I AM ASTONISHED

I realize that I am not going to die very soon because I feel so energetic.  Therefore, I am ending my blog, We who are about to die etc.  Instead I intend to get in touch with other people who are interested in two books that have captured my soul and heart:

1)    The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge, M.D., Penguin Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-670-03830-5

2)    THE GUARDIAN OF ALL THINGS: The Epic Story of Human Memory by Michael S. Malone, St. Martins Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-312-62031-8

 

I asked a beloved and knowledgeable friend how to get in touch with other people who are interested in those books and he said I should  use Facebook.

 

So farewell to you not because I am dying but because you won’t see any more blogs from me.  Good luck or blessings whatever works for you.

Love, eve

 

 

 

 

Why is a good librarian like an angel?

 

I don’t believe in angels with feathered wings, anymore more than I believe in the Devil with cloven hoofs and a pointed tail. 

Imagine for a moment meeting a gorgeous angel.  It would be so exciting! I would like to ask personal questions, “How did you get where you are?   What happened to you to make you an angel?”  The angel just wants to help me to achieve what I can do.  A good librarian is the same way.

I live in a retirement community where a bookmobile from the library comes once a month.  The librarian, Neal Denton,  is a marvel because he finds mind-blowing books for me that I would never have ordered by myself.  For example, he gave me a thrilling book; The Brain That Changes itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge, M.D.[1]  It tells us about the amazing plasticity of our brains and how to encourage even late recovery with brain-stimulating exercises.

 

 

 

 

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[1] Doidge,Norman: Penquin Books, 2007

Although we were preparing for our deaths the matter of sexual intimacy was looming. We felt that our children would be shocked but they were grown.  They had to live their lives and so did we.  He insisted that before we went to bed together it had to be mutual.  I knew that Gerhardt was cognizant of what he called “the feminine principle.”  He talked about goddesses being worshiped long before the patriarchal gods.  He made me aware that the feminine principle was in sync with the moon, the tides and the earth moving through the heavens.

His love for the feminine principle also expressed itself in practical ways.  The amount of time and energy he put into new clothes for me, whether I needed new panties, bas, slacks or blouses, he roamed the aisles picking whatever caught his eye and holding it up for my inspection.  He was fearless and unashamed.

There was one store in particular, Draper’s & Damon’s, he particularly liked. I had never seen such a store.  It was devoted to women’s clothes, discreetly older women’s clothes.  It was sort of the older women’s answer to Victoria’s Secret.  This store was unique.  We had to go a long way to get to it.  It was in a fairly high-priced mall.  Gerhardt loved to go to there.  He even took an interest in their catalogue when it came in the mail.  He would ask me to look through and see if there was something I might like.  If I found something he would call Draper’s & Damon’s and ask them to get it in the store in the right size for me.

I must confess that although Gerhardt believed in the possibility of communion between the living and dead I did not.  However, I did have a devoted belief in synchronicity.  Consequently, coming home after the emotional turmoil of escaping from a menacing man and having to ask strangers to call a taxi to take me home, seeing a business card on my floor I picked it up.  There it was, the only store where I had never gone without Gerhardt.  I have lived here for 12 years.  I have never seen a business card in the corridor before or since.

The elevator is in the middle of the hall so I had to turn right into the east wing.  If the card had fallen on the floor of the west wing I would not have seen it. We have 11 floors of apartments. So the chance of my seeing that card when approaching my apartment is actually one out of 22.  Therefore, 22 times 12 years times 365 days in a year equals 9,504 well beyond chance   Then add that to other close call I had going to the Farmer’s Market and my friend rolling his eyes in disbelief saying “Gerhardt is with me!”, fits perfectly with both communications after I had a close call.  I am forced to believe that Gerhardt was with me even though he died years ago.

 

I never expected to find a lover and neither did my partner.  We thought that a deep sexual and cherishing love was gone from our lives.  He had a happy lifetime marriage until his very accomplished wife began to have serious heart failings.

She would talk fervently about the love he would find after she died.  She didn’t want him to be alone, sad and old. She would try to discuss an elegant widow or one of her many friends who might fit into his life after she was done.  Nothing suited him.  Finally she fixed him with a penetrating look and said quietly, “I will send somebody.”  Both Gerhardt and I agreed that, in her human form, she would never have picked me because of my odd thinking.

There was another problem to our becoming lovers.  I didn’t realize that I had been brainwashed into deferring to a man that I desired.  He understood that when it came to sexual congress that I had no sense of selfhood. It took him one and a half weeks of talking before I could embrace the absolute necessity of mutuality in sex.  I had been so badly abused as a child that I didn’t know about love without power. 

