Last night I watched a BBC ‘Horizon’ documentary called ‘What happened before the big bang’. The title caught my eye because it was almost exactly the same question that my friends asked me back in 2004 during our very early chats. Well actually they asked me “What do you think happened before the big bang?”. I didn’t realise it at the time but apparently that would have sounded like an incredibly stupid or possibly ignorant question to any self-respecting astrophysicist as the widely accepted view within the scientific community back then was that ‘time’ started with the big bang and therefore it would make no sense to ask or even consider what happened before it. I may not be an astrophysicist and I may not have been aware of the accepted understanding of what ‘time’ is and when it started but it still seemed like a pretty stupid question for them to be asking me:

‘How the hell should I know?’
‘We know you don’t know but we are asking you what you think happened.’
‘But how can I even have an opinion about that? Basically our understanding as far as I am aware is that there was absolutely nothing before the big bang so if that is the case then I am guessing that nothing much happened but to be honest I can’t really get my head around the theory that there was absolutely nothing and then for no apparent reason there was a big bang so I guess something musta been happening but how the hell can I possibly know what it was?’
‘OK let’s leave how it started for now, what do you think will happen at the end?’
‘Mmm well that depends on whether or not the universe goes on expanding or not. There are basically two theories about how it will all end but don’t ask me which one I think is right because I really don’t have a clue.’
‘So what are the two theories then?’
‘Well we know that the universe is still expanding just now…They can tell by the Doppler effect and the red-shift of distant galaxies but no-one knows whether it will go on expanding forever. If it does go on expanding forever then obviously everything in the universe will get further and further apart. As time passes everything will gradually disintegrate and fall apart and all of those pieces of mass will keep on getting more and more distant. If that goes on and on for god knows how many billion years then eventually every atom in the universe will end up millions or billions of miles away from even the closest atom. Maybe eventually even all the atoms will degrade to just energy and I know that in theory the total energy in the universe will always be concerned but even if it is it will end up spread out over such an unimaginably vast area that the universe will eventually just fade away to nothing.”
‘OK so if that is one of the theories what is the other?’
‘Well the other theory is that at some point in the future the momentum from the big bang will run out and the universe will stop expanding. If that happens then gravity will kick in…well actually it would already have been kicking in to stop the expansion because if there was nothing opposing the expansion then the initial momentum would go on forever…Well according to Newton it would anyway…What I meant was that gravity would then take the lead and the gravity of all the mass in the universe would start to pull everything back together again…In effect the whole process would start to run in reverse and instead of the big bang we would have a big crunch!’
‘What do you understand from ‘a big crunch’?’
‘Well starts would collide and become bigger, stars would collapse and become black holes, black holes will attract any mass around them and get bigger and bigger, big black holes will attract and engulf smaller black holes and so on and so on until eventually we would be left with just one supermassive black hole’
‘And then what?’
‘Well that black hole would have so much mass and such immense gravity that it would be constantly collapsing on itself until it basically pulled its whole mass into what they call a singularity with infinitely small volume.’
‘Do you really mean infinitely small?’
‘Ha! Well actually I do, because that is the theory as I understand it, but don’t ask me what it really means because I don’t think anyone can really get their head around it – its always a big problem to mathematicians when a theory or an equation ends up in infinity or in zero divided by zero, but I guess it means that one way or the other the universe is eventually gonna disappear into absolutely nothing again.’
‘And then what will happen?’
‘How the f**k could I know?’
‘Well you could try taking a few seconds to think about it for a start!’
‘Eh?...Oh f**k I see what you mean! If it disappears back into a whole nothingness full of nothing again that would make it just like it was before the big bang happened in the first place so if I had to guess what happened next then the logical thing to assume would be that there would be another big bang at some time.’

I got a big round of applause for that before my friends kinda blew my mind a bit with their next question,

‘So can you believe that there have already been eight big bangs already?’
‘Phhhhewww! Well I guess I would have to believe it could be possible as logic seems to suggest that whether or not the universe goes on expanding we are going to end up back at the same condition as things were before the big bang…Or at least the big bang that we know about…So I guess I could believe it’s possible but sh*t that is a hell of a big number!’

More applause!

‘So could you believe there have already been a million big bangs?’
‘F**k wow!!! I suppose if there could have been eight then there could just as easily have been a million but wow!...And I thought that last number I tried to imagine was big!’

The reason I have shared that bit of the story with you today is because on that documentary last night they were talking about how a few scientists are now beginning to question whether there could possibly have been anything before the big bang. They interviewed a few people who had some widely varying theories (one guys theory that our big bang is really just ‘the other side’ of a supermassive black hole in some other universe in some other dimention, another guy had a theory that our big bang was caused by two other parallel universes getting a bit too close to each other) but the most interesting one to me was the theory of one guy called professor Roger Penrose – He was actually one of the guys who came up with the original big bang theory in the first place and until a couple of years ago he used to laugh at anyone who spoke about anything ‘before the big bang’ but on the program he admitted that even he doubts that his original theory is correct and he has come up with a brand new theory which not only matches what my friends suggested to me, but the logic behind his theory was EXACTLY the same as the thinking process that my friends led me through to get to that theory.

