Where you end up if you're careless with 845 Re: A few notes on building with the 845

Jon Yaeger wrote:
> in article 1135815650.106785.50100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Andre Jute
> at fiultra@xxxxxxxxx wrote on 12/28/05 7:20 PM:
> >
> > As a student I took one of those 99 dollar (it is said every time I
> > mention this that those tickets always were 199 dollars -- my memory of
> > 99 bucks in the middle 1960s is firm) go anywhere one way for six
> > months Greyhound bus tours through the highways and byways of America.
> > My love of America and Americans stem from that as much as from the
> > many great Americans I met in later years. I started and ended in
> > Durham because I had connections among the people studying the
> > paranormal at Duke, so I spent a lot of that bus tour in the South and
> > generally on or near the East Coast, with just a couple of big sweeps
> > through the mid-West and the West Coast.
>
> Apologies for focusing on the non-tube section of your post.

Nah, this is the right place to discuss where you go if you're careless
with kilovolt tubes, even with more standard tube voltages.

I'm afraid my interest in the paranormal was always small and personal;
my connection was not my own interest but that of a favourite teacher
who hoped I would join him when I graduated but I was already spoken
for by the head of the department, and anyway I had been told by
newspaper editors and ad agencies with their eye on me to study
motivational psychology rather than esoterica. The personal interest
arose because our house, St John Palace (not quite what you think, no
crennellations, more an extended italianate villa), was famously
haunted by star crossed lovers who had their heads blown off with a
shotgun by the jealous husband in the 1890s, who then kept the bodies
under the windowseats in what was later my mother's sewingroom. My
brothers and I used to put string across the passages for the ghosts to
trip over and glasses of water for them to knock over.

> I don't know if the Rhine Center is still extant.

It opened maybe a year or two before I went there but it was called
something much more pompous than the straighforward "Rhine Center";
before that it was a department of the psych faculty at Duke since
before the war.

>I used to communicate
> with J.B.'s daughter; they offered workshops at Duke from time to time.

I met the old man but not the daughter. We didn't discuss his studies
except that he wanted to know what I studied and how our servants
reacted to the ghost in my parents' house; he was amused by my
apprenticeship to a Zulu witchdoctor. We talked about fundraising in
industry, something I already knew about (my family isn't only
scholarly, they are in business and politics as well) and he clearly
didn't know the first thing about. His was a magnetic personalty. What
I remember best from over forty years ago is that he talked some about
the correct attitude to the negativity of professional statisticians
which later, when I made a spectacular living out of statistical trades
(much of what one does in a large marketing organization, including the
better big ad agencies, depends on an understanding of statistical
data), came in handy.

> Haven't received an e-mail in quite some time. Most of my immediate family
> has settled in Durham so I get up there regularly.

One of the most civilized cities in America to live. (And without the
miserable weather of the college towns further north.) You can shove NY
and LA, in both of which I lived on and off for a few years, and I hear
SF is no longer as agreeable as I found it; most of my American friends
have now moved to Seattle or even all the way to Canada.

> My interest in the psi field arose from having experienced many OOBEs and
> other phenomenon. I built a very stable hemisync generator in the early 80s
> using a crystal-controlled PLL oscillator, variable in 1 Hz. steps. It
> still works. Loaned it to a retired SF buddy who is experimenting with it
> of late. His current interest is in using SF Army techniques to maximize
> potential and performance in the private sector.