He believed implicitly in what C. G. Jung said about love, “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking.  The one is the shadow of the other.”

It was amazing that we, two people old in our bodies felt like sixteen year-olds in emotional longing to become one.  We were two very old people living our lives fully, well aware of the imminence of death. Open to joy and sorrow, caught up in active involvement with the intimate emotions of a foretaste of heaven.   It would eventually lead to a revelation of the meaning of our intimacy that neither Gerhardt nor I could possible foresee!

After Ted died I could no longer afford the rent in San Francisco so I moved to Sacramento because my daughter lived there.  I found a good retirement community.  I keep to myself while writing a novel that I had been working on for thirty years.  But now I know how to contrive a delightfully happy ending.  I was deeply involved with producing it before I would die.

I described my aversion to getting involved with any of the men living in this retirement community.  Against my will, I became aware of a man living there, because he had such a melodious voice. But after my long satisfying life with Ted I didn’t want to become involved with anyone else.

Nevertheless, my whole life was about to turn into something startling when I was forced to rethink every single thing I know about life, sex and death.  I described it in my book, Sex In The Eighties, especially about becoming aware of something beyond humanity.

He transformed me, and just like the plots of old fashioned Regency novels, in the beginning I was irritated by his voice but I couldn’t help being aware of him.  He was told by the other people at his table that I was in another relationship with a man at my table.

Finally he offered his arm to me going into the dining room.  And I took it without thinking that it would change my whole life. 

 

The most horrifying example of blaming the victim is Representative Todd Akin’s saying, “...the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down.”  In other words, if a woman is raped and produces a child the woman is at fault because she should have stopped the rapist sperm!   Todd Akin is firmly in the Republican mainstream. 

“...this war for the soul of America ...over such issues as abortion... It’s not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call ‘God’s country.’”  The most heinous men take refuge in their protestation of God in many countries all over the world to do murder, rape, incest and violent supremacy.

I feel that perhaps modern men are deeply frightened because they sense the end of masculine dominance.  They take refuge in being one of the “good old boys” so they want women to be condemned to inferiority because of their vulnerability to producing children.  Since I am now an 91 year old woman, I can remember that I was among the first generation of American woman who had a reliable birth control device.  The diaphragm was clumsy and a little messy but it worked reliably.

As I wrote in my book, You and the Universe: finding your place in the Cosmos, page 166 – 167

“Freedom, oneness/diversity:

Concerning limits, I find it electrifying that I am  among the very first American women to have a reliable method of birth control.   The significance to all humanity, that now women are in charge of their bodies, is uncountable.  American women are deeply indebted to Margaret Sanger:

 American birth control activist Margaret Sanger fled to Europe in 1914 to escape prosecution under the Comstock Laws, which prohibited sending contraceptive devices, or information about contraception, through the mail.[1]”

After millennia of enslavement to women’s bodies in the long history of humanity, the meaning of this progress in the freedom to choose  wanted children or refrain from unwanted children is so enormous that I cannot conceive what it means.  The best I can do is quote Bronowski :

“In the evolution of any animal there come moments when the species takes radically new step…from that moment on the species is committed to some new way of life – like coming out of the water onto the land."[2]

 

 

 

  

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphragm_%28contraceptive%29#History

[2] J. Bronowski, Magic, Science and Civilization (Bamptom lectures in America; no 29) 1978 Columbia University Press (page 1-2)

Ted never declared his love to me.  But, I felt secure with him because was he so devoted and protective of me.  He was a deeply interesting man because he had only three profound beliefs:

 (1)             Do the best you can with the tools you’ve got.

(2)             No woman will overcome me.
(3)             He seemed to believe in reincarnation without condemnation!

He didn’t seem to believe in a personal God.  He certainly did not address a petitioning God.  But every now and then he might refer to “The Big Boy Upstairs” so I do not know what he believed in.

After a while, he seemed to understand to whom I referred as GJean, when I said that GJean had assigned me to him.  He certainly wouldn’t argue with me about that.  We lived together for 21 very interesting years. It was never dull living with him, even though it was not smooth and easy.

He had three years at the very end, even with serious heart trouble.  He doctor insisted that he walk every day for 3 miles.  His doctor said, “If it takes you ten hours to do it, just do it!”  I found a very good park to take him to every day.  I would haul his walker behind me while we walked together.  It had a good seat so that he could sit down at any point.  That park was filled with dogs off their leash which was allowed there.  Ted loved dogs and the freedom of that park was exhilarating.

