Strangely, this bad cold I’m experiencing has given me a huge craving for spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce. This is something I normally eat less than once a year, so the craving came completely out of nowhere.
Strange Craving
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“a huge craving for spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce”
Que coincidence! That’s what I’m having for dinner tomorrow (though the ‘meatbals’ will be leftover turkey loaf cut into slices and then reheated in tomato sauce).
I sometimes get weird cravings that seem to come out of nowhere which really sucks when it’s something that isn’t easily available here (but then the universe seems to produce something…. close enough).
A few years ago I started jonesing for a club sandwich… I’d always thought they were… okay…. but never a favorite) and a few months later I find a commercially made reasonable substitute (I know I theoretically could make one from scratch but… part of the club sandwich is that you don’t make it yourself).
Then a year or so ago I got a hankering for dinner rolls… which are extremely not like any of the many very good baked goods that are easily available here… and then a few months later I find a bakery close by makes something that is remarkably like dinner rolls, again… close enough…
I’m wondering what the next weird craving will be…. and how close the universe will come to fulfilling it….
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Hmm… my middle child is similarly in touch with the mysterious energies of the universe. This week he used his chore money to buy a remote-controlled tank toy. Some very specific German model. The same day it arrived in the mail, he received an issue of a regular magazine his grandparents subscribed for him… and it had that exact tank on the cover. And that sort of thing happens to him all the time. Nobody else in the family, just him.
I tell him to be very careful what he wishes for, because the ether is clearly listening.
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“in touch with the mysterious energies of the universe”
Sometimes I just… know something is going to happen or have….. intuitions that end up being right.
A few years ago in Malta, a few days before leaving I began having very uneasy thoughts about the ride to the airport. They kept getting stronger as the time neared. On the night in the car it kept getting worse, then almost at the airport as we approached a traffic circle… a car came out of nowhere with no lights on and blasted straight through missing us by no more than 15 feet or so (and miraculously not hitting any other car as well).
Dread immediatley lifted…. “Oh” I thought “I was worried about that….”
Lots of other examples, many trivial some more… substantive. It’s unpredictable and irregular in occurence but I’ve learned to pay attention to it as much as I can…
It’s the main reason I’m agnostic and not an atheist (since I can’t do religious faith….).
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Intuition is a shortened leap of cognition.
There is a spot at a local trampoline park, right next to a not-so-clean and very unremarkable side exit, that if I stand there, I get a jolt of energy and happiness like somebody stuck a fork into a pleasure center in my brain. It’s inexplicable but it’s one of my happy places in life. Even thinking about it feels good.
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“a shortened leap of cognition”
But from where? A few weeks ago I started getting uneasy vibes about a very close friend. The vibes seemed like death but not about the friend…. I was convinced someone close to them was going to die within a few days (putting together the feelings that’s what it seemed like).
Cut to the chase: a few days later they said they were upset – they just found out an ex had died a few months previously…
Again, this isn’t regular or something I seem to have any influence on… it shows up and lingers until it’s resolved…
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It is not difficult to embrace these things, as long as you don’t get hung up on rationalist/materialist ideas about the nature of the world. We are physical beings, but we aren’t only physical beings. The part of us that isn’t physical, also isn’t straitjacketed by strict sequential time, and has inputs that aren’t strictly sensory. Some people are just better at tuning into the nonphysical inputs. IMO, we probably all can tune into those, it’s just that we are trained from childhood that that’s not real or possible, so we learn to shove it into a corner and ignore it– and maybe if you’re really good at “normal” it just goes on permanent mute.
I know I do it. I read people. That has always been a stumper, rationally, because I’m fairly autistic, and I often miss the most basic social signals and obvious body language. I never know when it’s time to stop talking, time to leave, when I should defer to someone higher-ranking, or when someone is lying to me… it’s all a muddle. But the one thing I can do very well is tell, in person, almost instantly, if someone is dangerous to me. It has never been clear where that information is coming from, and I have never been able to get others to see it. It is enough that I have no trouble at all believing in guardian angels. I’m way too socially inept to be picking that up myself– but it makes perfect sense if someone’s looking out for me, and whispering it in my ear.
