of werewolves do appear to involve monstrous creatures of unknown origin").

Personal experience however's forced me to come to a similar conclusion to Rupert Sheldrake that much of what passes for science - especially medical science - isn't really explanatory at all but mere catch phrases and jargonese designed to snow the inquirer into humiliated silence allowing the scientists to avoid admitting they don't really know.

In my case this conclusion's resulted from attending university first on a engineering course (for the maths and the physics) then on an environmental science one (for the biology, chemistry and earth sciences) in the hope the supposed rationality of Science'd help me snap myself free of the often extreme weirdery I've been subject to throughout my whole life.

Yet perhaps as a result of finding out how little Science really knew or understood my situation eventually got so bad I finally subjected myself to mixed battalions of psychiatry and neurology departments quite prepared at one stage to undergo electroshock therapy or even brain surgery if it'd put a stop to what was happening to me.

However as an avid consumer of books and knowledge all the time I was also avidly studying all the relevant medical texts and discovering Science knew and understood even less the workings of the mind and that 'explanations' like temporal lobe epilepsy (supposedly 'explaining' Muhammed Jesus Socrates Alexander the Great etc) were at best superficial descriptions of almost infinitely complex unknown brain processes or at worst labels intended to hide the ancient cartographer like ignorance which forced mapmakers to write on the blank parts of their maps Here Be Dragons.

So when I read Nick writing about the serial killing cannibal Peter Stumpp the Werewolf of Bedburg I find it difficult to accept the medical 'explanation' he's an example of Clinical-Lycanthropy as anything but a convenient label hence my resort to personal experience.

At this very moment as I write this I'm experiencing what I call my Medusa Effect which is the sensation there's something atop my head which at times can feel like a sort of miniature 'oil rig', rotating 'castle' or even segmented 'helmet' reaching down to and covering my face but which constantly changes not only its shape but also its 'density' so sometimes it feels like heavy aluminium other times light plastic.

But it also seems to go through organic phases where it can feel like seaweed moving slowly in shifting water, strangely moving white fire (a form I've actually seen and one of the reasons I tend to steer clear of mirrors) or very actively writhing snakes - hence the Medusa tag.

[It's also been pointed out to me it's in the same location as the Seventh Chakra and even at times seems to behave like some descriptions of it but from my point of view the Seventh Chakra's no more an explanation than Clinical-Lycanthropy or temporal lobe epilepsy].

So when I read accounts of the Medusa I find myself unable to dismiss the idea as merely a fairy tale but find myself wondering if it's evidence other people down the ages've also experienced the same inexplicable sensation others've described to me of having someone seemingly playfully dandling with their hair - even when they're wearing hats or hoods and there's no one there!

Ditto Herr Stumpp.

I note this "wealthy, respected, and influential farmer in the local community" claimed he was able to effect his werewolf transformations as a result of the Devil giving him a "magical belt".

I myself may well've undergone a version of the precise experience he was alluding to.

Ever since I started having panic attacks in my late teens in the Seventies I was periodically subject to these 'attacks' which I likened to friends and family at the time as being like that scene in Alien where John Hurt starts gagging and clutching his chest before all of a sudden to everyone's horror his chest explodes and a baby alien emerges.

I'd actually been experiencing a blissful earlier version of it where on one occasion I was on a train with my art teacher who I was deeply in love with when this sort of ecstatic force or energy rose up from somewhere deep down in the very depths of me and sort of bifurcated into two this sort of two headed affair where one 'head' seemed to split off just below my solar plexus seemingly slowing down time almost to a dead stop and making me and my art teacher have this sort of psychedelic melding experience where she sort of exploded and became this sort of vorticial version of the entire universe making this other energy version of me seem to leave my body and blissfully plunge into this infinite region of blazing female light.

At the same time the other 'head' seemed to carrying on reaching up to just past my solar plexus where it seemed to make time accelerate (so I'm simultaneously experiencing time seemingly somehow both speeding up and slowing down) and I'm bombarded with all this stuff telling me I'm SOMETHING's bitch and showing me all these future events that're supposedly go'n'o be happening a great deal of which'd be leaving me deeply unhappy for a very long time because I'd be having no say in how any of my life'd be working out.

