Delusions and Fimhs I

This last month has been a curious month really. Curious happenings – both inside and outside my head have unfurled. I must admit that at different points in my life there have been ‘curious’ happenings, but this time it’s as if I know they are curious pieces, and that they don’t fit into my regular jigsaw puzzle (about which I shall speak another time). Now I don’t want to get distracted by other thoughts – so I’ll write about this one curious ‘thing’ that’s been following me around for a fair while now.

This entry is about ‘thought-link, ‘thought-communion’ or ‘communicating without speech’. Now these are not my own ‘concepts’ or ‘terms’. They were used by two different writers, the first writer was a 17 year old when he wrote his story, and the second writer is currently about 18 years old. The first story is my all-time favourite short story – haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful, and I very much doubt whether any other story will ever replace this one as my all-time favourite. The second one is clear, stark, drenched in silence, and the first time around when I read it, it acted much like a zen whack on the head. I “heard” about the first one, almost exactly 5 years ago (read it about 7 months later), and the second one, I read a week ago.

We, that is my friends and I used to call "thought-link" ‘telepathy’ when we were growing up in school, some couple of decades ago. But that’s what it was “called” back then. “Do you know what I’m thinking?” or complementarily “I can read your mind.” Nobody actually said back then that the process could also be described as people talking to one another ‘with’ their minds and bodies, and other senses. The first time a friend of mine, Sumki and I actually carried out an experiment on ‘telepathy’ was right after her birthday, when we were about 16 or thereabouts. To make the process as unbiased as possible I went out of the room (so that I wouldn’t be able to observe any subconsciously processed signals (like eye movement and so on), while Sumki focused on ‘one single thing’. After some seconds or minutes, I came back, and said, “Balloons. That’s what you were thinking about. Balloons.” Both of us grinned I think, and we were quite delighted that the first run of our ‘scientific’ experiment had ‘worked’. The thing is none of the other runs panned out. I don’t remember, the specifics of the ‘failures’ – but we only met with one hit, and so we reasoned that “Balloons” was probably a rather “obvious” guess, since Sumki’s birthday had just passed by….

…And so for a while there were no other thoughts about “telepathy”. I won’t go into long, convoluted stories here – but the fact is when I was 21 I got horribly fascinated in the whole “communication without speaking” thing, and communication as a whole across barriers of space and time…”Contact” had made a big contact with me, among other things. Reality, as I had known it to be even in my own world received a big jolt. But I couldn’t figure out anything. All I felt was that there were other forms and patterns of communication possible – but I dealt with the “feeling”, by superficially believing that I was quite, quite loony, and cramming the odd bits of “solid evidence” that I had regarding “communication across barriers” into a box marked “coincidences”, and went on with my life, sometimes breaking out into mad fits – but gradually getting better at distinguishing between “being truthful” with others, and “letting others know only what they need to”. (My ramblings regarding “madness” per se will probably get around to being another post on this blog). So I went around doing my own thing, for most of the time – but I could get no closer at cracking open the puzzle of the “voices in my head”. Gradually, of course over the years, and by the time I was past my 26th year there was only one voice speaking inside me (apart from all my ‘other selves’). The curious thing about this ‘voice’ was that I knew it was ‘not me’. I knew it was not my imagination. The Voice, whom I started calling “fimh”, didn’t even make very good sense all the time. It never did really say “mean” things about me, nor did the voice make me “brilliantly creative” or a whiz in physics (which I would have enjoyed a lot). But sometimes it yelled out a cheery “Hi” in the middle of a boring class, and the “Hi” would jolt me out of my daze and doze, and I would grin inside my head. The voice kept me occupied, but eventually it just became something that was with me, inside me, and quite a mundane “something”, which provided me with some no, not kicks, but quite bizarre "together times", conversations (some of which I have no recollection of, and others which I remember more vividly than I want to), and there was nothing terribly distressing, disturbing, or even deliriously delightful about having fimh with me. At least not for the most part. I often wondered, quite “cockily” when I appeared to be quite “normal” and “sane” on the surface, why indeed I had gone barmy so many summers in a row, just because of a voice in my head! At least that’s what it had been the first time, and the second time, and the third…even the “fact” that as far as I was concerned, I knew that the voice was not a part of me (No. I didn’t tell myself, “…it’ll pass...”,when I had been choking into a pillow over the Kargil War) didn’t faze me any longer – at least for awhile. I had somehow resigned myself to the idea that I wouldn’t be able to figure out what it was anyway (all my deliberate attempts drove me barmy), and that “fimh” was just an oddity, no less, and no more, like a benign tumour, which I would live with.

And so that’s the first part of the tale. And yet. There is more. For if the above was all there was to my tale, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this on the blog. There’s been a new realisation of sorts. The truth is that I had secretly imagined that “thought-communion” – if it really were possible – was the ‘greatest’ miracle of all. That it would lead to the redemption of the human race. That it would take us to the next level of human consciousness, awareness, life, and living. “Thought-communion”! Oh God. It was the “cure” in my mind to “all and every” problem on our planet. I had imagined that if we, humans, knew that we could actually speak with and in our minds with each other, sense the other, whenever we wanted to know, whenever we needed to, we would all become one happy family, singing “We are the World”, or “Cumbya” by the ocean or along the mountain ranges. Heaven would be created on the planet. We would save ourselves, save our planet, save everything and everyone. Diseases, pestilence, cruelty, distributive injustice, greed, brutality, wars would all be immediately and in one swift stroke be negated. If “Thought communion”, “communicating without speaking” were really real, that’s what I secretly believed in. To me “thought communion” symbolised, no, it was equal to the glory, the beauty, the amazing grace, the brilliance, and the genius of the human mind. We would be a “new” race – an exceptionally mature, sensitive, kind, compassionate, and wise race…if only we all knew that “thought-communion” was really possible, and if the process itself were “really real”. And this is how I’ve felt off and on through a little over a decade now. Reading Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, was an altogether bizarre experience for me. I felt as though I were trapped in the tunnels of my mind, when I was reading it. Not to know that the world didn’t suddenly become beautiful (far from it) but the fact that someone else out there had talked about “being able to communicate inside our heads”.