I wrote that whole part of my story down about six years ago and I spent a lot of time today trying to track it down from my documents but so far I haven’t been able to find it. Back in February my last computer (which I got back in 2004) completely gave up the ghost and I had to go out and buy this one. I had thought I had been able to recover all my significant writing either from emails or from back up discs but it appears that that bit of my story is still stuck in the memory of my last computer but I’m sure I will be able to retrieve it someday somehow.

OK for today’s post I am going to copy and paste quite a strange bit of the story. It may actually cause more confusion than it provides answers (it’s not really meant to provide answers it is just another example of how they can communicate with me in strange ways) but I can’t really think of much else to write about right now. As I have cut and pasted it from an email I sent to one of my friends a few years ago there may be some odd references that don’t seem to mean much so just ignore them:

This bit refers to a time, just a few days after 'First Contact', where they were teaching me/showing me ways that they could 'communicate' with me, or at least 'send me 'hints' without us actually having to talk openly. At one point while I was watching TV and listening to them whilst getting ready to head into Saigon for some reason or other (at their request/insistence), and they said something like:-

"OK, for this next bit you are going to have to remember what we are about to tell you very carefully"
I said "What are you gonna tell me", and they came back with a sarky remark like "If you'll shut up for a second you just might find out!" (The b*****ds! <!;->).
I then said "If it's so important, can I write it down?" and they replied "You can write it down if you want to.", so I picked up a pen and said "OK. Shoot!"

They started off by saying "That's our colour"

(NB: I'm gonna leave out all of the 'I said', 'They said' stuff from now on coz it's getting repetitive - You should be able to follow the chat, but if you get lost, then the voice that sounds totally confused is very probably mine! <!;->)

"What's your colour?"
"That is!"
"What is???....Look! If you're actually pointing at something just now then maybe I should remind you that you're totally f**king invisible!!"
"We're not pointing."
"So what is your colour??? What are you talking about?"
"The thing you just picked up as we said it!"
"Ohhh! You mean my pen!...So, silver is your colour, is that what you are saying?"
"It's not silver, it's platinum."
"I wish it was Big Yin, but actually it's not even silver, just silver coloured"
"It's the colour we're talking about."
"Well we call that colour 'silver' down here."
"So what colour do you call something that's platinum?"
"Phhhh...We just call it silver if we're talking about the colour."
"So who is to say whether platinum is silver coloured or whether silver is platinum coloured?"
"Phhhh...Good point I suppose! Who knows?"
"WE KNOW! It's our f**king colour and we call it platinum, so will you just write that down or we'll never get out of here???"
"OK, ok! Keep your hat on!....If your wearing one!....OK, so your colour is platinum!....What the f**k does that mean???"
"Just write Wee Man, will ye?"
"OK! So! Your colour is platinum! What's next?"
"Next is gold, coz gold is the colour of the sun and it's the nearest thing to platinum!"

(Actually, I'm gonna change that coz that wasn't exactly what they said, but rather than just correcting the typing 'm gonna leave that bit as it was and clarify that what they actually said was "...coz gold is the CLOSEST thing to platinum" - At first glance, and at the degree of accuracy that you and I would talk with there would seem to be little difference between 'nearest' and 'closest', but they were VERY careful about saying EXACTLY what they meant, and after talking with them I can see that there is a big difference between 'nearest' and 'closest' - nearest means 'closest' when you are talking ONLY about the position of things, but 'closest' can mean a lot more than that, so if they said 'closest', they didn't JUST meant 'nearest' - That point became very significant in one of my later books where they talked about my pet dog when I was ten years old - who was about as friendly as a dog can get, and yet bit 'the closest thing to him' out of sheer panic after being knocked down by a taxi!).

"OK! So, platinum is your colour and gold is the closest thing to platinum, so what's next?"
"That's not exactly what we said."
"I know! I'm not writing it down verbatim, just taking notes, but I am listening!"

(Actually I wasn't really listening closely enough, which led to a bit of confusion later when I did eventually get to Saigon, and which also makes it harder for me to recount EXACTLY what they said from then on, but I will give you the details roughly and quickly!)