The one that gets me is the churchladies at my old church. We were living on a part-time income and eating our savings while my husband was in school, and things were really tight. Just at the point where I’d start to despair about some small thing we couldn’t afford (and I never, ever mentioned any of this to anybody at church), like decent socks, or good cheese… lo and behold one of the Yia-Yias would tap me on the shoulder and hand me a shopping bag that would turn out to have home-baked cookies, a pound of feta, and a pack of new socks in the right size. Or my Russian friend would be like: “Come to ze car after church, I show you some things” and I’d go home with a bag of gently-used clothes for the kids (including good socks!), and exactly the toy my child had been asking me about the previous week. That her friend had got rid of while cleaning closets. So oddly specific! Those ladies are scary good at it, whatever it is.
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“we aren’t only physical beings. The part of us that isn’t physical, also isn’t straitjacketed by strict sequential time, and has inputs that aren’t strictly sensory”
Pretty much my hypothesis. which makes me think of ideas like Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance and the idea that information isn’t stored in the brain so the brain is more like a radio receiver than a hard disc…
My family had no problem entertaining all sorts of weird ideas (not committing to them but not rejecting them out of hand either) so I never thought there was anything unusual about it. Most of the time it’s really trivial and only very occasionally more… ominous.
My mother sometimes tuned into things and a cousin (mother’s neice) would tune into…. things about the future in a really uncannny way… again in a very irregular and involuntary manner.
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I get weird cravings when I’m sick, too. Though usually mine involve eggs and bagels. Maybe your body is telling you that you need more potassium?
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Search for this phrase: “with cameras everywhere, crazy coincidences are now normal”
methylethyl: “I tell him to be very careful what he wishes for …”
I could describe “the loop” in very specific details for you.
But your first reaction will be to think I’m much more of a Crackpot than I really am.
So I’ll give you my version: many years ago, before there was such a thing as the Internet, I’m on a flight to Toronto so I can move there to work on a few projects, and what’s right next to me?
Some guy reading a newspaper from the small town in which I was born many decades before, a town that I haven’t visited in … over forty years now?
Goldfinger’s maxim: that’s not a coincidence or happenstance, that’s enemy action.
After finally getting on the ground at YYZ, my entry into the passport control area was delayed presumably so this guy could give a full and accurate report to CSIS.
As for cravings, I presently have cravings for electrolyte drinks because the antibiotics I was on for several weeks have managed to screw up my calcium and magnesium balance, and I can feel that in both of my legs.
And yet until I get rid of the underlying antibiotic contamination, fixing the metals imbalance will have only limited effects.
I’m so completely tired of Powerade now that I’ve shifted to some pricey sports drink powder tube packets that come out of Walmart.
cliff: “… part of the club sandwich is that you don’t make it yourself …”
Can’t do that and have the bacon or ham on it because of severe allergic reactions to pork.
I can make my own with beef bacon which I can find a few counties over in a deli. I’m happy to make my own for now because after the move I’m not expecting a lot of beef bacon.
So my club sandwich is turkey with roast beef and beef bacon.
A little creamed horseradish and Polish mustard helps.
Try it! You won’t even miss the pork on it.
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@Cliff
The column was getting too narrow!
I like the radio receiver idea. I have now and then ended up with odd bits of info I had no rational way of knowing. In seventh grade, I dreamt I knew the password to the classroom computer. So vivid I of course tried it out the next day. Didn’t work. A week or so later when someone gave me the real password… I had been one character off. In real life, the last character had been the letter O, and in my dream it had been a 1. A digital joke.
In general, thanks to weird brain wiring (synesthesia plus some), it is, was, completely normal for me to see things that aren’t technically there, in the strictest material sense. I remember figuring out very young that other people can see the black gnats, but not the shiny ones, so it’s best not to mention those or swat at them! But (unlike, say, hallucinations) these things aren’t meaningful. They’re mostly static, visual snow, phosphenes, distortions, that sort of thing. What does it mean that my infant telegraphs his hunger in a blinding burst of orange? It doesn’t mean anything. He’s just hungry, and that’s what it looks like, and I happen to be able to see it. For a long time I convinced myself it was strictly neurological. But there are too many things I’d have to ignore for that to be entirely true. No. It’s just another source of input, and like sight, smell, sound, etc. most of the signal coming in is irrelevant noise that I needn’t pay attention to.
I pondered this. The evangelical-ish mindset I grew up around was basically materialist (my parents didn’t subscribe, but all my schoolmates did). They believe in some extremely limited, very technical version of “the supernatural” where anything not material can only be divine or demonic. Nothing outside that binary. There wasn’t any room in that framework for… whatever I was picking up. Like a staticky radio station where you hear two or three words now and then, mostly unintelligible. It was one of the many small things that set me up to later leave protestantism. It’s a mindset that doesn’t correspond to observed reality, and had no room for me unless I denied my observations. Those experiences are real, and are not good or evil any more than overhearing snippets of conversation in the grocery store is good or evil. It just happens.