My interest never went as far as electronic devices. But in my motor
and powerboat racing days I did have a few out of body experiences on
various stretchers and operating tables. But they were all of the
trivial floating above table looking down on myself kind; no action, no
result, no exterior influence, just a memory. Two, of marginally more
interest, happened on the Iditarod trail in Alaska. While I was
scouting it prior to the run my pilot had to put the plane down on a
large shard of ice floating in a river and I got so cold (the only
heating was the pan of oil we burned under the engine to be able to
take off again after he fixed whatever was wrong) that I clocked out. I
saw a Muslim's paradise peopled by women I had long since forgotten
(not a guilt reflex as I pride myself on being kindly remembered by
women). My editor later cut that from my book Iditarod as too fanciful.
A mate of mine who also was frozen unconscious when he fell off my ship
in the Southern Ocean in the Cape Town to Rio race, and we took some
time sailing Rowlandson figures of eight to find him (I didn't dare not
bring his body home; his mother knew my mother and I'd never hear the
end of it), didn't see anything, though we hoped to hear something
interesting as he was a notorious womanizer. On the other occasion I
had an out of body experience, some guys who were supposed to be
training me, for a practical joke sent me to fetch the post only 75
miles away but "forgot" to pack food for the huskies and "lost" my
compass. Fucking huskies wanted to eat me, fucking elk wanted to stomp
me and got really nasty after I failed to kill it with my first shot
(you've never met a shot as bad as me; I've been in guerilla wars where
the commander refused to let me carry firearms), finally, with a wolf's
fangs only inches from my throat, and me wondering if anyone would
believe a prayer from me, I saw myself on the snow with my family,
including a favourite but dead grandmother, standing around me. With
the last of my strength I reached my knife and ripped out that wolf's
stomach ("for not using a stronger mouthwash" I said later) and rolled
against the sled before the rest of the pack could get on me; I still
have a toothmark on my wrist but not from a wolf, from a goddamn
huskie. I didn't think this was funny. When I finally got back to the
training camp, in a sorry state and very pissed off, as you can
imagine, I sat on the berm and shot out all the windows, and their
radio through a window, then shot at those clowns whenever they tried
to go take ***. When the lady administrator of Alaska -- they don't or
at least didn't then have a governor, or if they did I never heard it
mentioned; the lady seemed to be in charge of everything -- came to see
how I was going, these jokers were kneedeep in *** and frozen piss (I
put a few bullets into their heating boiler as well) and I was living
comfortably in a tent with a cook and a valet and a huge fire and all
their food ("I ate their lunch!") because the Eskimo servants took one
look at how badly I shot and decided not to become collateral damage
for so little pay; even the huskies (except those who survived our
brush with the wolves, who preferred Wendigo the evil forest spirit to
me) decided to come live with me. The gratuities I gave the Eskimo
before I was hauled to Juneau to be dressed down for shooting up
mushers temporarily on the government payroll amounted to a year's
salary for each of them; the government was exploiting them. I used
that to escape punishment, glancing often at my newly-arrived camera
team in their van outside the window and smiling gently while I hinted
that the charming publicist could as easily grow a social conscience
and expose them as exploiters of indigenous peoples as promote their
major tourist attraction.

> Most folks poo-poo these things but experience is better than theory. With
> audio & tubes as well!

I live in wonder and I don't judge until some idiot puts himself in my
face. But I think ESP was proven to exist, both by Dr Rhine (who
famously refused to admit "belief" in ESP, equating it with faith in
religion) and by some Russian experiments that seemed at time, and
still, to me to be kosher; whether ESP skills are predictable and
controllable or common enough to be of practical use even to the
military, who don't count cost, is an entirely different matter. The
problem is that ESP was discredited by premature publicity, so that
largescale studies are now nowhere conducted that I know of. I don't
take the same benevolent view of out of body experiences; I don't think
that, as is often claimed, they prove an afterlife; they could just be
tricks of a mind halfconscious and under severe stress, some kind of an
ur-instinct or even a chemical hallucination generated by an extra shot
of serotonin or kerotonin in the brain, in the same way the mind is
chemically protected against the intolerable nightmare by a shot of
reality so that you half know it is only nightmare. (This, as can be
seen, is given under the qualification that I don't know much about
these things and haven't kept up with the literature, in fact didn't
read much of it in the first instance.)

> Jon

While we're getting back up to speed on tube matters, tell us about
your out of body experiences.

Andre Jute

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