Now if you take my SOMETHING and have it make its bitch some poor 16th Century German bastard who's got no more clue what's going on than I had then it's not that hard to imagine him thinking he's in the thrall of the Devil.

If you now quickly wind on time a few months to the point where the no longer blissful rising energy in me's started feeling like an ever more powerful solid steel battering ram periodically try'n'o bash its way out my chest until circa the Millennium I'm bouncing round the livingroom wondering if my family's correct I'm having a series of massive heart attacks only to notice for all my chestal convulsions the ambulance crew's heart monitor shows my heart's beating so steadily it's as if it's completely unaware what the blazing hot rest of me (covered in frozen foods straight out the fridge)'s going through.

Imagine then that same poor Sixteenth Century bastard undergoing something similar - no wonder he thought he was dealing with the Devil.

But it's that business of Stumpp's magical belt which clinches the deal for me.

Throughout the Nineties as well as periodically experiencing different versions of some of the above I also seemed to undergo an acceleration of something else which'd been happening to me since I was a little kid which was this periodic sense something from infinitely far away'd been launched at me which whenever it slammed into me left me with the sense I knew EVERYTHING.

I basically spent the Nineties try'n'o unravel and more importantly confirm all this raw data I was all but drowning in until one day while sitting there rocking me way through it all I suddenly became aware I had this sort of invisible metallic bronze hoop 'belt' around my waist (plus the information it'd supposedly been placed there at some point to delay my development) which as a result of mounting pressure from my inner energy 'Alien' thingy built up in me all day until suddenly exploded filling the air with this incredibly loud but melodious bronze bell sound at which point I became aware of this sort of house brick shaped 'letterbox' recessed in the area below my navel with these sort of limp extensions hanging from it.

In fact I eventually became aware of this old American Indian type guy (who reminded me of Chief Dan George out The Outlaw Josey Wales) crouching in front of me (who for some reason I took to be Don Juan Matus) telling me the way I sitting there with my 'letterbox' hanging open and my 'extensions' dangling out like that for everyone in the Otherworld to see was the Otherworld's equivalent of being an inadvertent flasher.

Now the point of all this to me isn't therefore there really ARE such things as Alien-like kundalini or 'magical belts' or Medusae or Devils or Dan Juan Matuses who look like Chief Dan George.

But even if there ARE that still wouln't explain what's going on anymore than temporal lobe epilepsy or Clinical-Lycanthropy does anything other than hint at possible explanations.

My point therefore's just like once upon a time people couldn't conceive how other people could possibly be attracted to members of their own sex (to the point they 'helpfully' fried their nervous systems with electricity or tried to 'fix' them by experimentally hacking out various chunks of their brains) then maybe people like William Blake and Jacob Boehme (and maybe even your cat when it seems to see and follow things "that simply aren't there!") aren't just seeing specks of dust floating across their eye fluid and deluding themselves they're something more.

Maybe they're really seeing and experiencing precisely what they describe.

And when I've finally summoned up the strength to tuck my dangling 'extensions' back in my 'letterbox' I'll attempt to tie Dale Drinnon's berserker observations into Nick's Werewolf stuff to suggest the possibility there may be even more going on than that.

Over at the BBC I'm reading Living Outside the Hearing World by Lucy Wallis in which she tells us the issue of 'curing' deafness with cochlear implants has become something of a touchy subject among the 19,600 deaf teenagers in the UK.

One clue to why such teenagers might be 'attached' to their deafness is given by 19 year old Meghan Durno who describes how after undergoing the implant procedure she spent the intervening period of four weeks studying for a veterinary nursing degree at Edinburgh Napier University relying purely on lip reading. "When I went into the lecture theatre, I just switched off because the lady that was standing there started pacing up and down and talking and I couldn't understand what was being said, so I just looked at the notes".