"Your colour is next - blue! On your planet blue is the closest colour to the sun"
"Eh?...Oh! Sky blue kinda thing! OK! I get it!...I think!....Even though I don't have a clue what this is all about!"
"Pink is like blue. It's actually the same as blue in a way, but different."
"Eh??? Oh! Do you mean that pink is the female equivalent of blue, kind of thing?"
"Aye, that kind of thing, but not that exactly - Wood is the female colour, not necessarily pink."
"Eh??? Wood isnae a colour Big Man!"
"So what colour is wood?"
"Brown!...Well, brownish!....Or tannish I suppose...Or...Oh f**k, it's loads of colours depending on what kind of wood it is.."
"Aye!!! And they're all f**king female! Now, can we just get on with this???"
"Emmm. OK! I'm confused as f**k, but let's get on with it and hope it makes more sense later!"
"OK! So now remember this: Blue goes with yellow, coz yellow is like gold.."
"So gold and yellow are the same then?"
"Nawww! We didnae say that, we said yellow is LIKE gold! How could yellow be the same as gold if we've already told you that blue is the closest thing to gold on your planet?"
"Ehhh??? Oh f**k, never mind! Just let's carry on before you confuse me even more."
"OK, so blue goes with yellow, and green is the same as yellow. So what does green go with?"
"Eh....Blue, by any chance?"
"Now you're getting it!"
"Do you want to bet?....But go on anyway!"
"Black is our colour when we are on your planet. Even though we can look like any colour we want to, black is our colour, so black goes with anything."
"Black's your colour???"
"NAW!!! We told you already, PLATINUM is our colour!"
"OK! I got that, but I'm just surprised that black is your colour down here! I suppose I can think of it like 'The Men In Black' - but only in reverse - kind of thing, but I'm just a bit surprised that you said black is your colour down here coz to most people down here black is a bad colour."
"Aye! But most of your people are stoopit, aren't they! And anyway, how can a colour be bad???"
"Good point! I suppose you better ask one of the stoopit ones if you want an answer to that one coz I quite like black - Always have in fact."
"Why?"
"I dunno, I just did."
"You like it because it goes with anything - just like we told you ten minutes ago, so now can we carry on?"
"Awww! Is that what you mean when you say 'something GOES WITH something'? Do you meant that they look good together?"
"That's one of the things we mean, but we also mean more than that."
"OK! I'm confused enough for now, so what's next?"
"Next is red! Red means 'Danger', and that is your warning colour. Red doesn't go with blue."
"OK. What's next?"
"Did you write that down?"
"No, I just wrote 'red equals bad' for short hand."
"So you think red is bad?"
"Sounded bad to me."
"F**k sake Wee man, we just told you that no colour is bad! In fact, if you really understand what we mean then red should equal good!"
"Ehhh??? How do you make that out?"
"Well, red is your warning colour, it means 'danger', or at least 'be careful', so as long as you remember what we have told you then red should be your favourite colour in a way, coz it will be the one that steers you away from danger."
"Ahhh! OK! I suppose that's logical! And that suppose it should be easy to remember coz red is a universal warning sign down here....Well in this wee universe of ours I mean! Red means danger or warning to almost everyone down here."
"NAW IT DISNAE WEE MAN! We're not talking about your stoopit people's stoopit rules here - red is only a warning sign for you, and it is only a warning sign for you for the purposes of this exercise. To some of your people 'red' might be their colour and their warning colour could be blue! This colour scheme we're explaining to you today might change tomorrow or in a day or two, but for now you just need to remember all we just told you and then you need to get your arse into that shower so that we can get into town and put this into practice before we need to change everything again."
"Ehhh? So this could all change tomorrow?"
"Not all of it! You will always be blue and we will always be black – Or at least you will always be blue until you become gold, but the rest of it could change at any time."
"OK! I'm confused as f**k Big Yin, but I don't think I'm gonna have any idea what you're talking about until I try to work it out 'in practice', but I really don't know what I'm looking for....What kind of things should I be looking for out there?"
"Everything!"
"Naw, I mean what types of things does this colour code apply to?"
"Everything!"
"OK! I'm going for a shower before you confuse me any more!"

Now Sammy! I know that most - if not all - of that won't mean a thing to you. Even after I got into Saigon it didn't mean much to me either, and I ended up confused and frustrated as f**k. I ended up going home in a foul mood and having a huge shouting match with them about it, but when they referred back to certain things that had happened during the day I could 'sort of' see that if I had paid more attention to what people dressed in blue (or pink) had been telling me then I might not have ended up so confused because the next time (times) we tried it I did manage to follow their colour co-ordinated clues and always ended up finding something or somewhere interesting – I guess it’s hard to imagine how, with all the colours surrounding you in the centre of Saigon, it was possible to know what was a clue from them and what was just ‘background’ but it just worked because somehow they managed to make sure that certain things caught my eye just when they were supposed to.

There was another small bit to add on to yesterday’s post however before I say what it is I think I should maybe explain a bit of the background as to why I was telling that particular bit of the story to my friend at that time. The person who I was writing to was actually a mate who I had worked with in Vietnam for a couple of years however he had returned to the UK about a year before all the weird stuff happened with me. Although we got on really well in Vietnam we didn’t really keep in touch when he left however back in 2007 he got in touch to tell me that his wife (who was also a friend of mine as she had been out in Vietnam with him too) had been killed in a car crash. He was understandably pretty devastated by that and I felt there were parts of my story that may provide some comfort to him so I decided to tell him the story of what had happened to me. Obviously I couldn’t tell him the whole story at one time but just like I had done with one of my other mates back in 2005 I began to tell him the story via email a bit at a time and we ended up exchanging many emails over a period of months.