His joy in life continued even though he was seriously ill.  We still had three very good years together.  If fact, when he was dying from repeated heart attacks, at a certain point it came to me that he was hanging on because he was afraid of losing me.  I came to him next  morning and said, “Don’t be afraid of losing me because GJean didn’t assign me to you for one lifetime but for all eternity.”  Then he closed his eyes and departed.

Taking courage from Cecil, I joined a health club.  This time, I wanted the kind of man where I didn’t have to do all the work of maintaining the union.  There was a man who appeared only in the Jacuzzi.  He was  older, tall and magnificent.  One day he jumped off the jet, strode across to me, put out his hand and said, “How do you do?  My name is Ted Nichols.”  Later we went into the swimming pool together and when we got there he suggested that we go out together sometime.  I was scared, and I said, “I’m pretty busy.” Because even though I was old and went around the globe I didn’t know how to respond to a strange man.  Then he didn’t come back again.  I looked for him every single day.  I made up my mind that if I ever saw him again I would be more forthcoming.  About a month later he appeared in the Jacuzzi.  Immediately I greeted him and he suggested that we go out to dinner. We did that very same night.

 

After a while he suggested that we take an apartment together.  He took me to see a cluster of apartment buildings across from Lake Merced.  It had swimming pool, a Jacuzzi and a health club.  We took it on sight, moved in, and accommodated to each other and our new apartment.  One evening, about three weeks after we moved in, I was alone in my car coming home. This was the first time at night.  The road turned left and in the nighttime I could see lights far way across the lake.  The road continued to turn even more left and now I could see other lights on the right across the lake.   The road turned even more left and then I saw a cluster of lights on the left and I recognized the place where we had our apartment.  I was shocked.  That is precisely where the four men carrying me in the sedan chair stopped and where I got out there!  I had not seen the landscape at night until now!  So my out-of-body experience foretold where I would be.

 

I related his story in my book, The Human Thread a novel in three parts; read in any order: Jeannie’s Story, Tom’s Story, The Victors.  It is a story of two people, a young girl and a young man both from completely different destructive, indeed vicious, backgrounds.  Both were fearful of  involvement.  They liberated each other to a joyous future together.  All copies are sold out now.  I  will issue it as an eBook, title Breaking Free.

 

 

Our second marriage allowed us to recover from our first marriages!  His former wife was a very successful choirmaster in a very popular church but after twenty-five years she ran away with the minister.  I divorced my first husband even though I believed that marriage should be forever.  I realized that my first husband wanted to destroy me, but I was undone until my second husband came and saved me from my devastated feelings.   We finished the trip together and came back to the United States and then we agreed to an amiable divorce. Typically, he did the divorce himself, very successfully!

 

Unfortunately, I had allowed my chemistry to lapse.  The whole chemistry field had evolved far beyond my expertise.  I would have had to spend two years catching up before I could get job in chemistry.  My daughter was still in school but she had enough to live on.  My son was out of school and independent.  I needed a job right away so I found a government program which would pay me a small sum right away as I learned to type.  I completed the course and got a job with EPA in San Francisco.    In those days EPA did not have computers; they had huge clumsy word processing machines.  I along with another new hire learned to produce letters and documents.  But there was a huge problem if one made a mistake, it would require back-tracking, which is in itself confusing and difficult.  My companion in learning those difficult machines was an entrancing, young black girl with huge eyes.  If she made a mistake, she would roll her eyes to the ceiling and say, “Jesus, come to the phone!”

 

I actually found a safe haven in, of all places,  Glide Memorial Church.  Lizzie Glide purchased a parcel of land at the intersection of Ellis and Taylor Streets in San Francisco  and founded the Glide Foundation as a memorial to her millionaire cattleman husband, H.L. Glide of Sacramento.  Apparently Lizzie was concerned about the souls of prostitutes living around the so-called Tenderloin area, so she made it a condition of her grant that the church would never move away.

 

I stayed and volunteered for Glide for over eight years because it gave me a spiritual home, courage, and vibrant adventures.  The service was so dynamic that every single Sunday at least three busloads of tourists would come to experience it.  Cecil Williams was a magnificent preacher.  When he really got going there was absolutely nothing like it, in my entire life before or since, and I have attended many, many churches and listened seriously and attentively.

 

I wrote and produced a modern one act play based on the Greek play by Aristophanes, Lysistrata, a comic masterpiece, in which the women of Greece impose a moratorium on all sexual activity to end the Peloponnesian War.  I named my play Sister Strata.  She wasn’t a nun.  As I remember her, she was a wise prostitute, organizing woman against war.  Cecil came to see a rehearsal.  I was stunned when Cecil actually allowed my play to appear on his platform on a Sunday.  After that success I took council with Cecil because I despaired of attracting a good man to love.  He firmly advised me to look actively.  He assured me that I was indeed an interesting woman.

