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Confirmation 99
ground and started to set up the tape recorder and I couldn’t remember what I had to do. It’s like I couldn’t focus on the recorder and remember which buttons to push and how to put the tape in and how to go through the motions of starting the program running. So I just put it down and sat there. I kind of put my head in my hands and just tried to collect myself so that I could continue.
And at that point Jim came up and I looked up at him. He took one look at my face and said, “You’re furious,”—because I had been mad at him a few days earlier. And I said, “No, Jim, I’m not furious.” He sort of tried a few more things: “You’re this, you’re that,”—and finally I said, “Well, you know what we were talking about yesterday about having these experiences that kind of shake your world? Well, I just had one.”
And he fished on that one for awhile, I guess giving me the chance to talk about it if I wanted to. “Well, did you feel this, did you feel that?” I said, “No, it’s none of those things.” I told him that I didn’t want to tell him about it because I was afraid of appearing ridiculous. I mean it sounds ridiculous to somebody who doesn’t know anything about this. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him.
He said, “Well, you can appear as ridiculous as you want to me, I’ll like you just the same.” And I said, “I appreciate that but I really couldn’t talk about it now.” So I didn’t, and we continued to work. I asked him a little bit later in the day, “Jim, how did I look to you when I came in this morning? Did I look really freaked out?” He said, “You looked really freaked out, I’ve never seen you like that before.”
S: What did it do to your mind? You say you couldn’t concentrate or push the correct buttons on your tape recorder, that your mind went on tilt, that your thoughts speeded up, that there was a sense of not being able to grasp something. Are those some of the ways you felt?
A: Everything except the business of my thoughts speeding up— everything stopped. I felt as though I was sitting in this chair without moving a muscle, without blinking, without—I was riveted.
S: The idea of your mind standing still, what is that? The mind doesn’t know where to go?
A: No, it didn’t know where to go. It’s like it had been given information, sort of like a computer program, I guess. You give a computer program information that it can’t process and it usually gives you an error message and then it stops. They call it “bombing out.”


































































































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