Lehal Library

16 "But one day, in 1973, I was swimming in a pool in the apartment complex where I was staying in Mountain View, which is near Palo Alto and Menlo Park where SRI is located. I had been wondering how we could identify a distant target in some other fashion than by its name. "In the water, I laid back against the edge of the pool and tried to envision something which had escaped me. I suddenly saw a map with coordinate-or dinates on it, you know this degree East and that degree North. A 'voice' of some kind said (in my mind, of course), 'try coordinates'. "So, I got the idea that if someone gave me a set of coordinate-ordinates they might act as a focus of some kind. At first my SRI colleagues thought this was silly, but I insisted we give it a good try. At first this didn't work too well either, but after about fifty tries, it began to pay off." "Can you explain why coordinates seem to work better than other ways of specifying a target?" Axel asked. "No one understands this at all, and neither do I. The criticism is that coordinates are only arbitrary sets of numbers and as such bear little real meaning to the actual physicality of the site. "But my explanation, if it is one, is that people do find their way around the world by using coordinates. And since this is so, then there is no real reason why one cannot use them to find their way in a psychic voyage. As a kind of focus, so to speak." Mr. Axelrod grew pensive for a moment. "There would seem to be more to it than that. Surely you've thought about it?" I hesitated. "It's a bit difficult to articulate." Axelrod brightened up. "Try me" "Hell, I have to introduce the possibility of . . . Well, we are educated to believe that thought takes place only inside of one's head, in the brain - that the mind is inside each person's head. "But this runs counter to the fact that some things can be directly shared at a group level maybe not thought itself, but certainly emotions and sentiments, for example." "For example?" Axelrod asked. "Well, during the 1930s, a lot of work was done on what was called 'mob consciousness', where anger or hysteria seems to get communicated by means other than reason or logic. This was suggestive of a group-mind kind of thing - somewhat linked together by a kind of communal telepathy. "In the middle ages there were lots of communal phenomena, or hysteria's like this . . ,". With this, I thought I noticed some kind of change in Axelrod - a slight pink color in his face. One can tell if someone is accepting or resisting. It's a sort of well-known magnetic thing.