After we left Hawaii we went straight to Christchurch, New Zealand.  My second husband was very good at finding and reserving attractive and inexpensive accommodations, even in those days before the Internet.  He had  reserved a delightful small motel for one week.  When we got there I was flabbergasted because I discovered an American couple staying for that same week.   We hadn’t seen each other for more than twenty-five years and they were the minister and wife of a Unitarian church that my first husband and I went to years ago.

 
My first husband and I had been members of a Unitarian church.  The reason we choose a Unitarian church was because my first husband had a father who was a Presbyterian minister who was drummed out of the church for inappropriate behavior.  I could understand my first husband’s distaste for going to church.

However, I insisted that our son and daughter must have some church so that my first husband and I agreed to go to a Unitarian church. That minister was good but his sermons were exceedingly rational.  My first husband and I continued to attend his church and finally that minister and his wife became intimate with us.  I admired his wife.  She was a little rough around the edges, but she was very good at being a minister’s wife.  Back then, it became obvious that the minister became obsessed with me; he suggested divorce then marriage to me.  I was outraged at the idea, because I thought that regardless of outside attractions marriage was forever.  I severed the friendship but now they were in the same motel and the same time. One week out of 25 years.  52 weeks in a year times 25 years equals1 chance out of 1,300!

At the time I knew nothing about synchronicity. Consequently I didn’t realize the significance of this event.   I became aware that his wife was not herself.  It was obvious that she had become an alcoholic.  It was pitiful; a good woman ruined.  I know that she tried to help herself, because I remembered that she tried to get a job as a bookkeeper instead of being a minister’s wife.  Apparently it didn’t work out.  In those days we weren’t aware of Alcoholics Anonymous.

My first husband was a very skillful passive-aggressive personality.  I finally learned that if a wish is unconscious a person can be destructive without conscious awareness.  He didn’t know how to save himself.  He was a tragic person because he had a brilliant mind, but he would never fulfill his promise.  I had to divorce my first husband of twenty-seven years, the father of my children because I had to get away from him.  He gave me five choices as I recorded in my book, Sex In The Eighties:

I divorced my husband because, as I saw it, he gave my five choices: I could be insane or a suicide, either I could be a drunk or a shrew, or else I could be miserable.

I began to drink heavily in the evenings.  I saved myself from becoming an alcoholic by asking myself what I would rather do than drink.  The answer was playing chess. So I joined a chess club and hired a chess tutor and eventually I hired a lawyer to get a divorce from my first husband

I was free to go around the world with my second husband because I could take my work with me.  We started in Hawaii and almost immediately I had an unforgettable experience.  A lady invited us to go to a Buddhist meeting that very night.  She explained that there would be chanting and that learning to chant is very helpful is this life.

 

I was eager to go and my husband agreed to go.  It was in a large house but the living room was filled with folding chairs.  I immediately took a seat in the audience but my husband took a seat at the very back of the room.  A young man stood up and told us how chanting helped him.  Then an older man stood up and explained why chanting helps and he sat down.

 

I had not noticed that in the front of the room there were curtains, until another man went forward and opened the curtains revealing a beautiful altar with flowers and fruit and a small but very lovely statue of the Buddha.  The man in front of the altar had a golden bowl and a wooden mallet in his hands.  He began to rotate the mallet around the bowl; almost immediately the bowl began to sing!  When he stopped making the singing noise, the people in the audience began to chant.  But when he struck the bowl sharply the audience would follow by raising or lowering the tone of their chanting in unison!

 

I didn’t try to chant, I just listened.  But at the same time somehow four of the men in the audience were holding a sedan chair and offering it to me.  I knew that I was sitting in the audience, and my husband was sitting at the back of the room while, I was entering the sedan chair. The men picked it up and carried me forward.  I felt very calm.  There was no confusion in my mind at all.  I was seated in the audience, however; simultaneously, I was in the sedan chair being carried forward.  Even though it was nighttime, I could see the road ahead and then the road turned left.  Now I could see lights far away to the right.  I had no concern about where the men were taking me.  The lights far away on the right disappeared because the men were traveling fast with me.  The road continued to turn even more left.  Suddenly there were big clusters of lights on the left.  The men stopped running and they put down the chair and I got out.  That was the end of my out-of-body experience but it took more than nine years to realize the amazing foreknowledge of my experience.

My second husband wanted to retire, sell everything and take five years to circumscribe the world.  I was an analyst of a weird psychological test.  I could go with him because the tests came to me in the mail.  I analyzed them and sent back in the mail.  I was paid handsomely for every analysis.

