"The Application of Impossible Things"

"The Application of Impossible Things" by Natalie Rudman, is a book I went to read after seeing her three hours of interview (three separate one hourish interviews) by Bob Olson on his 'Afterlife TV' channel over on youtube.

(If you don't know of Bob's interviews, go have a look~ All the interviews he publishes, that I have seen, are good medicine. Reason suggests that he does do interviews with people that he comes to deem either inauthentic or not up to par, but he does not publish these.)

Natalie's book is about a near-death experience, of sorts. She got blown up in Iraq a few years ago. The narrative of the experience sequence between parting from the physical information stream and the return to it is not usual, and the only other report that I know of that is remotely similar is that of Bob Monroe's in his Ultimate Journey book, where he speaks of addressing, during an OBE, a 'greater self' consisting of, among possibly other beings, a whole audience of thousands of beings that he understands to be his 'other incarnations'.

It's a particularly interesting narrative among NDE narratives, but the facet I find particularly interesting is the title chapter, which occurs toward the end of the book. I had to read it several times; and each time I read it, I would be at the end, and realize that somehow I'd missed its substance ... it was kind of like a road trance... where you turn on to the freeway and you go into trance and suddenly notice that, last you looked, you were in Brooklyn, and here it is Philadelphia.

I gradually realized that the ideation in that chapter needed to be grasped with the 'antennae/feelers of the mind' with the same careful delicacy as would be needed to catch an airborn giant bubble with wet chopsticks ....gentle gentle GENTLE!!!


This is the first part of what I have to say here about this.. I realize that long posts do not get read, and this already trending toward long. So I will stop here and continue with it shortly.

What NR describes in the title chapter of her book is hard to talk about, and hard to think about, harder to write about, let alone implement. I could hazard a nutshell of it this way: It is a model of reality in which each person is tunneling their way through their own private hall of mirrors that sometimes, nevertheless, is shared with other persons or beings. She actually does a pretty good job describing her experience and her interpretation of it, but I kept getting to the end of the chapter and I would think " ... huh? ...what was that again?" Part of the problem is that the reality 'on the other side' she describes is a much higher fidelity reality than this one, and the awareness one has in that one is able to take in enormous complexities. And theory and tales of experience is all very nice, but how to practically implement the idea that we all materially create our own reality, either ourselves or collectively (it is always a mix of both, in constantly varying proportions, I assume).

Then it hit me that it may be that what she is trying to indicate may very well be the same thing that Carlos Casteneda was attempting to relay. If you are not familiar with CC's work, briefly, he became, as an anthropologist working on his doctorate, an apprentice to what turned out to be a Yaqii Indian sorcerer. The sorcerer taught CC, over many years, a radically different way of 'assembling the world' (organizing sensation into perception) until, finally CC learned to put the world together in the way that sorcerers do (it is RADICALLY different. But then it turned out that it wasn't about sorcery at all. What Juan Matus (the sorcerer) was teaching CC was that the world we inhabit is a creation of our own, (although we usually just automatically accept the one handed to us by our parents/culture), and that the only clear perception to be had is at the moment when one is between worlds, so to speak, when the illusions of the first are dissolving and the illusions of the next have not yet taken hold. And CC basically provides us with the methods for finding our way (primarily, imo, in his book 'Journey to Ixtalan' (tried to post a link to an online version but this site wouldn't let me ... if you do a search on the title, there is a PDF of it right near the top)

The problems with CCs presentation are that, from his and his teacher's point of view, they inhabited a pretty spooky, aboriginal world, full of violence, fear and death. Additionally, CC was advised by his teacher to 'cover his tracks', and make himself inaccessible to people. (This is actually a wise policy generally .... most folks have a fair amount of yucky energy, and if they can get a sense of YOUR energy you can get polluted fairly easily). And so CC switched around any number of hard facts, apparently, his purpose being to communicate the ideas he did, and not to expose himself or his co-operatives to human weirdness.

NR's approach is entirely different. She comes across as a light hearted, easy-going 'regular' person that would be just right in a group going for fish and chips and a few beers and then off to a poker game. And rather than describing how to get to a level of magical insight and ability, she simply describes being there, of being in a position where one can choose to switch out realities, and share them with others for a time.... or, not.

And, for me, it seems like the two different ways of approach (NR's and CC's), the two 'views', bring a depth (to what turns out to be their common topic) that only comes with a stereoscopic view.

This is my take on things, of course, and no one else's, and almost certainly will change over time. No idea what NR might think of this, though I will send her a link to this thread, in hopes that it develops into a useful discussion.

On the side, I had a reading with her recently (she 'does' readings in the manner of psychics, by the way) and she was basically 'spot on' as the expression runs these days, and helpful with a variety of insights into myself and others around me.