At one point during that exchange he confided in me about something that had happened which had seemed so strange or even impossible to him that he hadn’t told anyone else about it in case they thought he was crazy. When they were preparing his wife’s body for the funeral service my friend had decided to put her favourite jewellery on her – a gold chain and a couple of gold rings. It was only after the cremation that he remembered that his wife had ‘promised’ her niece (who really loved the jewellery that if anything happened to her she would give the chain and rings to the niece. Obviously by the time my mate remembered about that it was too late, however a week (or a few days at least) after the cremation my mate had to go and collect his wife’s ashes from the crematorium. They handed him the urn with her ashes but as he went home he heard something ‘clink’ when he moved the urn and when he looked inside he found the chain and rings! They were a little soot-covered (showing that they had indeed been on the body when it was cremated) however apart from that they were completely undamaged! To be honest I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about cremations but my mate explained why it seemed so impossible that he got his wife’s jewellery back: For a start he would have thought that the near pure gold items would have been melted at the high temperatures, secondly, even after cremation a body isn’t completely reduced to ‘ashes’ and part of the cremation process requires that the remains are basically ground up mechanically to break up larger bits of bone, and thirdly, if there are multiple cremations in one day it is (apparently this is what my friend was told)) normal that the ashes will not be collected immediately after each cremation but instead all the ashes from a single day will be gathered at the same time and then divided up between the families of the deceased people, so the ashes you get are not necessarily 100% from the body you sent to be cremated.

After my mate told me that story I began to explain to him how ‘rings and chains’ had cropped up as part of my chats with my mate (when they told me I couldn’t wear my gold chain or rings when I went to visit ‘their place’ – see earlier post) and I was telling him this bit of the story to explain why gold in particular was special to my friends.

One other short explanation note before I add the extra bit to yesterday’s piece of the chat with my friends: Just before my mate had told me the story about his wife’s jewellery we had been talking about how lucky/coincidental/whatever it had been that a forest-fire that had destroyed many square miles of woodland around the site of the original Olympic games in Greece had ‘miraculously managed to burn all around the area of the ancient ruins there without causing any damage – before that fire had happened I had already been telling my mate how the true Olympic ideals were something really ‘close to my friends’ hearts’ and how I would HATE to be anyone who had ever cheated their way to an Olympic medal once my friends get hold of them, because that really is a big no-no!!!

So with all that background explained I can now copy and paste the extra bit of the story that I added as a PS in my next email to my mate back in 2007:

PS: All this talk about rings 'n things combined with our chat about the Olympics in previous mail made me wonder how the colours and layout of the rings on the Olympic flag would 'fit in' with the 'colour scheme' rules that I mentioned in yesterday's mail, so I just looked up a picture of the flag on-line, and 'What'dya know!', the rings follow the rules that my mates set out for me in so far as: Blue is at the opposite extreme from Red (Blue top left and Red top right), 'Blue goes with Yellow' (The Yellow is the only ring connected to the Blue), 'Yellow and Green are the same' (They are the two rings on the lower row), and 'Black goes with everything' (Black is on the top row beside/between Blue and Red, and it is inter-linked with the Yellow and Green below)....So I wonder what all that means!!!!

Oh, and by the way, there was one other 'colour rule' that I missed out yesterday - They didn't actually mention it at first when they were dictating 'the rules' but I noticed something apparently missing so I asked "What about White?". They replied,

"White is invisible, like glass. White is not a colour, it's actually a lack of colour. White things are just things that we haven't decided to colour in yet, or maybe they are things that we want to make 'whatever damned colour we feel like making it from time to time'”

(i.e. if you shine a red light on a white thing it looks red, whereas it looks blue if you shine a blue light on it.).

For today’s post I’m going to copy and paste something else I wrote a while ago (it’s not JUST laziness, I haven’t been feeling great for the last few days so I’m not spending as much time in front of my computer). Anyway, I originally wrote this post on another website I was chatting on a couple of years ago and I was answering a question someone had asked along the lines of ‘Did your friends ever explain why they picked you out of the 7 billion people on the planet to talk to’:

…There’s a few things in your mail to reply to but I’m going to start off with your question ‘Did your 'friends' say why they choose you from 7 odd billion people? (sounds better than 7 billion odd people)’ – I like the brackets by the way, very much in tune with my sense of humour  . That was a question I often asked during those early conversations, and it’s a question that my friends gave many different answers to, or maybe it’s better to say that they answered it in many different ways (i.e. quite a few times during those conversations they would say something like ‘that’s another reason why we are talking to you’). Because of that there is no one bit of my book that I can cut and paste here to answer that question fully. When I asked them for the very first time why they were speaking to me they said something like,
“Because you were still paying enough attention and because your mind was still open enough to hear us. You hadn’t already decided that you, or anyone else, already had all the answers but you also hadn’t decided that there wasn’t an answer, and you had enough faith in yourself to believe that if there was an answer out there you could be capable of understanding it.”
”Yeah maybe, but there must be loads of other people out there like that, so why me?”
“It was you that invited us to talk, we just answered your call.”
“Yeah, but I only did that once you made it absolutely obvious you were there and that you could hear me!”
“Exactly! It wasn’t the just fact that you called out to us, coz we hear your people calling out to us all the time, whether they believe we are here or not, it was when you called out to us that made the difference. You are the first person who has ever called out to us and actually expected a reply based on a logical process of elimination. If you had called out to us yesterday or at any time during the last few weeks we would have to have ignored you, because we would have known that you were just guessing. Similarly, if you hadn’t called out today we would maybe have given you one or two more chances because you were so close, but if you hadn’t called out by then then we would have had to give up on you and go try to find someone else to talk to, because you would have shown that you weren’t ready to face the truth. As it was though, you called out at EXACTLY the right time. You had ruled out every other possibility of what could be happening to you and worked out that we MUST be here. Logic like that can’t go unanswered as far as we are concerned.”
“OK, I can kind of see that in a way, but I still only found you because you started picking on me a few weeks ago, so why me?”
”We try to contact all of your people all of the time, but there are strict rules about how we can go about that.”
”Rules? Whose rules?”
“Ours! We can only bring people towards us one step at a time – like a paper trail. Your people have got to find each piece of the trail before we can put down the next. Some people start off on the trail but soon get lost, others lose interest and start to look for other things, but most never really get started. You managed to find all the stepping stones – even the real difficult slippy ones nearest the end.”

(That’s not exactly verbatim but it’s a fairly close version)

The fact that you chose to quantify your question (i.e. why me out of 7 billion) brought to mind another specific bit of one of my books which is relevant here but might also add some light to your earlier question about whether I have managed to get my head around things yet AND it also begins to answer your question about how SOME of my friends and family have taken my news, so I am going to go copy and paste the relevant section…And here it is:

“…Hi Laura,

Maybe reading this will help you to understand what I was trying to explain to you in the emails we exchanged around Christmas time.

I know that what I wrote to you would sound 'impossible' to many people at first, but the fact is that if anyone believes that:
(a) It MAY be possible for intelligent life to exist ANYWHERE ELSE in the entire universe, or,
(b) That it MAY be possible that at ANY time in the future someone, or something, will find a way to travel, or at least to communicate, through time, or,
(c) That it MAY be possible that 'a God-like thing' might POSSIBLY actually exist,
Then NOTHING in my book is actually impossible!

(And if anyone cannot accept ANY of those three options being at least a possibility then I really can't imagine what they do actually believe!).

So, assuming that you can accept that EITHER (a), (b), or (c) above is at least a POSSIBILITY then my story is, by definition, not ‘impossible’ but is instead merely ‘improbable’.

I have studied ‘Probability and Improbability’ during both maths at school and statistics at college, and although I have no idea how you could go about calculating the precise mathematical probability of an ‘occurrence’ which may be logically possible but which has never actually happened before, my understanding of the statistical laws of probability AND my understanding of human nature means that I cannot blame any of my friends or family for finding my story just too hard to believe. I realised very early on that no matter how well people knew me, nor how intelligent they may already know I am, nor how much they should have been able to trust my word on anything this serious, it was always going to be far more difficult for my friends or family to accept my story than it would be for a stranger with an open mind, because, regardless of how the ‘improbability’ of my story is quantified, my friends and family were always going to have to face the ADDITIONAL burden of having to ask themselves:

“OK, even assuming that the story could be true, what are the chances that something that improbable could happen to someone I know?”

Now, it may not be able to precisely quantify the initial degree of ‘improbability’ of my story, but it is possible to put approximate figures to that last question, i.e.-

In the case of my friends, let’s assuming for the purpose of this exercise that an average person has an average of say sixty people who are close enough to them to be called ‘friends’ (NB. I chose sixty to keep the calculation simple however it does seem like a reasonable estimate to me – You may feel that there are more than sixty people that you would consider as ‘a friend’, but I can assure you that there are far fewer than sixty people who I would really consider as ‘a friend’), then, if you can start by assuming that my story COULD BE true then the odds that, out of the entire population of the Earth, it could actually happen to one of your friends is roughly ONR HUNDRED MILLION TO ONE!

Similarly, in the case of my family, and assuming that throughout the world an average person has six people in his or her immediate family (NB: once again I have chosen a figure that makes the calculation easy however, six seems like a reasonable estimate to me, bearing in mind that although six would probably seem like an excessive number of family members in Western countries it would probably be considered low in many other parts of the world. Six also happens to be the number of people in my immediate family!), then the odds of something like that happening to someone in your immediate family would be around ONE BILLION TO ONE!