In other words in order to read each others lips deaf people tend to require and give a much more intimate if not intense level of attention while people who hear tend to get by on far more minimal if not downright superficial levels of reciprocal attention.

Another clue is SenCity a multi-sensory Club Night which provides Aroma Jockeys who mix scents in the same way they mix the music and a vibrating dance floor.

In other words the young deaf people DO 'hear' the music - but with their bodies not their ears.

Meghan's brain took time adjusting to experiencing hitherto unknown sensations like babies crying or birds singing. "With the implant, I'm able to hear little things I never knew existed....Like when you rub your hands together, I never knew that made a sound."

"I was lying down one time and I heard a noise and I was like what's that and I realised it was my own breathing… I've amazed myself with what I can hear, and amazed a piece of machinery can help you hear."

My point being imagine a planet where hearing hadn't evolved. There be no koans like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" or "If a tree falls in the forest will it make a sound if no one's there to hear it?"

But if a few kids started reporting they could 'hear sounds' when they rubbed their hands together the scientists of that world'd refer to such a development as The Hearing Delusion because for them it'd a scientific fact there was no such thing as 'sound'.

And if anyone dared point out there might be something in the fact these kids had 'ears' those same scientists'd point out the scientific ridiculousness of the idea a few teensy tiny bones wrapped up in a minute amount of muscular nerve mush could be responsible for making those kids jump out their seats everytime a scientist got angry with them and slammed a door.

In fact those scientists'd probably point out since those ears seem to feed directly into the brain they're probably the reason the kids think they're 'hearing' things in the first place.

But let's push the envelope a little further and imagine a world where the denizens've evolved few if any of the senses we have.

Let's imagine a few of their kids've succumbed to what that world's scientists refer to as Schrodinger's Tree Delusion because those kids're reporting observing something they call a 'tree' falling in a 'forest'.

The kids even take the scientists to the 'forest' to see the 'tree' and by luck to hear another one fall.

But as the kindly scientists point out if the kids weren't so unwell they'd be able to perceive with their own gas sensitive organs what they call a 'tree' is actually a cloud-like gaseous life form the vertical growth of which necesitates it gradually condensing its impurities into the solidified multi armed structure they call a 'tree' until the structure's sheer solidified pointlessness finally causes it to topple over releasing the gaseous life form to start the cycle all over again.

I'm reading Robin McKie's Piltdown Man: British Archaeology's Greatest Hoax on the Observer site.

The thing is over thirty people're suspected of the hoax but no one ever seems to suspect another possibility: the real hoaxsters might've been geologist Kenneth Oakley, anatomist Wilfrid Le Gros Clark and anthropologist Joseph Weiner.

You see in 1953 when the hoax was finally exposed everyone breathed a sigh of relief because Piltdown'd been placing a question mark over the emerging paradigm which didn't allow for million year old 'men' existing in Britain.

Which's probably why '53's pronouncement was merely a rehashing of Weidenreich's in '23 which had it Piltdown was merely a modern human cranium 'married' to the jaw of an orangutan with filed-down teeth.

[That rather remarkable thirty year gap before Weidenreich was confirmed alone should tell you all you need to know about just how fallibly mortal scientists can be].

But when Weidenreich first made his claim a different paradigm was emerging.

Since the turn of the Millennium however traces of 700,000 year old people've been turning up in West Sussex which by a rather curious coincidence's right next to East Sussex where Piltdown was found and it turns out all of a sudden Piltdown would've fitted right in with the latest paradigm - if he hadn't been a hoax.

Which's why I'm a tweaky bit suspicious when Robin McKie tells us the reason for the new tests to be done on Piltdown's "to solve a mystery that has baffled researchers for 100 years: the identities of the perpetrators of the world's greatest scientific fraud."

I can't conceive how they might find that out (unless the researchers're forensic scientists a la CSI) but I can conceive how the filing on the teeth might turn out to be ordinary dietary wear and tear, how now Piltdown's face fits again some if not all of his parts might turn out to be real.