The secular binary is just as nonsensical– where it’s either measurable or it doesn’t exist.
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You may enjoy Art Bell interviews with Malachi Martin. There are several of them and all are available on YouTube. They are quite long too, but worth a listen. In some of these, Malachi Martin talks about something called “middle plateau”. The reason why people tend to have a binary framework (divine/demonic) is due to a real spiritual danger of meddling in things we do not completely understand, so having rails in place is beneficial.
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I am a religious person, and in addition to all that, I suffered intense sleep paralysis repeatedly in my youth. I know the nonphysical world also includes malign entities that mean us harm, and I don’t mess around with it. I’ve seen them. It’s just that 99% of my experience with that has been as a passive receiver of functionally meaningless, boring noise that I have no desire to explore. I get why you have fences there, it’s just that I never had any choice in the matter (and bloody hell, the idea of taking LSD or whatnot to experience it on purpose is just as baffling to me as paying money to go to a concert for a band you don’t like, with a glitchy speaker system), and couldn’t stick with a religious structure where everybody would assume I needed an exorcism if I mentioned it– like some big dirty secret (ironically, in Orthodoxy, which I now belong to, we exorcise everybody–it’s part of the baptism service!).
So yeah, I think it’s a bad idea to go deliberately exploring that part of reality, all willy-nilly, and I don’t. It helps that I’ve always had access to it, and it’s mostly not that exciting. Though it does have a lot of really interesting geometry going on. I’m convinced that all the people who originally came up with the laws of Euclidean geometry, Persian rug patterns, Mughal tile patterns, and the classic interlocking borders like Greek key– I think they saw it there first, and then tried to reproduce it in a physical medium. Those patterns are all just there all the time.
It is very reassuring to me that in Orthodoxy, we still have a mystical tradition with practices that can induce or intensify this sort of experience (fasting, meditation), but that they are tightly hemmed in by other religious practices that act as safety nets: prayer, regular confession, and participation in the sacraments.
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I completely get where you are coming from. Some people simply have an easier access to this reality not because they seek it out, but they are simply that way. I am in no way trying to imply that there is something wrong or improper with your experience. I still think you should look up the interviews with Malachi Martin, he was an interesting character – a Catholic priest who left a high position in Vatican and ended up living in New York writing books about Catholic Church (fiction and non- fiction) and working in the exorcism ministry. Something in what you said made me think of his interviews with Art Bell.
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I’ll look him up.
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“the nonphysical world also includes malign entities that mean us harm”
Some weird memories from childhood (odd disconnected things) made no sense for years… fast foward to late teens/early 20s and watching a ghost movie on tv.
I say something about an image in one scene and my mother looks at me and asks “What do you remember from Ingerson?” This was a small town (name changed) we lived in briefly when I was… 3 or 4 or so.
She then decides I’m ready and tells me the whole story of living in what can only be called a haunted house and an… entity that seemed to be pursuing me and me possibly seeing what might have been a ghost and the memories suddenly make sense except I can’t match the geography of the house for the possible ghost sighting and then she tells me that was the second house… it followed us…
One of her favorite quotes was: “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
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My dad told me a story like that once. Nothing to do with me– happened before my time, back when they were hippies. The thing afflicted the child of some friends of theirs, and yes, followed them from one house to another. Stuff always falling off shelves in weird directions, doors slamming at all hours, yada yada. So on the advice of some psychic friend of theirs, my mother offered the thing a ride back to its old house– she never saw it, but went through an elaborate pantomime of pulling up to the house, opening the passenger door of the car, inviting it to take a ride back home, waiting, closing the door, driving to the old house, announcing “OK, we’re back home!” opening the door, and waiting a while. Whatever did or didn’t happen there, going through the motions seemed to work.
My mother has developed a selective memory about that. If she remembers, she would never admit to it.
This is why I say my older siblings and I had different parents. By the time I came along, they’d found Jesus and settled into pretending to be normal mainstream middle class people, with a few lingering souvenirs of some weird former existence (the conspicuous lack of a television, the Dr. Bronner’s soap, and a lingering habit of patronizing the local beekeepers).
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