So, faced with odds of one hundred million to one or one billion to one (and bearing in mind that the odds of winning the lottery jackpot in any given week are ONLY fourteen million to one!), there is no way that I can blame any of my friends or family for finding themselves unable to consider that my story may actually be true.

That is the reason that whilst I have given them all a little bit of my story and the opportunity to hear more if they wish to, I have made no effort at all to actually try to convince any of my friends or family that I really am telling the truth – What would be the point? No matter how hard I tried, I know that I could never overcome odds like that, and, if at the end of the day ‘the world’ finally realised that the only LOGICAL explanation for everything that I have written is that I must have been telling the truth all along, then my friends and family would only end up feeling guilty for not having believed me earlier!

So don’t feel bad if you just cannot bring yourself to believe that my story is true, and don’t think that that creates any problem between us, coz I really do understand how difficult it must be for anyone who was not actually there and who does not think in the ‘absolute logic’ way that I do to actually believe me, but do try to spare a thought for how it must feel to be me, caught up in this situation.

If you can understand how hard it is to be expected to believe that something like this could happen to someone close to you, then try to imagine what it must feel like to have to get your head around the fact that, for whatever reason, ‘the powers that be’ chose to come out of hiding and explain ‘life the Universe and everything’ to you, AND to give you the evidence you would need to PROOVE it!

No matter how hard you may try to imagine how something like that would feel, I guarantee you won’t even come close to the truth, but maybe this wee extract from part of the conversation I had with ‘my contactors’ three years ago while I was trying to convey my feelings on that matter to them might help you understand a little more:

It was a day or two after the initial ‘contact’, and I had gone a bit quiet and reflective during one of our conversations, so ‘he/she/it/they’ asked me what was wrong….

“What’s wrong???? Have you lot got ANY idea what this must feel like to me??? Have you got ANY idea how many times I have asked myself ‘Why me?’, or asked myself ‘What are the odds that this could actually be happening to me?’”
“Can’t you work that second bit out for yourself?”

They were always logical, and they often ‘pounced’ on the opportunity to take my words and questions literally, even when they knew fine well that the question was supposed to be rhetorical! I paused for a second and then answered,

“Phhheww! I suppose I can…..I guess the odds are roughly six billion to one!.....Or to put it another way, roughly four hundred times less likely than the odds of winning the jackpot on the lottery!”
“Do you really think that that is all they are – six billion to one?”
“Well, I said ‘roughly six billion to one’, because that is roughly the population of the Earth, but if you are trying to be difficult then I suppose that the odds are actually six billion and odds to one, but what is the point in trying to put an exact figure on it, coz even if I knew EXACTLY what the population of the world was, with the way that that lot are breeding like rabbits out there, the odds would have increased during the time it would take me to get the words out!”

There was a wee round of applause, but they continued with their questioning,

“But do you really think that the odds are even just ‘six billion and odds’ to one?”
”Eh? What do you mean?”
”Well….Don’t you think that we could have spoken to someone else yesterday if we wanted to?”

I thought for a second,

“Ahhh! I see what you mean, but by ‘yesterday’ I take it that you actually mean ‘all our yesterdays’, so to speak!”

There was a big round of applause to confirm my assumption, so I continued,

“Well, I would guess that you would have had a hell of a lot of trouble trying to find anyone that you could have explained any of that stuff to anybody on Earth , say, one hundred years ago without them just ‘jumping to the God conclusion’ and going down the same old route as all the times before, coz I would think that the person would AT LEAST have to have some kind of understanding of nuclear power and what it could do, or they would at least have had to be able to see how easy it could be for people…or even ‘a person’ to actually destroy the whole planet, so I guess that there is at least some kind of time limit on how many of ‘all our yesterdays’ we are actually talking about here.”

There was another round of applause but they came back with:

“Well actually we think that you’re underestimating our powers of persuasion and explanation a bit there, coz we know lots and lots of ways to skin rabbits, if you know what we mean, but at least your thinking is logical so lets keep going down that road for now.”
“Well, OK….So…Leaving aside your alternative rabbit skinning tricks then, I would guess that you would have struggled to find anyone on Earth that you could have discussed most of what we were talking about yesterday more than, say, fifty or sixty years ago….Let’s call it seventy to be on the safe side coz there were obviously a few people dreaming about BIG BOMBS for a few years before we actually had one…”

(Wee round of applause!)

“…But, then again, I would struggle to imagine how ANYBODY on Earth could have gotten there head around this kind of concept without at least having a basic understanding of how computers work and what they could do,….So I suppose that would take us up nearer ‘the seventies’….Or maybe we should call it ‘sometime in the sixties’ to be on the safe side…”

(Wee round of applause)

“…But, then again,….Would understanding the basics of computers be enough or would you also have to at least be able to imagine the potential of the internet and digital communication between loads…or even between ALL computers?”

There was a BIG round of applause and then they asked,

“So where does that take us too?”
”Phhewww up to the eighties or thereabouts I suppose….But then again! Maybe you could have found someone like Arthur C. Clark or whatever to have a chat with! Maybe him or his like could have gotten their heads around this concept a decade or two before the internet was ever a real technical possibility, but I would guess that your choices of people to talk to in those earlier days would have been pretty limited – Digital communications and the spread of the internet would have been the key development that would really have increased the numbers of people able to imagine this stuff without their minds just being completely blown!”

BIG applause! They then asked,

“So where does that leave your odds now?”

I thought for a minute and then said,

“Phhhheww…I dunno! Most of the people for the last decade or two, MAYBE!...SOME of the people for a few decades before that, as long as they didn’t have to get their minds around the whole concept all at once…..And maybe a hand full of people with a real ‘way out’ imagination for the rest of the century before that…”

I paused for a second and then added,

“…Oh! And I suppose you better add Leonardo Da Vinci in there too, coz I bet that c*nt could have gotten his mind around this even all that time ago!”

There was a big cheer and a round of applause before they came back at me again,

“So what about your odds? Put a number on it now.”
”Phhheww…..I’d guess about ten billion to one maybe…Give or take a billion or so!”
“Guess again!”
”Eh???”
“Guess again!”
“What do you mean? I can see that I was wrong by just calculating from the basis of the Earth’s population today coz I can see it should be more than that, but how do you expect me to put any kind of exact number on it?”
”Think again!”
”Think about what?”
”Well…You can see that we chose not to talk to anyone ‘yesterday’, but do you think that we actually HAD TO talk to someone today? Couldn’t we have chosen to talk to someone tomorrow?”
”Ahhh!....Oh <<Removed by Mod>> !...By ‘tomorrow’ I guess that you actually mean ‘tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, so to speak!”

Big applause!

“So can you put a more exact number on your odds now?”
“Phhewww! Naw! Of course I can’t! How could I?”
”Can’t you?”

I thought for a second, and then it hit me,

“Ohhhh <<Removed by Mod>> !.....Phhhewww....Yeah, I suppose I can in a way!”
”And what is that?”
”Well….Roughly I would say that the odds against it being me were roughly….Oh let’s see….About ‘an infinite number’ to one!”

Huge round of applause!

I sat there in silence for a few seconds and then said,

“Look! If this is supposed to be your way of helping me get my head around this…”

But before I could finish my sentence they interrupted,

“It is!”
“Well I’ve got bad news for you mate coz all you are doing is making it worse!...How the f**k is ANYBODY ever supposed to get their head around something like that?”
”They’re not!”
“So HOW THE F**K is this supposed to be helping me then???”

There was quite a long silence, and then the said gently,

“Six billion doesn’t seem like that big a number now, does it Wee Man?”

I sat there for a few seconds and then just shook my head and kind of laughed a bit. They were right – dead right! They really were ‘the cleverest thing’ I’d ever come across, but all I could do was sit there shaking my head and think about the huge hole of logic that I had stumbled into.

After a while longer I thought of some more words to say,

“OK! Congratulations Big Yin! You’ve managed to find a way to help me get my head around the odds of me coming in as a six billion to one outsider….But I can see one minor flaw in your f**king plan!....Now you have just moved the goal posts WAAAY over the horizon! In fact, they’re not just ‘over the horizon’, they’re probably half way to f**king Jupiter by now!”
“Patience, Wee Man! A few minutes ago you couldn’t handle six billion, but already you can see that’s a dawdle! It won’t take us too long to get you to Jupiter, and after that….well, we’ve got plenty of time to deal with the rest!”

…”

Thanks Dolce,

That is the reason I haven't posted anything for a couple of days - not feeling too good here :sick: but hopefully will be back in a day or two

Sending healing energy your way.

My health is a bit better today than it has been (I seem to have some kind of gastric flu) however my mother passed away today so I probably still won't be around much for a few days. Please don't feel sorry for me or my mom however as I really do mean it when I say it was for the best as her health has been bad for a long time and I also mean it when I say I know that she is in a better place now.

scots_nomad wrote:My health is a bit better today than it has been (I seem to have some kind of gastric flu) however my mother passed away today so I probably still won't be around much for a few days. Please don't feel sorry for me or my mom however as I really do mean it when I say it was for the best as her health has been bad for a long time and I also mean it when I say I know that she is in a better place now.

That she is scots and in peace...Be well friend, I look forward to your return

Hi all,

Got a little bit of spare time on my hands just now so decided I could do another post albeit that I am really just copying and pasting something I had written before. A few posts ago (probably around 2/3rds of the way through this thread) I wrote about the first time my friends had let me/enabled me to talk to my father who had died four years earlier. If you read that post you may remember that I was in my kitchen when it happened but after a short time my friends had suggested that we may like to go outside to the garden for a while. I left the story at that point however I attach below part of an email I wrote to one of my mates a while ago when I discussed that part of the story a bit more.

…I’m guessing that you’re assuming that my dad and I must have had a hell of a long conversation after that, but actually you couldn’t be further from the truth. My friends had already explained to me that basically my father had never actually left me and my family, as ever since he died he had been watching over us all the time and was aware of everything that had been going on both with me and with everyone else in my/his family, so there was clearly no need for me to bring my dad up to date with anything. Maybe some people would assume that I must surely have asked him something like ‘What’s it like to be dead?’ but it never even crossed my mind to ask such a question – not because it just slipped my mind or anything like that but actually because it just seemed to me to be a ridiculously stupid question to ask – I mean, what kind of answer could possibly have meant anything to me or to any other human? My time with my dad just felt too precious for me to waste any of it on stupid questions!

NB: Actually when my friends first told me that my dad was there with them and that I could speak to him sometime soon I really didn’t believe them and I challenged them to let me speak to him myself there and then – They said that they couldn’t do that but if there was something I wanted to ask then I could ask them and they would pass on his answer. Obviously that sounded even more like a load of bullsh*t to me so I tried to come up with a question that I could possibly use to expose their BS. By that point in the chat it was already pretty clear to me that somehow or other they seemed to know as much about me and my past as I did so I knew there was no point in asking them to name my brothers and sisters or tell me the address of the house I was born in or whatever. I did eventually think of a question – I cant actually remember if I have told you the story that provides the background to the question I asked so I wont say what the question I asked them was because without the background explanation it wouldn’t mean much (When I have a bit more time I will check if I told you the story about the day I spent at the nursing home where my dad had been for 4 years prior to his death watching the total solar eclipse on 11th August 1999 with him, because that was what my question referred to, and if I haven’t already shared the story with you I’ll make that the subject of a post soon because it is quite a nice story). Anyway, when I asked them to ask him something about that I must admit that I was surprised at how ‘right’ the answer they gave me seemed to be. I wouldn’t say it was enough to convince me that my dad really was with them but I guess I accepted it as a bit more of a possibility than I had previously thought so I decided to ask them what my dad did all day – The answer they gave me was “You’re dad does whatever the f*ck he wants to!”. I pushed them for a bit more info than that and they said ‘Well obviously he spends a lot of time checking in on you and all your family and all his other friends but he’s still got enough time to do whatever the f*ck else he feels like – For example would you believe that he spent a few hours watching a cricket testmatch yesterday?” I laughed and said ‘Now I know you are full of sh*t coz my dad hated cricket!’ but they said ‘You’d be surprised at the number of new experiences you dad has developed a taste for once he gave them a chance and he had a lovely time just sitting on the grass in the sunshine watching the cricket match yesterday’…But anyway that is all an aside so I will get back to the extract of my mail to my mate about my early chats with my dad…

On that first night we actually said practically nothing to each other. Apart from us each telling the other that we missed them there was one point where my dad squeezed out the words to say that he was really proud of me and everything I had done and was doing – which made me breakdown again, which made him break down again, and then a short time later he said he should go but that we would speak again soon, and that was basically it for the first night – It was quite short, but it was just long enough. It was more of an emotion thing than a chat thing – words really didn’t seem that necessary.

There were another few times during those first contact chats when I had brief chats/exchanges with my dad but none of them really amounted to what I would call a conversation. I was aware/I believed/I felt that he was present throughout the whole thing and that he could hear everything I said, and that was generally enough for me with everything else that was going on.

There is one last wee anecdote about those times with my dad to tell before I get back to the main thread of the story – There was one point when my dad suggested that it was about time I called home and spoke to my mum coz she was worrying about me (which I did), but there was one point during that exchange with my dad when he referred to my mum as ‘his Rita Hayworth’ (or is it Rita Haywood or Heywood – I always get a bit confused about that). Anyway, at that time I had heard the name before and knew that she was some actress from ‘the old days’, but other than that I had no idea who she was, what she looked like, what movies she had been in, what kind of movies she was in, what period she was from, or anything else about her – she was really just a name and nothing else as far as I was concerned. At some time in 2007, after I had come back to the UK, I was talking to my mum about my dad one day (nothing about my experiences or anything, just general stuff from the old days) and I said I could remember one time when I heard him refer to her as ‘my Rita Hayworth or My Rita Haywood or something like that’. My mum smiled and I could see that it had tickled her a bit. She confirmed that the name was Rita Hayworth and that she was a Hollywood actress that my dad used to have a bit of a soft spot for when they were younger. She didn’t actually confirm that it was something he used to call her or that she could also remember him referring to her as that (as I had been kind of hoping), but I could see from her smile that I had hit a wee bit of a nerve and tweeked some special memory somewhere.

In my last post I told you that my mum died on Tuesday but that you shouldn’t feel sorry for either me or for her because I knew she was in a better place – I also know that she is with someone who she has been missing very much for the past 12 years and someone who has been looking forward to being with her again for just as long, so even though I will miss having my mum around I really don’t feel any sorrow for her at all because I know that right now she is happier that she could ever have imagined…I don’t really see her getting interested in cricket any time soon right enough!

I hope that this post may help anyone who has 'lost' someone close to them recently