 

I had to get up early in the morning and then do the work of deciphering the intent of the person filling out the test.  It usually took me half an hour to complete it.  But I couldn’t do another one that day or I would lose my ability to see the standpoint of the person who filled out the test.

 

My work required me to analyze psychological tests from people I never saw or heard of.  I never knew whether the test came from:  a typical university student, a professor, or a juvenile delinquent about to be committed to a psychiatric ward or an adult involved in a criminal court trial or an adult involved in a child custody case or a gifted child or an accomplished adult or a full blown schizophrenic or a psychopathic.   This test had been devised scientifically to reveal the fundamental attitudes of the test taker.  (PREDICTION OF VIOLENCE: Attitudes as Projected in Sentence completion) Probably my most dramatic analysis is recorded in a most unusual book (BAD BOYS, BAD MEN: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder)  Here is quote from  it:

 

“A late colleague, psychiatrist Richard Jenkins, was fascinated with my study of antisocials, Gacy in particular.  He told me that in 1984 he had asked Eve Gowdey, another former colleague, to interpret Gacy’s 1968 Sentence Completion Test—with Gacy’s name removed, of course.  The test – a list of 40 sentence fragments that the patient is asked to complete—is intended to provide clues to the patient’s inner thoughts, much like the Rorschach ink blots.  Gowdey’s reading produced a far more chilling assessment then any found in Gacy’s file.  ‘The most striking impression,’ she wrote, ‘is the feeling that man is sorry he was caught.’ “She went on to suspect that he was ‘physically and grossly aggressive to anyone he considered in his power, [and that] any change in his behavior would originate only by chance and then from something outside of himself.’  She stated that she would ‘never trust this man or expect any improvement in his behavior.  I would assume [that he was] physically dangerous to any one he thought was powerless.’  By then, of course, Gacy was on death row.”

BREAKING FREE

 

Very old people and very young people want to break free.

Very old people want to free themselves from an aging body.

Very young people want to free themselves from the constraints against driving fast cars, sex or drinking.  Humanity wants to be free from this earth, the solar system and finding other beings from other galaxies.

 

My second husband was a good man but rather stingy.  He was good looking, even at seventy.  And, he was nice to me in bed!  He had a very bountiful pension from NASA.  He was the man who affixed a plaque to Pioneer 10, the first object to escape from the solar system in 1972.

 

Carl Sagan designed it to inform extraterrestrial beings where this vehicle came from and when it was launched.  It showed a human man and a human woman and a hydrogen atom.  This spin-flip of a hydrogen atom up to spin-flip down can specify a unit of length.  I cannot believe that Frank Drake actually claimed that there were negative reactions to the plaque because the humans were naked!  My husband was proud of it but his mother who was 92 would have been shocked by nakedness because she had very firm convictions, including that white people were better than black and brown or Asian.   I cannot conceive of what she would think of extraterrestrial beings.

 

Her 92 birthday was coming up soon and my husband’s brother who lived close by their mother was planning a big party for her.  But my husband complained to his brother about having to make a big trip (800 miles) to attend their mother’s 92 birthday party.  His brother, inadvertently or maybe unconscious sibling rivalry, told their mother that my husband didn’t want to spend the money to attend the party.  Their mother commented about my husband, “Does he think he will be able to take his money with him?”  Perhaps the fact that extraterrestrial beings won’t have money makes them inferior?

 

 

When I began this blog (I am now 91) I thought that I might live for six months but today it feels like only one month.  My heart is malfunctioning.  I think it was Kazantzakis, the author of Zorba the Greek, who wrote that when one is on a precipice he should send back to his fellows what he sees.   Consequently, I am hurrying to tell you what I see.

I have a lifetime of devotion to science; I was a working chemist.  After raising my children I avidly pursued reading in the sciences.  I wrote, “I regarded paranormal messages between the spirits of the dead and living people as so much hogwash,” in my book published in 2006, SEX IN THE EIGHTIES: For people who are not afraid of their sexuality and contemplate a radiant approach to their aging and death.

I am forced to acknowledge, against my will, that when something occurs, well beyond chance, there is an important message for us.  Now-a-days the discoveries of modern quantum physics cannot be ignored.  These discoveries point toward the existence of unknown forces at work in our world.

I now admit that there can be communication between the living and the dead, if something occurs well beyond chance, as it did to me.  I am very well aware of C. G. Jung’s essay:  Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, because I have had several such occurrences in my adult life.  In any case I believe that in Nature everything is connected and nothing is wasted including our culture.

See page 135 in The Tell-Tale Brain by V.S Ramachandran for rapid propagation of culture … innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today.  Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity.